Helter Skelter - Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince - Fondazione Prada - Venice

Born a decade apart, they share an ethos of lawlessness when it comes to the appropriation and manipulation of images siphoned from movies, pulp novels, comic books, YouTube videos, sci-fi stories, album covers, record sleeves, rock ‘n’ roll posters, first-edition Beat volumes, news reels, celebrity memorabilia, and social-media posts. Trafficking heavily in American popular culture, they expose its grit and grift, while embracing many of its myths and perversions. Both artists chart peculiar topographies specific to the United States: Jafa’s reflecting his identity as an African American man, coupled with a mission to invigorate Black cinema and art; Prince’s hovering between a self-conscious critique of white masculinity and a fascination with the underbelly of the American psyche.

The exhibition features more than fifty works, including photographs, videos, installations, sculptures, and paintings. It will also showcase new work by each artist and a collaboratively conceived zine, which incorporates images exchanged between the artists during the process of making this exhibition.

“Helter Skelter” unfolds across the ground and first floor of the Venetian palazzo through a series of thematic and conceptual juxtapositions, combining works by both artists to illuminate each of their practices and tease out shared subject matter and mutual obsessions. Underlying the elective affinities between their artistic projects, “Helter Skelter” reveals a certain vernacular edge in the U.S., where both artists live and work: “A country forever tarnished by its history of slavery; a country defined by its remarkable musical traditions rooted in Black culture; a country of doing without, but making good; a country of spirit and prayer and freedom of expression; a country of protest and subcultures and humor and celebrity,” according to Nancy Spector. Go to Website

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