‘Going Postal: Philately in Unstable Times’ is a project that seeks to build a picture of the world through a selective lens on the recent history of postage stamp production and dissemination.

The newest series within the ongoing project focuses on postage stamps produced globally featuring images of former President of the USA, Donald Trump, in advance of and during the tenure of his single term presidency.

Depicting the former leader during various moments of his international engagements, the stamps create a narrative that offer attention to the events and international interconnectivity of his liaisons of him as a leader, and the country that he briefly, yet dramatically, represented on the global stage.

Produced by countries other than the one he represented, the stamps represent a multitude of different reasonings, from courting political favour through to their potential collectability by philatelists.

At times elaborate in their production values, and in other instances, using relatively crude stock footage, the stamps indicate much of the countries that produced them and their political, cultural and economic relationships to the USA. Alongside this suite of recent stamps depicting Trump, the project will present an additional historical set of framed works that feature stamps of global leaders produced by the nations they governed.

This creates an armature for the consideration of how the commonplace postage stamp has been used historically to define, advocate and bring attention to their leadership.

Collectively, these two sets of postage stamps create highly interesting visual information for and representations of the complex history of global leaderships and the strong hold their physical depictions cast over their populations and pronounced to international audiences.

Event details:
When: Thursday 30 June to Sunday 4 September.
Where: Bargoonga Nganjin, Nth Fitzroy Library, 182-186 St Georges Rd, Fitzroy North, 3068.