Attack & Release
2012
Attack & Release (2012) is a series of paper collages that examines the visual architecture of political power through processes of fragmentation, disruption, and reconstruction. Composed from printed images and cut-out shard-like fragments of portraits depicting prominent world leaders, the works focus on figures whose political influence has become synonymous with conflict, inequality, authoritarianism, and the erosion of collective ideals surrounding peace, justice, and human dignity.
Rather than presenting recognisable representations of these individuals, Mangion subjects their images to acts of physical dismantling. Faces are cut apart, layered, obscured, and reassembled into fractured compositions that hover between portraiture and abstraction. Through this process, the authority traditionally embedded within the political portrait is systematically destabilised. The figures remain present, yet their identities become increasingly uncertain, dissolving into networks of fragments, traces, and disconnected visual information.
The series engages with a long history of portraiture as a vehicle for projecting power. Political leaders have historically relied upon images to construct authority, legitimacy, and public identity. In Attack & Release, this relationship is inverted. The portrait ceases to function as an instrument of representation and instead becomes a site of disintegration. By physically breaking down these images, Mangion exposes the fragility of the structures they seek to embody, revealing power not as fixed and monolithic but as contingent, unstable, and vulnerable to collapse.
Collage becomes both method and metaphor. The fractured surfaces mirror broader conditions of geopolitical instability, social division, and ideological conflict. The works suggest a world in which established systems of governance and authority appear increasingly fragmented, their claims to permanence undermined by the realities of violence, inequality, and political failure. At the same time, the process of cutting and reassembling introduces the possibility of transformation. Destruction becomes a precursor to reconfiguration, opening space for alternative readings and new forms of meaning.
Visually, the collages oscillate between recognition and abstraction. Familiar features emerge momentarily before disappearing again into layered accumulations of paper and image. This tension compels viewers to actively navigate the work, confronting the mechanisms through which political identities are constructed and consumed. The leaders portrayed are stripped of their symbolic certainty and reduced to material fragments, no longer commanding authority but existing as remnants of larger systems under pressure.
Ultimately, Attack & Release is less concerned with individual political figures than with the broader structures of power they represent. Through acts of fragmentation and disruption, Mangion dismantles the visual hierarchies that sustain authority, transforming the political portrait into a field of instability and critique. The resulting works offer a reflection on the contemporary condition of global politics, exposing the fractures beneath images of control while questioning the permanence of the systems they seek to uphold.