‘We got banned from YouTube but they showed Saddam Hussein being hanged’: the wild viral visions of Romain Gavras
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- Romain Gavras and Surkin (Benoit Heitz) launch "Visions of 2034," an audio-visual exhibition timed to debut Gener8ion album "Love & Tears," assembled piece-by-piece over the last eight years while Gavras financed ambitious videos through commercial work
- Gener8ion's "God Hates Space" — featuring 070 Shake as a hollow-Earth conspiracy theorist in middle-American woods — was shot in Ukraine more than six years ago, before the war, with Surkin calling its "confederate/Monster energy drink" aesthetic "prescient, not referential"
- Storm, set in a 2034 Leeds boys' school with Swedish rapper Yung Lean and choreography by Damien Jalet, went viral earlier this year — embraced by America's right for its depiction of young white men, while France's right attacked a shot of Lean drawing a penis on a map of France
- Charlize Theron stars in one of the new videos in the exhibition, which also includes new edits of earlier Gavras-helmed clips for Justice ("Stress"), Jamie xx ("Gosh"), and MIA ("Born Free")
- MIA's "Born Free" — depicting redheads pulled from their homes and killed en masse as commentary on viral videos of the Tamil genocide — was banned from YouTube at the same time footage of Saddam Hussein's execution was not, a double standard Gavras calls "always interesting"
Why it matters: The debut crystallizes eight years of self-financed video work from one of music's most celebrated directors, with the Storm controversy showing how Gener8ion's ambiguous imagery lands differently across political cultures — embraced by America's right, attacked by France's — making them rare artists who draw heat from both ends of the spectrum simultaneously.
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