Karma Khazi announces venue for London Sh!t Show

GUERILLA Artist, Karma Khazi has announced the venue for his January multimedia exhibition, Sh!t Show, which celebrates the art of toilet graffiti. 

The artist will take over the space at 133 Bethnal Green Road - in the graffiti hotspot of Shoreditch - for four days to showcase his ambitious collection of nearly 100 pieces inspired by the messages he found during a 250-pub crawl. 

The centrepiece of the show will be a single, black door with 63 pieces of graffiti, all pulled from different toilet cubicles and each with their own unique view on the world. 

Other pieces in the show include 63 individual canvases reflecting the graffiti’s messages, fibreglass pub signs and other sculptures and art to bring the collection close to 100 pieces in total. 

The show will extend beyond physical art - music created at Courtyard Studios (Radiohead, Gaz Coombes, The Stranglers) and mixed at the legendary Abbey Road will soundtrack the exhibition, and a short film by double-BAFTA winning filmmaker Lee Phillips sheds light on the work and its origins. 

It is an idea borne of the modern age, when debates over free speech and cancel culture pervade, and we have an unprecedented audience for our opinions. 

The artist will host a private, VIP viewing on the evening of January 25, before throwing open the doors of the exhibition to the public from January 26 -28 . 

Speaking of the forthcoming show, Karma Khazi says: “I always felt as though Shoreditch was the spiritual home of Sh!t Show. It’s a place where graffiti is a huge part of the culture and it seemed like the perfect place to celebrate the work of anonymous graffiti artists from all over the capital.” 

The artist will welcome the public for free from January 26-28, even inviting them to create their own contributions to the show, with special areas set aside for guests to add their own, anonymous messages, drawings and slogans, which will then form part of the collection. 

The show promises to celebrate what Karma Khazi calls the “purest form of expression.” 

“You’re in this private realm and it’s the one place where anything goes,” he says. “You can say what you want without being conscious of a backlash. Those marks that people leave behind are typically somebody’s most impulsive expression.” 

“It’s kind of the final frontier of free speech. Even with social media, it’s not that easy to just say what’s on your mind any more. Something you said 10 years ago can be brought back up and you'll get into trouble for it, and suddenly you have to apologise and go back and delete everything.”

“When you go into these cubicles, you sit down on the toilet; you look at the back of the toilet door and you see all the social commentary people have written. 

"I’ve always wanted to make a conceptual exhibition based on the back of toilets doors. It’s like the original social media.” 

Sh!t Show London is a hyper-local dissection of the population's thoughts; a view into the unfiltered minds of the capital’s residents and visitors. But it marks only the beginning of the journey. 

“There’s a real, strong narrative about our capital city,” he says of the show. “But it’s only our capital city. After this, I’ll move to another city where their thoughts are different and their worries, anger and love will be directed somewhere else. That’s the beauty of it. We’ll go to Paris next and that show will pull back the veil on an entirely different way of thinking.” 

Source: Cultmedia Collective