Skepta, Diligent

How much of the person we become is actually chosen by us?

For DILIGENT, Skepta brings together a series of statements that move between identity, memory, ambition, culture, perception and power, using the language of public address to examine the forces that shape a life. Appearing across Piccadilly Lights in London and screens across Africa, the work draws on more than two decades spent navigating music, fashion, film, art and public life while repeatedly resisting the identities, expectations and systems of validation imposed upon him.

The work begins with a tension that has followed Skepta throughout his life: the relationship between environment and self. Growing up on the Meridian estate in Tottenham within a Nigerian family, he describes himself as inseparable from the place that formed him, while remaining conscious of the danger of allowing other people’s perceptions of that environment to determine who he becomes. “I think all of it,” he says when asked how much of the person he is today was created by where he grew up. “But at the same time, I don’t want the stigma or the picture that people have painted of Tottenham to define me.”

That distinction between being shaped by something and being defined by it runs throughout DILIGENT. Statements including I’M A PRODUCT OF MY ENVIRONMENT, BUT I REFUSE TO BE DEFINED BY IT, THE NOTION OF IDENTITY, CONDITIONED MIND STRUCTURES and CULTURAL (IN)DIFFERENCE consider identity not as something fixed, but as the result of an ongoing negotiation between what we inherit and what the world attempts to place upon us. Skepta describes identity as both innate and constructed: “We’re born with identity, but we’re also given an identity from the world. And that’s the battle of your life, to remain the identity that you were born with.”

For Skepta, that negotiation is inseparable from his relationship with Nigeria and Britain. He has previously spoken about occupying a space between the two, at times feeling too African in London and too English in Nigeria. In DILIGENT, that displacement is not presented as a deficit. It becomes a source of perspective, discipline and imagination. Reflecting on his Nigerian inheritance, Skepta speaks about the sharpness, ambition, drama, creativity and work ethic carried through his family, describing the experience of displacement and immigration as a “superpower”.

The exhibition also turns outward, examining the systems through which identity becomes interpreted and reproduced. NARRATIVES AND AGENDAS, HYPERBOLIC MEDIA CONSTRUCTIONS, WHO’S TO BLAME? and IDEOLOGY EMERGES FROM THE REALITIES WE THINK WE SEE reflect a long-standing distrust of the distance between lived experience and the narratives constructed around it. Skepta has spent much of his career maintaining a deliberate separation between the honesty of his art and the machinery that surrounds it, conscious of how quickly media, institutions and cultural gatekeepers can begin to rewrite an artist’s story.

He describes seeing how media can “take someone’s narrative away from them” until the person themselves begins to believe the version being presented. His response has been to keep those structures at arm’s length while continuing to make work that is intensely personal. Once that work enters the world, however, he no longer attempts to control its meaning. “When I release my art, it’s no longer mine,” he says. “They’re gonna interpret it how they want. And it’s theirs to do that.”

This tension between control and surrender becomes another recurring element of DILIGENT. Skepta’s career was built through independence, from Meridian Crew and Boy Better Know to the expansion of his practice into disciplines far beyond music, yet the exhibition repeatedly questions the assumption that independence means complete control. BORED OF CONTROL, FEAR IS A CHOICE, INTERPLAY BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL ACTIONS AND REACTIONS and IT’S A GIFT AND A CURSE WHEN YOU’RE CHOSEN reveal someone increasingly interested in the limits of individual agency and in the freedom that can come from accepting that not everything can be managed, predicted or possessed.

Perhaps the clearest expression of this appears in Skepta’s reflection on success itself. He recalls once believing that his career contained a destination, a point at which he would finally arrive and know that he had succeeded. Each milestone only revealed another one beyond it. “It was really liberating for me to remove all goals and all checkpoints out of my way,” he explains, recognising that many of those imagined destinations were pressures he had constructed for himself.

That idea also sits behind THE FORK & KNIFE, one of the central phrases within the exhibition. The expression comes from a story passed down through Skepta’s family about his grandfather in Nigeria, who encountered a formal dining room and understood its fork and knife setting as an image of another kind of life. For Skepta, the phrase became symbolic of “the room that I wasn’t supposed to be in”, the imagined place of access, success and legitimacy that can appear distant to people growing up outside established structures of power. Yet reaching that room ultimately exposed the absurdity of the fantasy. The symbols of arrival could never provide the final sense of completion they appeared to promise.

This is where the title DILIGENT becomes important. Legacy, for Skepta, is not primarily about controlling how history remembers him. He speaks instead about the meaning contained within the work itself and the discipline required to continue making it. “Legacy is not in my hands,” he says. “I just definitely hope they remember me as a hard worker.” The distinction is subtle but important. Reputation belongs to other people; diligence remains one’s own.

Across the exhibition, this belief connects the artist Skepta is today with the child he once was, painting, DJing, making clothes and absorbing music in his family home before any of those activities acquired professional labels. His movement between disciplines is therefore less a reinvention than a return. Painting, fashion, film and DJing allow him to reconnect with forms of creativity that existed before his life became dominated by the expectations of being a musician. In describing the things he is ready to leave behind, he names negativity, trauma bonding, imposter syndrome and the instinct to doubt whether he deserves the position he occupies. What remains is a determination to move towards “the version of myself that I feel that I was put on earth to be”.

Projected into some of the most visible public spaces in London and across Africa, DILIGENT transforms those private negotiations into public questions. The work does not offer a single definition of identity, success or freedom. Instead, its phrases accumulate as fragments of a consciousness trying to distinguish inherited values from imposed ones, perception from reality, ambition from validation and the person we are told to become from the person we recognise within ourselves.

If our environments shape us, our families imprint us, media interprets us, culture categorises us and ambition continually moves the finish line, the question that remains is not whether we can escape those forces entirely, but whether we can learn to recognise them clearly enough to decide which ones we carry forward.

Skepta is a British-Nigerian artist, musician, producer and designer whose work has had a defining influence on contemporary British culture. Born and raised in Tottenham, North London, he emerged from the grime scene in the early 2000s and went on to become one of the genre’s most internationally recognised figures. Alongside his brother JME, he co-founded Boy Better Know, establishing an independent platform through which he has consistently retained creative control over his music and wider practice.

His 2016 album Konnichiwa won the Mercury Prize and marked a pivotal moment in the global recognition of grime. Since then, Skepta’s practice has continued to expand beyond music, encompassing fashion, visual culture, performance and design. Through projects including his fashion label MAINS, DJ work and collaborations across art, music and fashion, he has developed a distinct visual and cultural language shaped by independence, experimentation and the intersection of his British and Nigerian identities.

Questions of identity, environment and self-determination have remained central to Skepta’s work throughout his career. His practice frequently draws on the experience of moving between cultures, disciplines and public identities, while resisting the expectations and classifications placed upon him by the music industry and wider culture.

In 2026, CIRCA commissioned Skepta to create DILIGENT, a new work conceived for public space. Presented through CIRCA’s programme of public screens, the commission brings together a series of statements, observations and personal convictions that reflect on the forces that shape an individual, from family and environment to culture, media, fear and ambition. DILIGENT marks a further expansion of Skepta’s practice, translating ideas previously expressed through music and conversation into a visual language of text, image and public space.