Unpop Art

Un-pop emerged from South Africa’s #RhodesMustFall movement, offering a playful subversion of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans by replacing them with local Rhodes-brand tins. The project explores the tension between monuments built on historical exploitation and the humble objects that sustain human life. While colonial statues were erected in stone and bronze to project lasting power at the expense of human labour, canned food exists for a very different kind of preservation: providing accessible, shelf-stable nourishment for everyday survival. By transforming a staple grocery can into a digital monument, the work bridges this divide, contrasting the heavy permanence of imperial history with the daily resilience of sustenance.

Yet things come and go. Rendered digitally, these augmented cans are deliberately fragile and temporal, shedding the stubborn permanence of metal and rock for an ephemeral existence on a screen. Through mobile augmented reality, viewers project these textured, ghost-like artifacts directly into their immediate environment, from parking lots to indoor surfaces. Once placed, audiences can freely build their own compositions, using on-screen 3D axes to translate, rotate, and scale the virtual objects to transform the setting around them.