OBEY

OBEY brought Shepard Fairey’s visual world into the Institut franco-américain’s gallery in Rennes from February 3 to 20, 2026. Presented with Galerie Édition Spéciale during Festival Travelling’s Los Angeles edition, the exhibition connected an American street-art campaign with the cinema that helped shape its language. Admission was free, and the institute scheduled the opening reception for February 3 at 6:30 p.m.

Travelling’s accessible program specifically described the display as an exhibition of posters. The festival used the expanded title Obey, de John Carpenter à Shepard Fairey. That formulation gives this presentation its particular focus: the passage of a command from a fictional screen world into everyday visual culture. The institute’s account traces Fairey’s beginnings in skateboard culture and the André the Giant sticker project, then identifies Carpenter’s They Live as a source for the OBEY campaign. In French, the film’s title, Invasion Los Angeles, made the connection to Travelling’s featured city especially direct.

A useful way to approach that pairing is to ask what happens when an instruction becomes an image. The word OBEY appears to demand obedience, yet its conspicuous repetition can also make the act of obeying feel strange. In a film-festival setting, that tension invites attention to the relationship between entertainment, persuasion and the apparently ordinary messages surrounding an audience.

The poster format gives the film connection a physical dimension. A cinematic slogan is encountered within a story, over a set duration; a poster can interrupt a visitor’s path and be returned to at will. Repetition across posters can also change the experience of a word. What reads first as an order may become an object of scrutiny when it appears again in a new context. This is a useful lens for the Rennes presentation because its organizers explicitly joined cinema, counterculture and Fairey’s visual campaign. The pairing asks an audience accustomed to watching images move to consider how still images act on their attention.

The institute’s own program twice gives February 3 as the first date. Travelling’s press dossier begins the run on February 4, a discrepancy worth retaining rather than silently harmonizing. Neither source supplies a work-by-work checklist, so individual prints, edition details and installation claims remain unconfirmed.