When Protection Becomes Threat: Introducing The Fall of the Guardians

In the images many of us grow up with, certain figures are meant to stand for safety and moral order: the priest, the judge, the officer, the guardian of faith and law. They appear as protectors, guides, listeners, or saviours. But what happens when these same figures begin to embody control, silence, and coercion instead?

This question sits at the centre of my six-poster series about the collapse of protective institutions, The Fall of the Guardians.

The work featured below, Administered Faith, shows a silhouetted religious figure in black robes and a vivid red tie, standing against a saturated yellow background. His hands are raised in a gesture that sits somewhere between blessing, instruction, and judgement. At first glance, the image feels almost ceremonial, but something is wrong. The red tie cuts through the robe and brings in another language: bureaucracy, management, public image, institutional power. Faith no longer appears as something private, fragile, or spiritual. It looks administered.

The project comes from a lived experience of power, pressure, censorship, and silence, but I do not want the work to be trapped inside one geography. I use widely recognisable archetypes so as not to speak about one culture alone, but to point to a pattern that repeats across societies. The costumes change; the structure often remains.

In this series, the priest is not only a Christian or Catholic priest. He becomes a symbol of religious authority when sacred power turns coercive. The judge is not only a Western judge. The officer is not only an American police officer. The angel is not only a figure of salvation. Each one stands for a role that once promised protection, but now carries the possibility of threat.

The Fall of the Guardians follows this transformation through six works. Each poster examines a corrupted form of faith, authority, justice, silence, protection, or salvation. Rather than using slogans, the series relies on simple and sharp visual language. I want the images to be immediate at first glance, but darker the longer one stays with them.

This project continues a direction I began with my earlier series Conditioned Silence, but moves toward something more direct, ironic, and visually confrontational. The aim is to create a kind of visual warning: quiet enough to enter the mind, sharp enough to stay there.

The series asks viewers to look at their own societies and consider which guardians have stopped guarding. When protection decays, when justice stops listening, when faith becomes administration, and when authority becomes threat, the collapse is not only symbolic. It becomes part of everyday life.

For readers who wish to support the work, the most meaningful support is to keep the conversation alive: by sharing the project, publishing it, exhibiting it, writing about it, or creating spaces where these images can be discussed critically. You can keep up to date with my work here.