Three graffiti artists hired to decorate the set of the American counterterrorism drama Homeland have admitted to painting slogans accusing the series of racism.
The trio, identified as Heba Amin, Caram Kapp and Stone, were approached in June by a set production company to help recreate a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon.
Their work was for a scene in the second episode of the fifth season, screened in Britain on Sunday, when the CIA agent Carrie Mathison, played by the actress Claire Danes, travels to meet a Hezbollah commander.
The street artists, appalled by what they called “the most bigoted show on television”, decided to send a message through the graffiti they were asked to paint. Instead of reproducing apolitical slogans about the Syrian conflict as the producers had asked, they wrote in Arabic “Homeland is racist”, “Homeland is a joke and we are not laughing” as well as “Homeland is NOT a series”. On other walls they scrawled “Homeland is a watermelon” a common insult, referring to the fruit commonly grown in the southern states of America, where black plantation workers were once common. They also wrote the widely used hashtag “Black Lives Matter”.
Ms Amin, a visiting assistant arts professor at the American University in Cairo, wrote on the internet: “It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself. Set designers were too frantic to pay any attention to us.”
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The artists said they had been troubled for years by the show’s “highly biased depiction of Arabs, Pakistanis, Afghans and the so-called Muslim world in general”.
They said the misinformation in the series fed into the mainstream knowledge in America. The thriller stars Danes as a CIA agent with bipolar disorder. Previous plot lines have included the radicalisation of an American sniper and the CIA’s operations in Pakistan.
The artists admitted that the series, which focuses on the Middle East, was critical of America, but it also described all Muslims as “evil and backwards”.
Since Homeland was first screened in 2011 it has sparked controversy for its alleged racist undertones. The Washington Post last year described it as “a blonde, white Red Riding Hood lost in a forest of faceless Muslim wolves”.
So while the set designers were busy constructing the set for the latest episode, the three artists painted their protests all over the make-believe camp.
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The artists wrote: “In their eyes, Arabic script is merely a visual that completes the horror-fantasy of the Middle East.”