Prada‘s current ad campaign for its Spring/Summer 2026 collection is an unsettling affair, and no surprise its maker is an artist known for disturbing video art and sculptures: Jordan Wolfson, whose past works have featured a gyrating cyborg, chained-up puppets, and other terrors. Wolfson’s art is famous—and, in some cases, notorious—for its depictions of violence, both of the physical and emotional variety. A VR work that he produced for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, for example, allowed visitors to witness a man being bludgeoned by a version of Wolfson himself wielding a baseball bat. Another VR work made last year for the Fondation Beyeler, a museum just outside Basel, Switzerland, body-swapped its participants, without much warning to viewers in advance that this would happen. Related Articles Mercifully, the Prada campaign includes no such instances of carnage, but it does maintain Wolfson’s ongoing fascination with bizarre digital avatars. Its still images feature a range of models—including the actors Carey Mulligan, Nicholas Hoult, and Damson Idris—standing beside larger-than-life birds that seem more than a little menacing. Wolfson first …