In his "Afterimage" series, Warren Neidich examines how political power determines who is remembered, celebrated or erased. Drawing on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the work reimagines the familiar star as a monument to those excluded from official recognition. This painting’s reference to Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright and poet who fled Nazi Germany and later faced political scrutiny during the Cold War, places artistic freedom within a broader history of ideological persecution.

The work draws on the optical phenomenon of the afterimage, in which an image persists in the eye after the original stimulus disappears. The left panel of the triptych instructs the viewer on how to create an after-image on their retina, and use this vision to temporarily place Brecht’s name on the Hollywood star. Neidich uses this fleeting effect to propose a form of recognition that exists only briefly and only in the mind’s eye, asking what it means to remember those whom institutions have chosen to marginalise. Here, visibility is not simply a matter of fame, but a question of who controls cultural memory.