Arthur Jafa often speaks about images as if they carry their own momentum. Rather than arranging them into fixed arguments, he follows their trajectories patiently, allowing unexpected connections to emerge over time. A potent photograph placed beside another. A work installed in Venice that suddenly begins conversing with the architecture around it. For Jafa, some of the most revealing discoveries arrive after the work is created.
That sincere openness runs through “Helter Skelter,” the major exhibition at Fondazione Prada during the 2026 Venice Biennale, bringing Jafa into dialogue with Richard Prince for the momentous first time. Curated by Nancy Spector and installed throughout the beguiling rooms of Ca’ Corner della Regina, the exhibition places two masterful artists together whose practices have continually transformed the visual language of American culture. Here, a magnetic presentation uncovers new, visceral possibilities within images that many viewers thought they already knew.
Embracing more than 50 works, including photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, and new commissions, “Helter Skelter” imparts a shared intrigue for appropriation, popular culture, mythology, and the shifting meanings rooted within and between images. Though born a decade apart and working from diverse vantage points, Jafa and Prince each draw from a vast supply of cultural material, revisioning familiar forms into something newly powerful and destabilizing.
Among the works on view are landmark projects including Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016); The White Album (2018); and SloPEX (2023), alongside new works such as Viriconium (2026), a sprawling installation shaped through sharp association rather than narrative. Elsewhere, BEN GAZARRA (2024) revisits Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) through its originally intended casting, revealing significant possibilities embedded within the film from the very beginning.
When Whitewall spoke with Jafa, the conversation moved dynamically between influence, instinct, working-class culture, and the profound yet unexpected meanings that emerge when images are placed in uninhibited conversation.
Arthur Jafa, portrait by Marta Marinotti.
Fondazione Prada, Venice,
Photo by Andrea Rossetti,
Courtesy Fondazione Prada.
WHITEWALL: “Helter Skelter” brings your work into dialogue with Richard Prince’s through the idea of the “image scavenger.” What interested you in placing that methodology in direct conversation with Prince now?
ARTHUR JAFA: I have a longstanding interest in Richard’s work. A large percentage of my practice, as it’s currently constituted, would be impossible without his precedent. Not so much thematically, but certainly in terms of opening up possibilities. I’ve even said that Richard is the master thief. So I’ve learned from the best, but ultimately I’m interested in stealing different things than he is. Still, there’s quite a bit of overlap.
We’re both interested in American working-class culture. I’m interested in Black culture. Not exclusively, but it’s a primary interest. There’s overlap not just in the strategy of appropriation, but in the kinds of things we’re invested in.
It’s not simply the act of taking. It’s the act of transposition. Taking something from its vernacular context and moving it into another space. A big part of it is bringing things typically considered low culture into the context of high culture.
“It’s not simply the act of taking. It’s the act of transposition.”
Arthur Jafa
When I first started showing with Barbara Gladstone, she would often talk about Richard. One of the things that really stayed with me was her observation that it’s always better if success comes a little later than a little earlier. She often pointed to Richard as the best example of that. His success came after many of his contemporaries had already become famous. At least for me, there was never any doubt about who was the most interesting.
The Logic of Intuition
Exhibition view of “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince,” Arthur Jafa, “Big Wheel II,” 2018, photo by Andrea Rossetti, courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
WW: Many of your works begin with unexpected juxtapositions. What keeps you returning to that process of collecting, arranging, and recontextualizing material?
AJ: I’m trying to do the things that I find interesting. To present things that seem resonant, things that suggest questions. A thing can feel very telling, but not be exactly legible. I’m mostly interested in the fact that it resonates.
As far as trying to direct what it signifies, not so much. A lot of it is intuitive. Free association. You’re thinking about it, but maybe not always on a conscious level.
One of my key metrics is work that reveals something different each time you return to it. Sometimes I see things in my own work that I know I had no conscious intention of putting there. If I had noticed them beforehand, they might have seemed too obvious. But when I discover them later, they seem almost magical.
WW: You’ve often spoken about drawing from forms of culture that exist outside traditional art spaces. How has that perspective shaped the way you think about your work today?
AJ: I’m aware that it creates a certain kind of contextual dissonance for me to bring the kinds of things I bring into the high-art space. But I’m not doing this exclusively to create contextual dissonance. That’s just a side effect.
Basically, I’m interested in privileging the things that I think are dope and interesting. I don’t think working-class culture is low culture. It’s just culture. Mississippi, outside of Appalachia, is probably one of the poorest regions in America. At the same time, it’s ground zero for Black American music, which means it’s ground zero for American culture in the twentieth century. That paradox shaped me.
My parents were college professors at a small Black college. One of the consequences of growing up on a college campus in the South was a sense of being both inside and outside at the same time. I felt like an outsider everywhere I was. Too low for high culture and too high for low culture. Alienated in both places. I’m certainly working-class identified. I’m very aware that my work ushers certain kinds of things into spaces where they’re not typically found. But I don’t feel any insecurity about that. I’m a bit of a working-class aristocrat. Olympian even, in my commitment to working-class culture, its values and ethos. I’ve started saying I’m less interested in making work about Black people than I am in making work like Black people. That’s the spirit generally.
“I’m a bit of a working-class aristocrat. Olympian even, in my commitment to working-class culture, its values and ethos.”
Arthur Jafa
My work validates the context, not the other way around. It makes museums relevant in a way they seldom are for most people. But that’s a consequence of what I’m doing, not the reason I’m doing it.
Affective Proximity
Exhibition view of “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince,” Arthur Jafa, “Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death,” 2016, photo by Andrea Rossetti, courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
WW: Viriconium brings together a wide range of images and references. How did the work develop as you began placing those elements alongside one another?
AJ: My good friend, and the great artist John Akomfrah, has this term, “affective proximity.” You put something with affective capacity next to another thing with affective capacity, and that juxtaposition creates a new kind of affective capacity.
I select things that have a kind of associative tethering. There’s a relationship happening among all the pieces. But I didn’t begin with an idea and then choose images to illustrate it. I started with images. When I put two things together that did something, I kept them together. Then I’d find another two or more things that worked together. Eventually, I had a handful of combinations. Sometimes they connect conceptually. Sometimes they just look good together. It evolves over time.
One of the most startling experiences with Viriconium was seeing it unpacked in Venice for the first time. The work ended up resonating with the architecture and painted ceilings around it in ways I hadn’t consciously planned. As soon as I saw it, I thought, “That’s intense.”
When it works best, for me, it’s because it isn’t totally overdetermined.
Arthur Jafa, “BEN GAZARRA,” 2024, Film Still, © Arthur Jafa, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone.
WW: In BEN GAZARRA, you revisit Taxi Driver through its originally intended casting, with Black actors in key roles. What interested you in returning to that unrealized version of the film?
AJ: Friends of mine who revere Taxi Driver came to see it and said, “This is a mindfuck.” They were up until 4 or 5 in the morning talking about it. They said you can never look at the movie the same way again.
I was trying to make something resonant. Something with energy. Something provocative. Maybe beautiful in a way. Maybe truer.
Often my work, like say Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death gets interpreted as an uplift project. Despite it being deeply ambivalent. There’s a pronounced ambiguity in what it signifies.
I’m always surprised when people don’t laugh at certain moments in my work. There are things in The White Album that seem obviously funny to me. I make things I find interesting under the assumption that somebody else might find them interesting too.
WW: “Helter Skelter” is a title that carries a long trail of cultural associations. What drew you to it for this exhibition?
AJ: I wanted to use it for a show for a long time. The interesting thing is that when you appropriate a title, people follow certain associative chains and not others. With The White Album, everyone mentions the Beatles. Nobody mentions Joan Didion, which is striking to me. With “Helter Skelter,” it’s all of those references. The amusement-park ride. The Beatles song. Charles Manson. The Los Angeles exhibition. And Joan Didion. All of it.
There’s a built-in duality to the title, HELTER SKELTER. Me and I. Two artists. Two trajectories. At one point, I wanted to change the title to Don’t Look Now. Everybody vetoed it. They preferred “Helter Skelter.” I’m always auditioning ideas. Seeing how they fit. Maybe the second idea is better than the first one.
I’m interested in the virtual. Karl Chu, the architectural theorist, defined the “virtual’ as a state that exists somewhere between the real and the imagined. It’s a zone of free play for me. The imagined is powerful because it’s so fluid. The real is magical because it’s concrete. The virtual exists somewhere in between those two conditions, and that’s a space I’m very interested in.
I’m interested in improvisation. In probability and emergence. In things that are in a constant state of becoming. Black being is in a perpetual state of emergency. I try to be an agent of this kind of stuff. Not the author of it, an instrument of it.
The Possibility That Things Can Be Otherwise
Exhibition view of “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince,”
Photo by Andrea Rossetti,
Courtesy Fondazione Prada, From left to right:
Arthur Jafa
“Mickey Mouse Was a Scorpio,” 2017, Richard Prince, “Untitled (Face),” 2001.
WW: What kinds of images or encounters still have the ability to truly destabilize or awaken?
AJ: I like the word destabilize. It’s not about telling people what to think. It’s problematizing what they already think. What kinds of things are resonant? What kinds of things are provocative? Not provocative in the sense of being a provocateur, but worthy of interrogating and with some capacity to generate new kinds of thought.
I’m resistant to the idea that my practice is archival. I use images because they’re available. And, I’ve figured out a range of fascinating things you can do with them.
People talk about found images, but half of the images in Love Is the Message weren’t found. I shot them. So, it begs the question, what’s the difference between a found image and a captured image? I’m just saying.
Ultimately, I’m interested in opening things up rather than narrowing them down. I’m interested in alternity, just the possibility that things can always be otherwise.
Exhibition view of “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince,”
Photo by Andrea Rossetti,
Courtesy Fondazione Prada,
Arthur Jafa,
“BEN GAZARRA,” 2024.
Exhibition view of “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince,” Arthur Jafa, “Viriconium,” 2026, photo by Andrea Rossetti, courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
