It’s think ha, ha!

In Sri Lanka this week two Danish artists spread their message of peace through satirical stickers

The sticker arouses the curiosity of a passer-by. Adjusting her glasses to look more closely before passing to the next, she smiles as she gets the joke.

The satirical stickers sure to raise a laugh on the streets of Colombo are the brainchild of two Danish artists, presenting political art in a global context. The duo was in Sri Lanka this week to paste such stickers on lamp-posts, walls, and many other places.

Jan Egesborg and Affex Ventura began their political art campaign in February this year.

The two Danish artists choose conflict-ridden nations to do their bit to contribute to a positive solution.

Slobodan Milosevic’s death and his funeral provided the inspiration for one project.

“I saw the media coverage and went to the funeral. All these angry people: I asked myself what made them come to the funeral of a war criminal,” says Egesborg.

Their first target was former Serb general Ratko Mladic, who is believed to be primarily responsible for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and who remains a fugitive from international justice.

Mladic posters that went up in Belgrade in Serbian read, “We know where you are hiding, Surrender” and “ We know that your nerves are suffering, Surrender”.

Kabul and Baghdad are on the agenda. “Some of the stops we are planning are really dangerous. We have to make careful preparations to cut risks,” Egesborg says.

They say the aim of their ‘Art in hotspots’, as they call it, is to get their ironic anti-war message heard by ordinary people. Their group is called ‘Surrend’ – short for ‘surrender’

Egesborg, 43, from Copenhagen is well known in his native Denmark, where his posters adorn galleries. As part of a recent retrospective of poster art, Warsaw’s Wilanow Castle showed some of his work. “But at some point I realized that that was not enough,” Egesborg says. “I wanted to get onto the street and create political art.” But he insists that humour has to remain at the centre of their work. “We want to make people think by making them laugh.”

The stickers in Sri Lanka are focused heavily on why people keep killing each other despite all that the country is endowed with in terms, of climate, beauty, heritage etc.