Not a brand new series of works, but a beautifully executed one, and also a particularly timely one given the content of the speech made by Barack Obama in Cairo last week...

'Correspondence: From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe' was created between 2007-8 by artist Suzanne Treister who painstakingly created 324 pencil drawings of existing letterheads culled primarily from Government and Presidential Offices, Ministries of Defence, NGOs and arms manufacturers across the world, both past and current. Each letter head is a replica of official state stationary, suggesting questions of national validity and seems to ask: "What causes it to be seen as legitimate entity?" The institutional capital that needs to be created in order to have a critical mass of legitimacy seems to be addressed via the choice of hand drawn letter heads and her charming, yet also unsettlingly naive execution reveals the need we have for systems of uniformity.

Take a look at the whole project here.