CIRCA is a public art platform that commissions and broadcasts new work across some of the world's most visible city screens. It was founded in October 2020 by the British-Irish artist Josef O'Connor as a daily intervention on London's Piccadilly Lights, where each evening the advertising is paused and an artist's work is shown instead. The broadcast time matches the year: 20:20 in 2020, 20:26 today. The programme now reaches screens across four continents and is free to watch in person and online.
Each commission is accompanied by limited editions, and CIRCA's model is circular. Revenue from collecting funds new commissions, grants, scholarships and the annual CIRCA PRIZE. Artists who have taken over the screens include Ai Weiwei, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramović, David Hockney, Vivienne Westwood and Shirin Neshat.
In 2026 CIRCA undertook its most ambitious collaboration to date with Michelangelo Pistoletto: a year-long Preventive Peace initiative with Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte and the UN's humanitarian office, OCHA. At its centre was Three Mirrors, a trilogy filmed at Cittadellarte in which Pistoletto draws directly onto large mirrors. Atelier JI produced the accompanying edition, Preventive Peace Flags: twelve hand-signed works on polished stainless steel, each titled as a colour equation in which two colours combine to make a third.
