In 2019, British artist Bafic created an installation on the floor of a London gallery, featuring a giant selfie of his smiling face. Title Walkover.me, the work asked visitors to walk through the portrait, during which an overhead camera would sneakily take their picture. Not that those viewers hadn’t been warned to be watched: Stuck around the edges of Bafic’s five-by-seven-foot selfie were hundreds and hundreds of little yellow stickers that cheekily announced, “WARNING! Smile, we are filmed.
The artwork itself is no longer physically installed, but this little sticker, created and produced by Bafic, had a surprisingly long afterlife. Over the next few years, he would appear across the world, all over social media, in the most unlikely places.
Its spread was so virulent that an Instagram account was set up to document his global exploration, and now, a hardcover book, titled Warning.Cameradropped to compile 2,061 images, each representing an instance where the sticker appeared in the world between 2019 and 2022.
A page of Warning.Camera. Photo: Theo Cristelis.
Someone’s parents had it on their doorbell in Australia, someone else handed some to security guards in Ghana and then someone showed up with one on a production set for the senator American Bernie Sanders. Fittingly, most stickers are found stuck to the backs of people’s smartphone cases. Bella Hadid had one, as did the late Virgil Abloh.
“A friend told me he was in LA and in this hotel room for a week, going in and out. And on his last day there he left and saw the sticker above from the door to the room,” Bafic told Artnet News. “He messaged me, ‘Bro, what’s going on?’ I was like, I have no idea.
Bafic has only a rough idea of how the Warning sticker came out there. The artist had distributed surplus stickers to friends and acquaintances when the show opened, but since people kept asking him for more, he continued to make and distribute them. He estimates that he distributed about 10,000 stickers; organic virality did the rest.
With the sticker’s growing footprint, Bafic came to see it as an accessible vehicle that carried his work beyond the gallery. It represents, in effect, a real-life meme.
“I had done this setup and inside was another room that didn’t even show up as a room,” he said, comparing it to how samples are often embedded in music. rap. “There’s something about doing something that was so small and ‘insignificant,’ but heavy and light.”
The warning sticker. Photo: Bafic.systems.
Certainly, for such a small job, the Warning multi-pronged sticker posts, even as an unplanned project. This indicates a surveillance state where cameras are ubiquitous; he reviews a culture obsessed with the image; it digs into our entanglement with social media. For Bafic, the spread of the sticker further highlights the nature of virality itself.
“There are all these lofty terms, but I bring them back to how we distribute images on the internet, how we send images to each other,” he said. “I keep coming back to our relationship to images versus our relationship to ourselves. What does it mean these days when images are so present in everything we do? What is the policy of this?
bafic. Pictured: Jim Joe.
This concern for the creation of images runs through the whole Bafic’s own practice, who used video and photography to probe what is watched and who watches. For example, his 2018 installation, treatment processioninvited the public to the ICA in London to watch a film interspersed with a live camera feed of the same audience watching the film.
In their immediacy and accessibility, these visual formats also suit an artist who, by his own admission, got into documentary photography earlier to find it “boring”.
A page of Warning.Camera. Photo: Theo Cristelis.
A page of Warning.Camera. Photo: Theo Cristelis.
“It’s such a big statement, but I felt like documentary photography, in terms of aesthetics, had stood still,” he said. “It didn’t evolve over time and it just replicated things that had happened before. There were no new aesthetics or new approaches or new stories.
“During that time,” he added, “I was looking at my phone and my desktop, and I was obsessed with ‘low’ quality screenshots and images and stuff like that.”
by Bafic Warning The project taps into exactly those veins, with the sticker being a piece of art of modest quality but with an outsized, non-static presence. Carried so far in a very 21st century momentum, it continues to be a living and evolving work.
“It’s a breathing thing,” Bafic said of the project. “He doesn’t just sit in a white-walled space with no context. Its meaning changes depending on where the viewer is and what vantage point they are looking at. It comes from the world.
Warning.Camera was published by Warning!
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