Slawn, Gone?

Human history can be read through the images we leave behind. Long before museums, galleries or even written language, people painted animals onto cave walls, carved symbols into stone and marked the surfaces of their surroundings with evidence of their existence. The walls of Pompeii preserve political slogans, declarations of love, jokes, advertisements and fragments of everyday conversation from almost two thousand years ago. Technologies evolve and societies transform, yet the impulse remains remarkably constant. We leave images behind in order to be remembered.

For GONE?, his first major public commission with CIRCA, Nigerian-born, London-based artist Slawn enters this lineage whilst extending it into the age of global screens. Emerging from Lagos before establishing himself in London, the artist occupies one of the most visible image-making platforms in the world whilst remaining physically embedded within the street itself. The commission marks CIRCA’s arrival on the African continent, connecting audiences in Lagos, Accra, Nairobi and Abidjan with London, Berlin, Milan, Seoul, Tokyo and Los Angeles through a single project unfolding across four continents.

The work emerges through a close dialogue between Slawn and CIRCA Founder and Artistic Director, Josef O’Connor, who challenged the artist to create a unique painting for each screen in the network. Rather than producing a single work to be endlessly replicated, O’Connor proposed a more ambitious experiment – an exhibition dispersed across the world, with each location receiving its own image, its own character and its own presence. The result is neither a film nor a conventional public artwork, but a constellation of connected works united by a single question. GONE?

The title arrives as a provocation rather than a statement. Has hope gone? Has certainty gone? Has the future we imagined for ourselves disappeared? Or is disappearance itself an illusion? The question remains deliberately unresolved.

Earlier in 2023, His Holiness the Dalai Lama opened the CIRCA 2023 programme with a response to the manifesto Hope: The Art of Reading What Is Not Yet Written. As the year approaches its conclusion, Slawn returns to that conversation from an entirely different perspective. If hope was the beginning of the story, GONE? becomes a meditation on what remains when certainty begins to dissolve.

To realise the commission, Slawn spent a day inside a disused retail unit beneath the Piccadilly Lights, transforming an empty commercial space into a temporary studio and stage. Above him sat one of the world’s most powerful advertising screens. Below it, another kind of image was taking shape. Working on bespoke sheets of transparent perspex cut to the exact proportions of CIRCA’s global screens, he created an entire series of paintings during a single filming session. There were no rehearsals, no corrections and no opportunity to return to what had already been done.

Filmed from the reverse side of the transparent surface, the viewer occupies the position of the painting itself. Cartoons, sketches, internet imagery and visual fragments shared amongst Slawn’s close circle of friends move continuously between the screen of his iPhone and the perspex before him. The paintings emerge with the speed of thought, capturing an artist working instinctively and without hesitation.

There is an art historical precedent for this reversal of perspective. In the early 1950s, Pablo Picasso famously painted directly onto sheets of glass whilst a camera recorded from the opposite side, allowing viewers to witness an image arriving into existence stroke by stroke. Yet the commission also belongs to a lineage rooted in street culture and music. The uncanny illusion created by watching images materialise whilst their maker recedes recalls The Pharcyde’s Drop (1995), Spike Jonze’s landmark music video in which actions unfold in reverse, producing a world that feels simultaneously familiar and dislocated. Slawn occupies both traditions at once. His references move freely between art history, cartoons, skateboarding, internet culture and the visual language of hip-hop, creating works that collapse distinctions between the gallery, the street and the screen.

As each painting accumulates on the transparent surface, the artist gradually disappears behind it. The gesture is deceptively simple yet unexpectedly moving. The more visible the image becomes, the less visible its maker appears. Presence gives way to representation. Process gives way to memory. What remains is the trace.

This relationship between disappearance and survival lies at the heart of the commission. Slawn has often spoken about humanity’s uneasy relationship with time, our tendency to experience it as something slipping away from us. Yet art proposes another possibility. Images survive their makers. Memories outlive the moment. Culture accumulates traces that continue to resonate long after their point of origin has passed.

At 23 years old, Slawn occupies a unique position within contemporary culture, moving fluidly between art, fashion, music, skateboarding and the internet whilst resisting full assimilation into any of them. GONE? captures a particular moment in that trajectory. The films function not simply as records of paintings being made, but as performances that preserve the energy, confidence and immediacy of an artist in motion. Suspended between Lagos and London, friendship and authorship, the local and the global, the works become a record of a fleeting moment before it passes into history.

As the commission unfolds across eleven cities and four continents, the question remains suspended in public space. The artist disappears. The paintings remain. The year comes to an end. The future, like the title itself, remains unwritten.

Slawn is a Nigerian-born, London-based artist whose work sits at the intersection of contemporary art, street culture, music and fashion. Known for his energetic visual language of cartoon-like figures, bold colour and expressive mark-making, he draws upon personal experience, popular culture and Nigerian heritage to create works that are at once playful, provocative and deeply human.

Since emerging from London’s underground creative scene, Slawn has become one of the defining cultural voices of his generation. Celebrated by figures including Virgil Abloh and Skepta, his practice has rapidly expanded from the street to international galleries, museums and public space while retaining the immediacy, humour and spontaneity that first made his work distinctive. In 2023, he became the youngest artist ever commissioned to redesign the BRIT Awards trophy, further cementing his position at the forefront of contemporary culture.

Slawn collaborated with CIRCA in 2023 on GONE?, a landmark public commission that marked the platform’s expansion across Africa. Appearing simultaneously on public screens in Accra, Lagos, Nairobi, London, Berlin, Milan, Seoul, Tokyo and Los Angeles, the project transformed city billboards into a global canvas while introducing the artist’s work to millions of viewers worldwide. Created in response to CIRCA’s manifesto Hope: The Art of Reading What Is Not Yet Written, the commission positioned Slawn amongst a new generation of artists using public space to explore questions of identity, belonging and collective possibility.

Today, Slawn’s work is collected internationally and continues to shape conversations across contemporary art and popular culture. Moving fluidly between disciplines while remaining rooted in the energy of the street, he represents a new generation of artists redefining what cultural influence can look like in the twenty-first century.