Cauleen Smith, COVID MANIFESTO

For CIRCA’s November 2020 commission, developed in collaboration with The Showroom, London, Cauleen Smith presents COVID MANIFESTO, an evolving sequence of twenty-three declarations unfolding across Piccadilly Lights throughout the month. Appearing one by one within a shifting tableau of books, notes, drawings and personal artefacts gathered on the artist’s desk, the work develops gradually over time. Seven intermissions drawn from Smith’s wider practice punctuate the sequence, creating a rhythm that moves between reflection, observation, critique and possibility.

As much of the world remains suspended between lockdown and uncertainty, COVID MANIFESTO emerges from a simple but urgent question: what exactly are we being asked to return to? The pandemic dominates headlines and daily life, yet Smith’s attention extends beyond the immediate crisis towards the systems and structures that have shaped it. Across twenty-three pronouncements, the artist connects public health, racial injustice, economic inequality, borders, labour and technology, revealing the ways in which these conditions are deeply entangled.

Throughout her practice, Smith draws upon Black feminist thought, experimental cinema, Afrofuturism and collective forms of world-building to explore how societies imagine themselves into existence. Her work begins from the belief that political transformation requires acts of imagination. Before a different future can be built, it must first become conceivable. Rather than offering solutions, COVID MANIFESTO opens a space in which assumptions can be questioned and alternative possibilities brought into view.

The manifesto has long occupied a complicated position within political and artistic history. Traditionally associated with declarations of intent and programmes for action, Smith adopts the form while resisting its certainties. Her statements move freely between poetry, humour, critique and provocation. They refuse the language of authority in favour of something more open ended: an invitation to think differently about the present and to imagine what might emerge from it.

Presented on one of the world’s most visible advertising screens, the work performs a subtle interruption within the daily rhythms of commercial culture. For a brief period each evening, the language of consumption gives way to another set of values and questions. The screen becomes a site for contemplation rather than persuasion, a place where public space can momentarily accommodate doubt, speculation and dissent.

At the centre of the work sits the artist’s desk. More than a studio, it becomes a space of inquiry where reading, writing and drawing function as forms of resistance. Objects accumulate and disappear. References emerge and recede. Ideas are tested in public. The manifesto unfolds not as a finished statement but as an ongoing process of thought.

If the present moment exposes the fragility of the systems upon which contemporary life depends, it also reveals the possibility that things might be organised otherwise. Across twenty-three declarations and seven interludes, COVID MANIFESTO transforms Piccadilly Circus into a forum for radical imagination, asking not how we return to normal, but whether normal was ever sufficient in the first place.

Cauleen Smith is an American artist, filmmaker and writer whose work explores the intersections of experimental cinema, Black cultural histories, spirituality, science fiction and social justice. Working across film, installation, sculpture, performance and text, she creates immersive worlds that connect personal experience with collective transformation, offering new ways of imagining community, care and liberation.

Over the past three decades, Smith has developed a distinctive artistic language that combines rigorous research with poetic speculation. Her work frequently centres the lives, ideas and creative legacies of Black artists, musicians, activists and visionaries, constructing alternative narratives that challenge dominant histories while opening space for new futures. Moving fluidly between moving image, visual art and public space, she has become one of the most influential voices in contemporary American art.

In 2020, Smith collaborated with CIRCA and The Showroom, London on COVID MANIFESTO, one of the platform’s earliest public commissions. Broadcast daily on Piccadilly Lights throughout November, the project unfolded through a sequence of handwritten reflections composed during lockdown, transforming the artist’s desk into a living tableau of objects, ideas and daily observations. Presented at a moment when the pandemic was exposing profound social inequalities around the world, the commission offered an intimate yet collective meditation on justice, memory, survival and radical care. Alongside the public artwork, Smith released The Internet Is Not The Answer, a hand-printed edition produced in her Los Angeles studio.

Born in Riverside, California and based in Los Angeles, Smith’s work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, the Art Institute of Chicago, ICA Philadelphia and SFMOMA. The recipient of numerous awards, including the inaugural Ellsworth Kelly Award and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, she continues to create works that expand the possibilities of art as a space for imagination, reflection and social change.