FONDAZIONE PRADA – “HELTER SKELTER: ARTHUR JAFA AND RICHARD PRINCE”

Images courtesy of Fondazione Prada

Venice Biennale: 9 May to 23 November 2026

At its Venetian venue, Ca’ Corner della Regina, Fondazione Prada presents Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, an ambitious two-person exhibition curated by Nancy Spector, on view from 9 May to 23 November 2026 during the Venice Biennale.

Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince

Bringing together the works of Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince for the first time, the exhibition explores a shared artistic language rooted in appropriation, image culture, and the contradictions embedded within American identity.

Spanning more than fifty works across photography, video, sculpture, painting, and installation, Helter Skelter unfolds as a charged visual dialogue between two artists who mine the vast terrain of American popular culture—from Hollywood cinema, music, and celebrity imagery to social media, advertising, pulp fiction, and archival material. Though shaped by distinct perspectives, both Jafa and Prince employ found imagery to expose the tensions, myths, violence, and seductions underlying contemporary America.

Presented by Coulisse | INK

The exhibition opens with a striking confrontation between Prince’s Blasting Mats (2006) and Jafa’s Big Wheel II (2018), two monumental installations that channel the mythology of American car culture while evoking destruction and dystopian futurism. Throughout the palazzo, thematic juxtapositions reveal recurring motifs of race, desire, masculinity, celebrity, spirituality, and protest. Jafa’s celebrated video Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) is presented alongside Prince’s Untitled (Sunsets) series, while Jafa’s LOML (2022) enters into dialogue with Prince’s iconic Untitled (Girlfriend) photographs.

Central to the exhibition is the idea of appropriation as both artistic strategy and cultural critique. Drawing inspiration from Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade, both artists transform existing images into provocative reflections on authorship, identity, and power. For Prince, appropriation becomes a form of artistic piracy; for Jafa, it also interrogates ownership through the historical realities of Black experience and slavery in America.

The exhibition further examines themes of “monstrosity,” whiteness, celebrity culture, and collective memory through key works such as Jafa’s The White Album (2018), Prince’s White Paintings, and Jafa’s BEN GAZARRA (2024), which revisits Taxi Driver through an alternative racial lens. Elsewhere, both artists engage with protest culture, spirituality, and social unrest, revealing America as a landscape shaped equally by trauma, spectacle, faith, and rebellion.

The title Helter Skelter itself references multiple layers of cultural history—from the 1968 song by The Beatles to its darker associations within American counterculture—reflecting the exhibition’s deliberately chaotic and confrontational nature. As curator Nancy Spector notes, the exhibition embraces the “messiness” of American culture, using appropriation not merely as an aesthetic gesture, but as a means to uncover buried truths and destabilize established narratives.

Accompanying the exhibition is an illustrated publication designed by Peter Saville with Graphic Thought Facility, featuring essays, conversations, and critical contributions from international writers and scholars.