The Wa

A French visual artist based in Berlin, The Wa studied fine art in France before moving to Germany, where he worked alongside Brad Downey, Akim and Jesus. His practice is rooted in unsanctioned urban intervention: sculptures dropped into the street, hijacked advertising, short-lived installations that are often gone within days. The work tends to be comic and multilingual, and it pokes at the stereotypes of the Western gaze and at everyday forms of social control. Known pieces include oversized "no advertising" stickers pasted on billboards, a marble likeness of Nicolas Sarkozy on a Paris bridge, a giant inflation valve in Shanghai and a bench made from confiscated crowd barriers in Marseille. At Points de Vue in 2024 he spent five days filling the spiral ramp of the Bayonne station car park with hundreds of black-and-white faces staring back at visitors, a take on panoptic surveillance.