Fondazione Prada Venezia (Ca' Corner della Regina) · Santa Croce

Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince

Jetzt zu sehen9. Mai 2026 – 23. November 2026·15 €

Nancy Spector curates 50+ works by Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, two image scavengers who mine American pop culture. Includes explicit content.

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You enter under a steel gantry in the palazzo's courtyard, where Richard Prince has hung singed mats of threaded tyre scraps from metal cables. Inside, Kanye West's "Ultralight Beam" carries across the whole ground floor: it is the soundtrack of Arthur Jafa's Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, which plays in a room of its own.

More than fifty works fill the ground and first floors, paired room by room. Jafa's aluminium cutouts of Malcolm X, Walt Whitman and others face Prince's photographs of hopeful actresses from Times Square bars. Jafa's The White Album, which won the Golden Lion at the 2019 Biennale, sits among three Prince joke paintings scrubbed out with paint.

Artforum's critic arrived to hear it called "a show with teeth". The doubts are about the pairing: 1000 Words warned that juxtaposition "flattens as easily as it illuminates". The museum flags violence, nudity and sexual imagery. Jafa's SloPEX alone runs 105 minutes, so choose your videos. It closes 23 November.

Nicht verpassen

The tyre mats in the courtyard
Look up on the way in: Prince's blasting mats, stitched from scorched tyre fragments, dangle on cables from an L-shaped scaffold in the inner courtyard.
The chained tyre with blue bandanas
Prince's mammoth tyre stands alone, wrapped in steel chains, with a rough rock-like ornament where the hubcap should be, tied with blue bandanas.
Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death
Jafa's roughly eight-minute montage in its own room cuts police violence against Obama singing "Amazing Grace" and LeBron James in flight, all to "Ultralight Beam".
Jafa's aluminium pantheon
Cutout figures from Malcolm X to Walt Whitman spill off the walls as one composite self-portrait, facing Prince's large photographs of aspiring Times Square actresses.
Prince's signed glossies
In the Publicities series, celebrity headshots of Carrie Fisher, Freddie Mercury, Robert De Niro, Ice-T and Cindy Crawford are all dedicated to Prince himself.