Introduction

In a new stop-motion animation by Simon Fujiwara, viewers are invited to follow Who the Bær - the cartoon protagonist - on their quest for identity and belonging. Curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal, Hello Who? will premiere April 1, 2022 on London’s Piccadilly Lights and broadcast everyday at 20:22 throughout the month across the CIRCA global network of screens in Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Milan, Melbourne, New York and Seoul.

Through a series of personal, provocative and political questions, (Who wrote history? Who wants love eternally? Who will stop the awful greed? Who needs a goddamn nap?) Who - as they are known - tries to make sense of the world and their place within it. Conceived during the first COVID-19 lockdown, when reality was flattened into content, Who the Bær holds up a mirror to the dominance of images in society and the influence they hold over how we see and understand ourselves.

Following Who the Bær’s debut at Fondazione Prada in 2021, and solo exhibitions at Kunstinstituut Melly, 2021 and Esther Schipper, 2022, Hello Who? will occupy digital billboard screens around the world in this next chapter commissioned by CIRCA. Interrupting the otherwise endless flow of advertisements, Fujiwara’s stop-motion work pauses the consumerist, image-based culture that it is calling into question.

Deconstructing identity, Who’s search for an authentic self encapsulates the CIRCA 2022 manifesto 'AND NOW WE BUILD WORLDS', creating a guide to everyone attempting to navigate what it means to be "real" in an image-saturated world.