Eliana Willis

One could say Cecily Brown is drunk on art history.
Throughout her 25-year career, the virtuosic British artist has engaged with seemingly every aspect of the Western canon—Renaissance artists’ contemplation on our eternal souls, Old Masters’ scenes of revelry, the delightfully frilly and coquettish vignettes of the Rococo era, Impressionists’ voyeuristic eye, even the impassioned gesturalism of Jackson Pollock. She’s guzzled it all.
Now the dizzying scope of these references will come into focus in “Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid,” the first full-breadth museum survey of the artist’s work in New York, which opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art next week. “I really only understand a painting once I’ve copied it,” Brown said in a video made with the museum. The exhibition promises to unpack these discoveries, bringing together 50 paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes—some of which have not been shown in New York before and several which were just recently completed—by delving into recurring themes, both sacred and profane, within her oeuvre. “There’s a whole raft of art history that flows through the work, and a lot of that is represented even in this very careful selection,” said exhibition curator Ian Alteveer in a conversation.
Ahead of the exhibition’s opening we’ve pulled out several works from the show and highlighted how Brown references and reimagines just a few of her many art-historical influences.
Edvard Munch and Death and the Maid(en) 
Cecily Brown, Maid in a Landscape (2021). Private collection; © Cecily Brown.
Before seeing even a single work in the exhibition, the title “Death and the Maid” offers us our very first historical window into Brown’s oeuvre. The title is an elision of Franz Schubert’s string quartet, Death and the Maiden (1824), which itself references an earlier Schubert piece, in which a terrified maiden begs death to pass her by. Death replies with bone-chilling comfort, “I am not cruel, you shall sleep gently in my arms.” This terror-laden subject became a popular visual motif during the the Renaissance, particularly in Germany. Such images typically presented a beautiful young woman held, almost tenderly, by the arms of Death, personified as a skeleton. Over the centuries, the subject has been revisited countless times. Two canvases in the exhibition, Death and the Maid (2022) and Maid in a Landscape (2021), as well as a notebook sketch, reflect on this motif. 
Edvard Munch, Death and the Maiden (1894). Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
For her depictions, Brown took inspiration from Edvard Munch, whose 1894 version of the pair, which seems to show the figures dancing. In preparing for the exhibition, Alteveer had texted an image of the Munch work as a possible source; Brown confirmed by sending a photo of a years-old sketch she’d made of the Norwegian artist’s composition. “Of course Munch was the source for this dancing pair, I thought—the skeletal man’s right leg extends down at the same oblique angle—and the couple frequently returns to haunt Brown’s work,” Alteveer explains in a catalogue essay for the exhibition. 
Hans Baldung Grien, The Three Stages of Life and Death. Collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie.
At other times, Brown’s references for her depictions of Death as a lover of sorts reach even further back. In Maid in a Landscape (2021), one can glean the influence of Renaissance artist Hans Baldung Grien’s plentiful—and freakish—depictions of Death and the Maiden. Notably, Brown’s interest in the motif does not seem to be one of morose brooding: in titling her own version, Brown cleverly shortened “Maiden” to “Maid,” both as a modernizing of the theme and a nod to her own time spent working as a housekeeper at the beginning of her career—and its a bit of a joke. “Despite this youthful occupation, as she told novelist Rachel Cusk, her own apartments in New York years later were always notoriously messy,” Alteveer notes. 
Dutch Scenes of Judgment and Vanitas 
Cecily Brown, Nature Morte (2020). © Cecily Brown.
Once asked to comment on the macabre undertones that permeate her works, Brown remarked, “I always liked the expression ‘The Devil has all the best tunes.’ I always find that I go to a depiction of hell and look at it for an hour and then look at heaven for 30 seconds.” Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, particularly, has served as a jumping-off point for Brown’s compositions, and Alteveer notes Brown’s affection for his epic scene of reckoning, The Triumph of Death (ca. 1562). The painting is one of deathly pandemonium: a skeletal rider on horseback, wielding a sickle and leading the charge of his throngs skeleton soldiers, gleefully laying waste to every human in sight. Amid this tumult, a table of revelers, on the lower right of the painting, spring from their seats in terror, leaving their dinner table strewn with food and the games they’d been playing. “In thinking about Bruegel’s painting and its small dinner party interrupted, I’m reminded of so many of Brown’s exuberantly heaped tables—mountains of food, puddles of cloth, chairs tipped over—and the ways in which she layers these reminders of death in near endless and compelling combination,” Alteveer writes. 
Willem Kalf, Still Life, Still Life with Lobster, Drinking Horn and Glasses (1653). Collection of the National Gallery.
The living body’s proximity to death is one of Brown’s central preoccupations, and decadent tablescapes offer one of the most artistically luxurious ways to approach such themes—as Alteveer described to me, “Still lifes are a way for an artist to show off a little bit, to revel in the plentitude that they offer, and then also to explore color.”
Frans Snyders, Interior of an Office (ca. 1635).
While preparing for an exhibition at Blenheim Palace in the fall of 2020, Brown turned to 17th-century Flemish painter Frans Snyders’s scenes of hunting, a pastime Brown considers decidedly English. From here, she soon found herself enamored with Snyders’s still lifes: disordered tableaux of meat, fruit, wine, and flowers. For Brown—a lifelong vegetarian—the paintings offered not the brutality of the hunt, but a space for lavish and decadent employment of colors. Brown soon commenced her own series of vanitas scenes. Vanitas were popular in Dutch Golden age painting, and operated as symbolic images that hint at the transience of our mortal lives and the ephemerality of earthly pleasures, through depictions of wilting flowers, meats, burning candles, and just-ripe  fruits. Her paintings Nature Morte (2020) and Lobsters, Oysters, Cherries and Pearls (2020) call to mind both Snyders’s painting Interior of an Office (ca. 1635) as well as Willem Kalf’s Still Life, Still Life with Lobster, Drinking Horn and Glasses (1653).
Cecily Brown’s sketchbook (2021–22). Courtesy of the artist.
“Still lifes are kind of an excuse for me to use this dramatic but weirdly neutral setting of a red tablecloth, like in Nature Morte and Lobsters, Oysters, Cherries and Pearls,” she noted in a conversation with Adam Eaker, assistant curator at the Met, that is included in the exhibition catalogue.   
Velázquez’s Mirrors and Memento Mori 
Cecily Brown, Untitled (Vanity) (2005). © Cecily Brown.
Mirrors, with their flat reflective surfaces that swallow up scenes from the world around them, have long held a special place in history of painting: a metaphor for the art of making itself. The mirror, both as as a symbol and as a compositional device, materializes time and again in Brown’s oeuvre, and several depictions of women seated before a vanity or reflected in a mirror appear in this exhibition.
Brown, who grew up in London, often visited the National Gallery, where she often wondered over Diego Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus (ca. 1647–51).
“Representations of mirrors and mirroring abound in Brown’s paintings, and the artist has revisited many precedents over the years. She has spoken of her fascination with Velázquez’s so-called Rokeby Venus, whose reclining subject faces away from the viewer, and whose reflection seems older and more distant than the curves of her youthful body might suggest,” Alteveer writes. “One can see that fascination in the ways in which Brown’s subjects are reflected differently (or not at all) in mirrors.”  Brown’s paintings Untitled (Vanity) (2005) and Vanity (2019–20) hint at her sustained interest in this not self-same woman in the mirror. 
Diego Velázquez, The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus) (ca. 1647–51). Collection of the National Gallery, London.
But beyond Velázquez, these doubling images also underscore Brown’s enthusiasm for a late Victorian trend for optical allusions. A kind of playful memento mori, these images would winkingly juxtapose images of young women or girls alongside death, usually in the form of a skull. No where is this influence more evident than in Brown’s painting Aujourd’hui Rose (2005), which pictures two young Victorian girls playing with a puppy; their silhouettes, one realizes with a second glance, cleverly form the shape of a skull. In this case, Brown leaves her source imagery largely unobscured—the image is pulled from a popular postcard produced by the Italian card company Alterocca at the turn of the last century.
Cecily Brown, Aujourd’hui Rose (2005). © Cecily Brown.
Such visual punning occurs again in All Is Vanity (After Gilbert) (2006): here, we see a woman seated and gazing at herself in the mirror, but when the eye pans out, we see that the  mirror and her silhouette form a ghastly skull, and objects and perfumes of her toilette, its strange teeth. This image, too, has a direct reference, in this case All Is Vanity, an illustration by American artist Charles Allan Gilbert published in Life magazine in 1902. In such works, Brown engages the longstanding tradition of the memento mori, a reminder of death’s inevitability through imagery of the skull, while playfully entwining the motif with considerations of feminine beauty, and even cosmetics.

The Boudoir and the Museum 
Cecily Brown, Selfie (2020). © Cecily Brown.
Preparation for the Met exhibition largely took place during the tumultuous, home-bound months 2020 and 2021. Alteveer, for one, believes those periods of isolation left a final impression on the exhibition’s form. In many of the works on view, Brown depicts interior spaces that are crowded, piled high, seemingly bursting with a clutter of objects. In some sense these scenes harken back to fascinations from earlier in career. “A number of earlier works, such as Hangover Square and Untitled (Chambre) (both 2005), center exquisitely cluttered interiors as spaces for discovery,” Alteveer notes. 
English artist William Hogarth and his bawdy, instructive scenes of domestic satire, marked by decorative disorder, certainly inform Brown’s often-humorous depictions of the erotic space of the bedroom. The contemporaneous Rococo movement seeps into Brown’s interior worlds as well. 
Cecily Brown, Untitled (After Manet and Fragonard) (ca. 2018). © Cecily Brown.
“Indeed, the pinks and yellows of Rococo painting, as well as the plushness of the boudoirs and lushness of private gardens represented by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher…have always attracted Brown’s eye, too,” writes Alteveer. Certainly, the ideas of the public and private self are at play here; increasingly so, since Brown often grants her women the freedom to occupy spaces by themselves—a pointed update to her historical references. In one sketch in the exhibition, Brown depicts Fragonard’s Woman with a Dog (ca. 1769) beside a diffuse sketch of Edouard Manet’s Nana, a courtesan, who gazes once again into a mirror. “In Nana, the eponymous courtesan pauses her toilette to gaze directly at the viewer in a critique—and parody—of the Rococo tradition of aristocratic women’s semipublic ablutions; where Nana’s client regards her from a sofa in Manet’s painting, Brown has removed him in her watercolor,” Alteveer explains.  
Cecily Brown, No You for Me (2013). © Cecily Brown.
We, the viewer, are forced into the space of the boudoir on occasion. In No You For Me (2013), the mirror of a vanity, round like a moon, now faces the viewer directly. We see a toilette, with perfume bottles, cosmetics are piled seemingly within reach. In the reflection we see not ourselves but a woman’s figure, prone, and nude, lying on a bed. Who is she? Boucher’s Odalisque? Manet’s Nana? We might not know, exactly, but we have crossed the line into intimate space with these art historical muses, nevertheless. 
François Boucher, Odalisque (1745). Collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Selfie (2020) continues this visual puzzle. Here, a nude form (or possibly a couple) lies in repose, surrounded by walls hung with countless paintings. The figure seems to gaze out at the visual plentitude. The scene calls to mind 19th-century paintings of collectors’ personal museums. The “selfie” may ostensibly be Brown herself, quartered away in her studio for months, as painting after painting fills the world around her. “In the recent years, these spaces are overlaid with a kind of new sensibility that evokes the pandemic rooms full of stuff and we’ve accumulated over the years,” Alteveer told me, “And in a way, that drama that happens in Selfie is in part maybe a personal one.”
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“It’s magical. Liberating. It’s a superpower.” This is how Bennett Miller sees the art-making potential of A.I. The filmmaker has just opened his first exhibition at Gagosian, showcasing his new black-and-white pigment prints—except they’re images that have been algorithmically generated. Miller’s aim here isn’t just to spotlight A.I.’s growing suite of capabilities, but rather, how the technology is “presenting a change in kind, not just degree.”
Miller is no A.I. evangelist. In fact, he has spent the past five years developing a documentary on how technology has altered our realities in ways we know and more terrifyingly, don’t yet know. For all its promises, A.I., in Miller’s view, requires us to exercise “real awareness and consideration.”
“The emergence of A.I. has brought us to the precipice of imagination-defying transformations and there do not seem to be any adults in the room,” he told Artnet News. “The documentary was meant to be a means to hit pause and reflect on this extraordinary moment.”
Installation view of “Bennett Miller,” 2023. Photo: Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian.
One of the people Miller interviewed for the project was Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which led the director to experiment with one of the company’s leading products, the text-to-image generator DALL-E. What began as a “guessing game type search” would end up becoming a dynamic, almost collaborative process, he said, “whereby you can manipulate an imagination and endlessly manipulate its outputs.”
The software does have its limitations: Miller points out gaps in its knowledge and its failure to properly render hands and faces. But, he added, “if you’re open to finding different means by which it can realize what you’re working for, you might be surprised with what it can do.”
The group of images Miller produced with DALL-E, now displayed at Gagosian, range from serene landscapes to haunting portraits to foreboding abstractions. In their sepia tones and grainy textures, they evoke an earlier era of tintype photography—a nostalgia conjured and a lost technology reawakened by neural networks. All of it, needless to say, is fiction.
Bennett Miller, Untitled (2022–23). Photo: © Bennett Miller, courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
And Miller, in his day job, understands the malleable bounds of fiction. As a director, he has helmed such award-winning films as Foxcatcher, Moneyball, and Capote—all, notably, adapted from real-life events. Just as cinema can rewrite reality, far more advanced technologies could very well collapse it. 
Miller recalled that when he started working with DALL-E, the software was simply drawing from real images. But the more he used it, DALL-E began pulling from existing images as much as “non-real images” that it had previously generated.  
“It’s just layers upon layers of fiction,” he said. “It’s going to become increasingly difficult to distinguish or know with any type of certainty that anything you see is authentic.”
Which goes to the heart of the exhibition and Miller’s inquiry into this tech-driven shift in perception. If human memory is already shaky and media can be skewed, what more impact can A.I. have on our collective reality? Does the pope own a white puffer coat?
“I hope viewers will feel stirred to consider the significance of how these works were created,” said Miller about the exhibition. “I hope there will be an appreciation for how the works themselves are a product not only of A.I. but of those very concerns.”
See more images of the exhibition below.
Installation view of “Bennett Miller,” 2023. Photo: Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian.
Installation view of “Bennett Miller,” 2023. Photo: Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian.
Bennett Miller, Untitled (2022–23). Photo: © Bennett Miller, courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Bennett Miller, Untitled (2022–23). Photo: © Bennett Miller, courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Installation view of “Bennett Miller,” 2023. Photo: Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian.
“Bennett Miller” is on view at Gagosian, 976 Madison Avenue, New York, through April 22.
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At a gallery in Los Angeles, photographer Justin Aversano recently debuted 78 new silkscreens, each featuring a portrait of an individual and printed on Egyptian papyrus. Ahead of the show, he also released every work in the series as an NFT on OpenSea, all of which swiftly sold out. 
The enthusiasm that has greeted the drop speaks to Aversano’s continued domination of the photography NFT space, spurred on by “Twin Flames,” widely recognized as one of the earliest photography projects on the blockchain. The collection has traded 5,900 ETH (about $10.7 million) in total volume to date, while the sale of Twin Flames #83 at Christie’s in October 2021 raked in a whopping $1.1 million, making Aversano one of the highest-selling photographers ever. 
Justin Aversano, Queen of Staffs from “Smoke & Mirrors” (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Gabba Gallery.
The collection of works now on view at Gabba Gallery, through April 8, is meant to evoke a full tarot deck, with the photographer’s sitters standing in for cards from the Knight of Staffs to Eight of Swords, the Sun to the Moon.
As Aversano told Artnet News, the project, titled “Smoke & Mirrors,” took three years to complete, beginning in 2018 when he commenced photographing an assortment of artists, shamans, psychics, astrologers, family members, and known figures such as the Winklevoss twins. 
Justin Aversano, portrait #53 from the series “Smoke & Mirrors” (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Gabba Gallery.
“There’s all these people who are in the project because I either looked up to them or they’re part of my everyday life and they represent that card,” he said. “It didn’t have to be magic or have a magical connection. It just needed to be the real reflection of what that card means.”
The works are also a way to level-up the NFT medium: “Photographs are the ultimate thing that can be minted,” Aversano said. And especially so for “Smoke & Mirrors,” where the papyrus in use offers a tactile counterpoint or connection to the data being inscribed on the blockchain. It’s through this mix of media, Aversano hopes, that the collection might develop layers of new meaning for the viewer.
The decision to silkscreen the portraits came down to the photographer’s desire to “evolve through the medium.” Just as his previous series have tapped traditional photographic processes—polaroids for “The Birthday Project” (2012), cyanotyping for “Twin Flames” (2017)—so this new collection reaches for another analogue technique to add pigment to his monochromatic portraits.
Justin Aversano, King of Coins from “Smoke & Mirrors” (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Gabba Gallery.
“I like the idea of applying color to make the photograph more than just the photograph,” he said. “It’s playing with mediums and what a photograph can represent.”
The colors for each silkscreen, Aversano added, have been selected by the portrait’s subject, who also had their pick of which photograph he eventually used. “I, as a photographer,” he explained, “let go and surrender completely to the subject.”
Justin Aversano, portrait #72 from the series “Smoke & Mirrors” (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Gabba Gallery.
“It’s introducing people to the tarot in a fun, novel way with photography, just seeing the mixed media of how photography could exist. What is it—more of a painting or more of a photograph?” he said of the series and exhibition. “It’s about transcending something basic to make it something more thoughtful.”
See more images from “Smoke & Mirrors” below.
Installation view of “Smoke & Mirrors” at Gabba Gallery. Photo courtesy of Gabba Gallery.
Justin Aversano, Four of Cups from “Smoke & Mirrors” (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Gabba Gallery.
Justin Aversano, portrait #41 from the series “Smoke & Mirrors” (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Gabba Gallery.
Justin Aversano, The World from “Smoke & Mirrors” (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Gabba Gallery.
Justin Aversano, Knight of Staffs from “Smoke & Mirrors” (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Gabba Gallery.
Justin Aversano, portrait #64 from the series “Smoke & Mirrors” (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Gabba Gallery.
Installation view of “Smoke & Mirrors” at Gabba Gallery. Photo courtesy of Gabba Gallery.
“Smoke & Mirrors” is on view at Gabba Gallery, 3126 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, through April 8.
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Remember Google Glass or Crystal Pepsi? What happens to all the hyped-up inventions and tech breakthroughs that suddenly disappear without a trace? These and over 150 more failed innovations are now on public display at “Museum of Failure,” a touring exhibition that opened at Industry City in Brooklyn on March 17, after landing in cities including Calgary, Paris, Los Angeles, and Shanghai.
Among the once cutting-edge objects that visitors can expect to see are a handheld vinyl record player, the Hawaii exercise chair, Apple’s personal digital assistant Newton, the zero calorie fat substitute Olestra, self-destructing disposable DVDs, and several wannabe smartphones, including Twitter Peek, Microsoft Kin, and Amazon Fire Phone. Other bizarre famous flops include Trump steaks, Atari’s E.T. video game, Coke II, Bic’s pink pens for women, and a frozen beef lasagna by Colgate.
Trump steaks. Photo courtesy of Industry City.
Samuel West, who first founded the museum in Sweden in 2017 with items he collected from eBay, is a psychologist specializing in corporate behavior and hopes the exhibition’s stroll down memory lane won’t just amuse audiences but also serve as a reminder that failure is a normal part of progress and there is always a lesson to learn.
For example, the TeleGuides used in Sweden during the early 1990s are now remembered as an early version of the internet while the Nokia N-Gage or “Taco Phone” was short-lived but successfully preempted the mobile gaming industry.
“The main message that I want to convey with the museum is that it’s okay to share your inadequacies, your failures, your stupid questions, your unrefined ideas without being negatively judged,” he has said. “We need to accept failure.”
Preview a selection of historical fails from the collection below.
Polaroid’s Polavision, an “instant” color home movie system. Photo courtesy of Industry City.
A display including Coke II, Crystal Pepsi, and “daily pet drinks,” Thirsty Dog and Thirsty Cat. Photo courtesy of Industry City.
The Nokia N-Gage. Photo courtesy of Industry City.
Installation view of “Museum of Failure.” Photo courtesy of Industry City.
Installation view of “Museum of Failure.” Photo courtesy of Industry City.
The Itera bicycle and the Segway. Photo courtesy of Industry City.
A display of limited edition Oreo flavors including Limeade, Apple Cider, and Carrot Cake. Photo courtesy of Industry City.
Installation view of “Museum of Failure.” Photo courtesy of Industry City.
“Museum of Failure” is on view at Industry City, 900 3rd Ave, Brooklyn, New York, through May 14.
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A new exhibition supporting the controversial news leaks and classified information-sharing website WikiLeaks has opened in London, featuring many of today’s most politically-minded artists. 
Organized by WikiLeaks with the London-based a/political foundation and the German Wau Holland Foundation, “States of Violence” explores the myriad ways artists and journalists have come to encounter repression in all its insipid forms, from police violence to state actors suppressing freedom of speech and access to information.
According to an a/political spokesperson, the exhibition is “an objection against government oppression.” While many of the works on display respond to physical violence exerted by different states, the exhibition emphasizes that there are also invisible methods of silencing opposition, and that these techniques pose the greatest threat to freedom of expression. 
The exhibition brings together a consortium of artists who have long explored political themes as the basis for art making, from Ai Weiwei to Dread Scott, Santiago Sierra, Forensic Architecture, and the late Vivienne Westwood.
On view through April 8, the show coincides with the fourth anniversary of the imprisonment of Wikileaks’s co-founder, Julian Assange, who is currently being held in Belmarsh prison in the U.K., awaiting extradition to the United States for computer intrusion charges stemming from the release of classified government documents he received from Chelsea Manning, a government whistleblower who worked within the U.S. military.
References to Assange and the organization he inspired can be found throughout the exhibition, such as a bookshelf featuring hard copies of classified government cables, which viewers are invited to peruse at their own risk—viewing the books will mean you could be prosecuted for the same crime Assange is facing extradition for.
Installation view of the 66 books printed of Wikileaks’ Cablegate files from 2010-2011. Courtesy a/political.
The exhibition also saw some of Assange’s most prominent supporters from across the U.K. in attendance. 
“What’s amazing about this exhibition here tonight are the works up for display,” Jeremy Corbyn, M.P. and former leader of the U.K.’s Labour Party told Artnet News at the exhibition’s preview on March 23.
Motioning to the long line of carefully assembled bound books, 66 in total, but representing only 6.2 percent of the material from Cablegate, one of Wikileaks’ largest leaks from 2010-11, Corbyn said it was the duty of art and artists to speak truth to power. 
When asked about the relationship between whistleblowing, democracy and art, Corbyn said artists and poets are able to tell truth in their own ways. “A poet can often tell greater truths without having to delve into that, because they’re telling the holistic story,” he said. “That’s why art is likewise so important and inspirational to people, especially when you think of the great causes of peace of the 19th and and early 20th centuries, it was artists who often inspired people to carry through in difficult times,” Corbyn noted.
Mentioning specifically his fondness for Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which depicts the Basque city after it was bombed during the country’s civil war, Corbyn situated the exhibition within a wider battle for truth and representation in the 21st century. Comparing Assange to Picasso, he asked “What’s different about Julian Assange? He has revealed on a mega-scale the totality of attacks on freedom of speech and democracy.”
The exhibition’s opening was also attended by Joseph Farrell, a journalist and WikiLeaks ambassador, as well as Chloe Schlosberg, director of Wau Holland Foundation, the German non-profit association whose stated mission is support the types of activities Wikileaks remains involved with.
“We’re here tonight to elevate Julian’s plight, and the plight of the assault on journalism in new and innovative ways,” Scholsberg said. 
On April 8, organizers are also planning a concert in Hackney featuring Bugzy Malone, Lowkey, Eva Lazarus, D Double E and My Nu Leng, an event they hope will inspire the youth to take up the cause of freedom of speech and information. 
“We hope that this will increase awareness in younger people. It’s about shifting the conversation using art and music,” Scholsberg said, adding: “it’s about how we keep Julian’s name in the conversation.”
“States of Violence” is on view through April 8 at a/political in London. See more images from the exhibition below. 
Andrei Molodkin, “Royal Blood” (2023), courtesy a/political
Andrei Molodkin, “Royal Blood” (2023). Courtesy a/political.
Installation view of Ai Weiwei / Pak. Courtesy a/political.
Installation view of the 66 books printed of Wikileaks’ Cablegate files from 2010-2011. Courtesy a/political.
Installation view with Santiago Seirra. Courtesy a/political.

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