CIRCA 2026

Lauren Halsey Curated by Ms. Lauryn Hill, DIASPORA CALLING!

5 August, 2026

Ahead of the Diaspora Calling! Festival , CIRCA presents a new animated commission by Lauren Halsey, curated by Ms. Lauryn Hill and appearing for one night only on Piccadilly Lights. Created feverishly from thousands of individually cut image layers, the work unfolds as a vast, saturated collage of people, signs, places, symbols and cultural memory, bringing the many dimensions of Black life into motion across one of the world’s most visible public screens.

The commission emerged through dialogue with Lisa Anderson, the London-based curator whose work on Diaspora Calling! has been central to shaping the festival’s relationship between visual art, music and community. Anderson brought CIRCA into the project and recognised the significance of connecting Halsey’s practice with Ms. Hill’s wider vision, creating the conditions through which this new public work could take form.

For Halsey, the invitation carries a deeply personal history. Ms. Hill has been a formative presence in her life since childhood, not only through her music, but as a model for the ethics, principles and sense of responsibility that can guide an artist working within a larger cultural landscape. Their connection extends back to the original Diaspora Calling! presentation at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre in 2016, where Halsey contributed an engraving and saw her work placed in conversation with songs that had helped shape her own life. This new commission continues that exchange on an altogether different scale.

Born and based in South Central Los Angeles, Halsey has built her practice from the visual and social life of the neighbourhood in which she was raised. Across sculpture, architecture, installation and collage, she draws together storefronts, hand-painted signs, community histories, ancient Egyptian forms, Afrofuturist imagery and the expansive graphic language of funk. The result is an art of accumulation in which the everyday and the monumental, the local and the cosmic, are never treated as opposites.

Halsey describes Diaspora Calling! as a non-linear portrait paying homage to the collective across Blackness. Although the work begins within the particular histories of Los Angeles, it expands across different eras, geographies and experiences, bringing recognisable figures into view alongside people whose names may never be widely known. That presence is essential to the work. Everyday people are not included as background or atmosphere, but are raised to the scale of the billboard and given the public visibility, complexity and power usually reserved for commerce or celebrity.

The collaboration between Halsey and Ms. Hill is grounded in a shared understanding that culture should remain connected to the communities from which it grows. Throughout her career, Ms. Hill has treated music as a means of gathering people, transmitting knowledge and creating opportunities for collective uplift. Halsey’s practice is rooted in a similar commitment. Her sculpture park in South Central functions not simply as an artwork, but as a classroom, dance floor, library, studio and meeting place, changing according to what the community needs and inviting those who enter it to become co-authors.

In this sense, presenting the commission freely on Piccadilly Lights is not simply an act of public access. It is a form of public service. For one night, a screen usually devoted to advertising becomes a space through which culture is returned to the public, allowing art to enter the shared life of the city without invitation, admission or restriction. With Ms. Lauryn Hill in attendance, the presentation becomes both an artwork and a public happening, extending the call of the festival into the centre of London.

Halsey speaks of Diaspora Calling! as a maximalist call to action, one capable of gathering artists, teachers, spiritual leaders, community organisers and people working across every part of Black cultural and social life. The work reflects that breadth. It is about the future and the present, the cosmic and the street, the ancient and the new, holding these worlds together without forcing them into a single definition of diaspora.

What emerges is not a complete portrait, but a collective one. Across thousands of separate fragments, Halsey gives form to a diaspora made powerful through its differences, its memory and its capacity to build from the inside out. For one night, Piccadilly Circus becomes a meeting place between South Central Los Angeles, London and the wider Black world, answering Ms. Hill’s call through image, movement and shared imagination.

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Three Mirrors is presented daily across CIRCA’s global network of public screens. Each evening at 20:26 (local time), the work appears simultaneously across the following locations, entering the flow of the city and inviting a shared moment of reflection. Select a location below to view directions and find your nearest screen on Google Maps.

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London

Screening: Every evening (5 August 2026) at 20:00 BST

Address: Piccadilly Circus, London W1J 9HS, UK

Nearest Tube Station: Piccadilly Circus (Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines)

Bus Routes: 6, 14, 19, 38, 139, 159

Directions: Exit Piccadilly Circus Station and the screen is directly above Boots.

With thanks to Landsec

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The Sum of Our Parts: Lauren Halsey In Conversation With Lisa Anderson

On 5 August 2026, Lauren Halsey’s DIASPORA CALLING! premieres on Piccadilly Lights as a new commission by CIRCA, created in response to Ms. Lauryn Hill’s return to the cultural proposition she first launched in Brooklyn a decade ago. Made feverishly in the days leading up to its presentation, Halsey’s work transforms one of London’s most visible public spaces into a saturated, non-linear portrait of Black life, bringing together the everyday and the monumental, the street and the cosmic, the ancient and the future.

Curated by Ms. Lauryn Hill, the collaboration has developed through a close dialogue with London-based curator Lisa Anderson, whose work across the festival’s visual arts programme helped bring Halsey into the CIRCA commission while connecting the project to a wider ecology of artists and communities in Britain. At the centre of the project are three women whose practices approach culture as a form of public service: Hill’s call for the diaspora to gather and recognise its collective power, Halsey’s community-rooted practice in South Central Los Angeles, and Anderson’s commitment to creating platforms for Black artists and cultural exchange.

Ahead of the premiere, Anderson spoke with Halsey about her years long relationship with Ms. Hill’s music, their previous collaborations, the meaning of DIASPORA CALLING! and the infrastructure that can emerge when artists begin working from the inside out.