Gavras had already worked with Charlize Theron on a Dior J’adore commercial in 2018, the footage was shot then and revealed only now. Here the actress pours emotion in front of his lens, moving from happiness to sadness, a live launch for the PrimeFocus™ 3D rendering engine, which conjures hyperreal doubles of Hollywood stars capable of summoning any feeling on command. Emotion itself is now an industry: outsourced, refined and copied without limit. The installation plays across four screens, one in each corner of the room, wrapping the viewer in a circular experience with a single bench at the centre.

© 180 Studios

I’ll admit I was confused; this was one of those things you’ve half-heard of but aren’t sure is real. Tianducheng, in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, is a housing development modelled after Paris, complete with a replica of the Eiffel Tower. Known as a ghost city, this Paris District is where children mark the yearly feast of a local prophet — a celebration that plays like a collage of borrowed faiths, imported mythologies fused into a single ritual.

One of the widest screens in the show carries a piece of homemade propaganda from the Agartha Liberation Army, a 6Chan-born insurgency that has broken away from the United States. They hold that the Earth is hollow and salvation waits inside it; their creed bans space travel altogether: heaven, they insist, is below, not above. The perfect mirror to the cosmonauts that opened the exhibition where Baikonur reached for the sky, Idaho digs in the opposite direction.

Probably the most popular piece in the show, and the one that brought real controversy. The video was shot at Cardinal Mercier College in Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium, where the project was reportedly pitched to staff as a portrait of “youth in the eye of the storm,” the involvement of established creative names reassuring them during approval. The violent content, fighting rings and drug use came later as a surprise: the principal told the press these weren’t images the school wanted associated with it. A second controversy followed online, the original cut carried a banner bearing the name of an exclusive Swiss boarding school, quietly scrubbed from the version now live on YouTube. Fitting, for a show about what culture consumes and forgets. Its cinematic choreography, by Damien Jalet, has turned this collaboration with Yung Lean into a viral phenomenon: a craze sweeping the UK’s elite boys’ schools, where pupils melt lithium MR3 out of 6G antennas and smoke the residue. They call the high “aggressively fun,” revolt and boredom collapsed into one ritual.

GENER8ION: Visions of 2034
Date: 12th June – 30th August, 2026
Opening Hours: Wednesday 12:00 – 17:00, Thursday to Sunday 12:00 – 19:00
Place: 180 Studios
Address: 180 The Strand, London WC2
https://www.180studios.com