Humor on the street, humor on the screen: protest banners, AI-generated avatars, and the visual politics of dissent after the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor

When a state bans a political figure’s image, how do citizens respond? This article examines the March 2025 jailing of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu – President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s principal challenger – and the subsequent state directive to remove his image from public spaces. Citizens responded by creating two distinct yet entangled visual archives: hand-lettered street banners photographed for social media, and AI-generated avatars that humorously reimagined his likeness online.Analyzing a cross-modal corpus of 105 protest banners and 106 AI avatars produced in the eight weeks post-arrest, this study argues these repertoires represent a single economy of visibility rather than a simple offline/online binary. Banners engage local physical audiences and achieve broader reach through digital mediation, whereas avatars are natively designed for algorithmic circulation. In both mediums, humor functions as a semiotic tool to multiply the arrested mayor’s political meaning. Notably, physical banners never explicitly name him; this signification occurs entirely on screens.While state prohibition coincided with intense visual proliferation, concurrent global trends in generative AI complicate direct causal claims. Ultimately, these findings advance scholarship on AI-mediated political imagery, platform affordances, and visual resistance within hybrid regimes.