“Whose hopes? Whose fears? Whose values? Whose justice?” In 2017, an NYC skatepark was wrapped with these words as part of Barbara Kruger’s citywide takeover for the Performa Biennial, marking an expansion of the artist’s bold works into new objects and environments. “My work is about how we are to one another: our adoration, our contempt, our desire and our disgust,” she tells Dazed. “And this engagement is both visible and audible in my installations, in both gallery and museum spaces, in still and moving images, and in the expansive terrain of infrastructural and built environments.” Through Performa, she added the skate park to the list, as both a new challenge and a new way to get her message out into the world.

As curator Job Piston puts it, looking back on the 2017 project: “The smooth, concave curves of the skatepark, the quarter pipes and U-shapes, opened up an entirely new architectural challenge.” And it didn’t end there. Alongside artworks on metro cards, billboards, and a school bus, Kruger also created a merch drop-slash-performance art piece that played on her complicated relationship with Supreme, featuring hoodies and hats emblazoned with her messages. 

“Long queues were a key element,” says Cyril Duval (AKA the French conceptual artist and designer Item Idem). “The ‘drop’ was clearly designed to mimic the streetwear phenomenon – the almost obsessive culture of waiting in line – which extends beyond fashion to Apple stores, Black Friday, and other consumerist rituals. Through this performative strategy, she managed to capture attention in a very precise way.”

Last year, Kruger recontextualised The Drop in collaboration with Item Idem, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Performa. The updated hoodie and t-shirt, initially available in the French capital, featured text-based works from the original project – in Kruger’s iconic white Futura font – as well as translations in French and Arabic. “In thinking through the local context of Paris, we discussed the languages that shape its cultural landscape, French, English, and Arabic,” says Duval, “as a way to speak directly to the city’s youth and next-generation creatives across art, music, and fashion from the ground up.”

Kruger adds: “The updated merch is an extension of my translation of texts to match the context in which the work is seen, hopefully making it available to a larger local viewership.” Adding to this, fashion photographer Rémi Lamandé captured the new iteration of the project in a series of stark images – styled by Stephy Galvani – that Kruger calls “terrifically seductive and stylish”.

Pushing the aesthetic of the project even further into the realm of advertising and consumer culture, the shoot also saw Piston and Duval lean heavily into diverse, and more often overtly feminine, casting. “And that was also tied to the meaning of the work,” Piston adds. Barbara’s original piece can be seen as a reaction to those very male-dominated, almost ‘boys’ club’ cultures, like Supreme and others. So for us, it felt essential that the casting pushed in another direction.”

Some nine years on from Kruger’s original Performa project, of course, the flood of images and text that mediate the world we’re living in has only become more torrential – and all the more instrumental, influencing everything form political elections to shifting cultural norms. “Today, the power of ‘messaging’ has grown to encompass and sometimes dominate our days and nights,” Kruger says. “Our online lives are an aerosol of circulated commentary, of loving and shaming, of organising both pleasure and pain, of caressing and bullying, of narcissism and voyeurism, of creating and destroying.”

“We keep ‘getting the message’ whether we want to or not.”