Xanadu is a synchronized 4-channel video installation by Robert Boyd. The work draws from hundreds of hours of archival footage featuring doomsday cults, political figures, and global fundamentalist movements. Boyd edits this material into short, rapid sequences presented as MTV-style music videos within a discotheque-like setting. Using disco music and aesthetics, the installation examines themes of apocalyptic thought and recent social and political events. The videos play in sequence across the four channels, building to a finale. A separate projection titled Exit Strategy serves as both prologue and epilogue. Xanadu has been exhibited at venues including ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Moderna Museet, ZKM Karlsruhe, Participant Inc., New York, and as part of the Julia Stoschek Foundation’s group show the Variety Arts Theater in Los Angeles (2026).

Robert Boyd: Xanadu / What a Wonderful World. Julia Stoschek Foundation in Los Angeles, Variety Arts Theater, Los Angeles, February 18, 2026.

Official description:

Culled from hundreds of hours of archival footage including that of doomsday cults, iconic political figures and global fundamentalist movements, Robert Boyd’s synchronized 4-channel video installation, Xanadu, tweaks, condenses, and re-frames modern events into seconds-long image bites, representing a history of apocalyptic thought as a series of MTV-style music videos within a setting reminiscent of a discotheque.

Having peaked in the late 70s at a high point of Carter-era optimism, disco was formed from an amalgam of black, Latin, and gay subcultures. Vilified at the time for its seeming promotion of male effeminacy (i.e. homosexuality), its embrace of a proactive female sexuality, and its racial non-distinction, disco, with its voracious capacity to sample and reshape excerpts from multiple musical genres, had the ability to reduce “everything to its surfaces […] so that the profound and the inane have an equal opportunity to stimulate.”*  The Xanadu installation exploits the duality that disco provides and combines it with the organizational structure of disco’s visual reincarnation—the music video—to dramatize recent social and political events.

The choice of disco reverses the classic 70s punk vs. disco dichotomy, in which the harbingers of “no future” were clearly the self-disenfranchised punks. In the videos, supported by extreme and often violent footage meticulously gathered over the course of several years, we see a current worldview in which mass annihilation and the Apocalypse are solidly in the hands of those empowered by their people. The choice of dance music suggests a volatile segue from the “feel good” generation of the late 70s to the current “feel bad” generation of the 00s. Taken as a whole, Xanadu insinuates that humanity is not apathetic about its own demise but, on the contrary, is furtively engineering it through a form of collective self-destruction.

* Tom Smucker, “Disco: a soundtrack for communal ecstasy,” The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1992).

In installation, the individual video works that together form Xanadu, are synchronized to play in progression, one after the other, culminating in the climactic grand finale. The video, Exit Strategy, serves as both prologue and epilogue for the installation and is shown as a separate projection.

​XANADU has been exhibited at:  Variety Arts Theater, Los Angeles (2026); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus (2020); Santa Maria della Scala, Siena (2018); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2016); Moderna Museet, Malmö (2015); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2014); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2012); C/O Berlin, Berlin (2011); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2010); Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong (2009); PinchukArt Centre, Kyiv (2008); The Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT (2008); Context Galleries, Derry (2007);  Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis (2007); Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2007); Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (2007); PKM Gallery, Beijing (2006); The Hospital, London (2006) and Participant Inc., New York, NY (2006).

Jeff Koons’ Tulips (1995–2004) is a monumental sculpture from his Celebration series, prominently featured in the collection of The Broad museum in Los Angeles. The work transforms a simple bouquet of seven colorful tulips into an oversized, hyper-realistic balloon-like arrangement, blending childhood innocence with industrial precision. Crafted from mirror-polished stainless steel with a transparent color coating, the piece measures approximately 80 × 180 × 205 inches (over 6 feet tall and 16 feet wide), making it one of the grandest and most technically complex objects in the series. Its seamless, reflective surface creates an illusion of lightweight, inflatable forms while permanently capturing the ephemeral joy of celebration. The vibrant petals and twisted stems interact dynamically with light and surroundings, producing ever-changing reflections that engage viewers. One of five unique versions, Tulips entered The Broad’s collection in 2007 and is typically displayed on the third-floor galleries. Koons has described his balloon sculptures as referencing internal body organs alongside themes of desire, consumerism, and permanence.

Jeff Koons’ Tulips (1995–2004). The Broad, Los Angeles, February 17, 2026.

“In Mark Leckey’s sculpture Inflatable Felix, a thirty-one-foot version of the mischievous cartoon cat sits slumped on the ground of the gallery in a kind of slacker repose. Little did we know that a three-dimensional doll-like version of this cartoon character was the subject of the first experimental television broadcast in 1928. As with all radio and television transmissions, this image of Felix is still travelling through the ether of deep space at the speed of light. It’s for this reason that Leckey has described Felix as a kind of avatar of the modern world, in which images and information are transmitted at a volume and speed that television broadcasting pioneers could not even imagine.” (source: Marciano Art Foundation)

Mark Leckey is a British contemporary artist (born 1964 in Birkenhead, UK) best known for his multimedia work that blends video, sculpture, sound, performance, and installation to explore themes like popular culture, technology, youth subcultures, nostalgia, class, and the ecstatic or transcendent potential of images and objects. His practice often mixes found footage, personal memory, British rave and club culture, and the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life, creating what many describe as emotional media collages or contemporary mythologies.Most Iconic WorkLeckey first gained widespread attention with his seminal 1999 video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore — a cult classic that collages found footage of British youth subcultures (from 1970s Northern Soul to 1990s rave) into a hypnotic, nostalgic portrait of nightlife, fashion, and collective energy. It remains one of his most influential pieces and is frequently cited as pioneering a new form of video art. Major RecognitionHe won the Turner Prize in 2008 for his exhibition Industrial Light and Magic (among other shows), which included works like Made in ‘Eaven (a video featuring a rotating Jeff Koons sculpture) and explored desire, transformation, and the “magical” qualities of objects and technology. Other Notable Works are: Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD (2015) — an autobiographical video retracing his own life events using archived internet footage; Sound System (2002) and large-scale installations that incorporate sound and architecture; Sculptural pieces and performances that often blur high and low culture, sometimes with a shamanic or psychedelic edge (e.g., works involving smart fridges or amusement-park aesthetics).

Mark Leckey has a long-standing obsession with Felix the Cat, which he treats as a kind of personal avatar or totem — a figure that embodies the slippery movement between image, object, technology, and culture. Felix appeals to him because the cartoon cat was one of the very first images ever broadcast on television (in 1929), linking early broadcast media to modern digital transmission, memes, and the “long tail” of internet culture. Leckey often describes Felix as a being that has passed fluidly from material form (toys, costumes) to virtual and back again, carrying a kind of magical or shamanic charge.

Felix Gets Broadcasted (2008): This was part of the exhibition that won him the Turner Prize in 2008 (Industrial Light and Magic). It directly references Felix’s historic role in early TV broadcasting and explores themes of transmission, magic, and the life of images. Leckey has incorporated lectures and performances around this idea, sometimes speaking from inside a Felix costume or suit. Inflatable Felix (2013–2014, with later versions): A massive, giant inflatable sculpture of Felix the Cat (around 10 meters / 31 feet tall when upright, though often shown slumped or deflated on the gallery floor). Made of fabric with a blower, it’s both playful and slightly melancholic — a pop-cultural monument that feels both celebratory and deflated.

Bunny Rogers’ “Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria” (2016) is a 13-minute animated video that serves as the central element of her larger installation Columbine Cafeteria. The video presents an animated female character, modeled after the “Sexy Dumpster Teen” from the early 2000s MTV animated series Clone High, crouching at a grand piano inside a reconstructed version of Columbine High School’s cafeteria. The setting is filled with falling snow. The character drinks red wine while performing cover versions of Elliott Smith songs in a melancholic style. The installation is typically presented in a dimly lit room with continuous artificial snowfall. It includes a real lavender-colored piano bench containing pairs of “Mandy socks.” Additional elements feature replica cafeteria furniture (some intact, some altered), memorial objects such as candles and trash, and other sculptural components referencing the 1999 Columbine school shooting. Created when the artist was reflecting on events from her childhood, the work combines 3D animation, sculpture, and installation. It draws on references from youth media culture, pop music, and historical events. The piece explores intersections of memory, loss, and adolescent experience through a blend of nostalgia and constructed environments.

Bunny Rogers: Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016) / What a Wonderful World. Julia Stoschek Foundation in Los Angeles, Variety Arts Theater, Los Angeles, February 18, 2026.

This the 96th episode in our VTV Classics (r3) series. VTV Classics (r3) highlights the treasures of VernissageTV’s huge archive. Back then published in Standard Definition, these classics are now re-mastered, re-edited and reissued in Ultra High Definition. Art Unlimited is the most spectacular section of the world’s most important art fair, Art Basel. The 2010 edition of Art Unlimited at Art 41 Basel presents large scale installations, sculptures and videos by artists such as Doug Aitken, Dan Flavin, Agnes Varda, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Ugo Rondinone, Yona Friedman and many others.

Art 41 Basel 2010, Art Unlimited. Walkthrough, June 15, 2010. First published June 18, 2010. r3 Series, No. 96 / April 24, 2026.