March 6 2026
Lost Art
All Eyes On You: Why You Should Care About The Cameras
Tylicki takes ‘Dazzle’ on the road through workshops at protests and festivals, where she teaches groups the trial and error process involved. She says ‘the goal is to get people thinking about surveillance, because the problem is that there’s no way to “opt-out” of cameras identifying you’.
June 26 2025
The Times
My make-up class at Glastonbury to fool facial recognition cameras
According to Tylicki, such “tools of resistance” have become important as the government hopes to push the Crime and Policing Bill through parliament — which would make it illegal to wear face coverings at protests.
She said: “Policing and advertising have both recently accelerated the use of facial recognition. [In England] the number of police face scans doubled between 2023-24 to 4.7 million.”
Sept 8 2020
Forbes
Glitzy SUV Adverts Subverted On 100 Billboards By Guerilla Eco-Warriors
Car advertising posters are often highly misleading. Adverts regularly feature cars driving along the beach, or remote mountain roads when the reality for many urban communities is cars clogging our streets and choking our air.
Artist Michelle Tylicki, says "my Piece is about being wander-lost: chasing status, and the feeling of discovering the natural world while simultaneously contributing to its destruction."
Sept 6 2019
Hyperallergic
Using Art to Voice Opposition to the Arms Trade
During Michelle Tylicki’s performance piece “Art Wars” (2019), light bulbs filled with black paint are fired at a white canvas, as a recreation of her father Jacek Tylicki’s street performance in the 1980s in the East Village, Manhattan. The initial performance was in response to both gang violence during the New York crack epidemic and the Polish 1970 strikes against increases in the price of food and everyday objects, which left 42 people dead and thousands more were wounded. In this piece, violence becomes a creative rather than destructive force.
March 8 2020
Dazed
Posters Advocating Sex Work Decriminalisation Appear on the London Tube
New posters on the London Underground are calling for the decriminalisation of sex work, as part of an adhacking campaign that comes simultaneous with a sex worker strike for International Women’s Day.
“Why is using sex to sell OK and selling sex isn’t?” asks one poster by artist Michelle Tylicki, alongside images of a demonstration by activists in red veils.
Aug 14 2019
Elephant
Do Artists Have a Duty to Save the World?
Michelle Tylicki is an artist and activist working across various media to campaign around climate crisis and social justice issues; and says that people need to “creatively and playfully challenge corporate and state power”. She adds, “there’s a lot going on in the underground in non-institutionalized, non-commercial spaces. People need to seek out and support those autonomous art spaces."
Sept 22 2022
The Guardian
Activists subvert poster sites to shame aviation and ad industries
The billboard in Seven Sisters was one – an artwork created by Michelle Tylicki. It showed the view across an outstretched aircraft wing as it soared through the sky – above landscape ablaze with raging wildfires.
“Fly responsibly? Creating a less sustainable future,” its slogan read. In the bottom right corner was the logo of Dutch airline KLM. “Currently being sued for greenwashing,” it added. The airline is facing legal action over adverts that campaigners say are misleading.
May 15 2024
Surfer Today
Oil Giant Shell's Surf Sponsorships under fire in UK guerilla billboard protest
Several poster artworks, designed by nine artists, critique Shell's sponsorship of athletes and sports and its targeting of youth culture, which the group says are PR tactics reminiscent of the tobacco industry.
One by artist and surfer Michelle Tylicki shows American pro surfer Sage Erickson surfing over dead fish and oil drums in a multicolored oil slick, and the words "I'm Fuelled by the Ocean." It's a direct quote from Erickson's "Unbound Diaries" Instagram posts branded with the Shell logo.
24 Nov 2025
100 London advertising sited hacked to protest mass consumerism
Activists have hacked 100 advertising sites across London in a coordinated protest against the tax avoidance of big tech companies like Amazon, and the “destructive hyper-consumerism” of Black Friday.
Satirical artworks pasted over billboards and Tube ads by the anonymous artist network Brandalism accuse companies of dodging taxes, exploiting workers and fuelling environmental collapse.
21 Sept 2021
Activists 'Hack' More Than 200 Billnoards to Protest Alleged Greenwashing
The posters, designed by 11 artists including Darren Cullen, Soofiya, Fokawolf, Merny Wernz, Rhonda Anaconda, Frank Riot, Michelle Tylicki, Inzione, F-Art-Attack and Seize the Mean, are intended to draw attention to Barclays’ financing of companies drilling for Arctic oil, coal mining and fracking, as well as meat companies like JBS, a Brazilian company linked to deforestation in the Amazon.
9 Sept 2022
Activists Take Over Billboards to Call Out Impact of Flying on Global Carbon Emissions
Billboards in 15 European cities have been covered with satirical artwork highlighting the role of airline marketing in driving up greenhouse gas emissions.
[One of the works] by Polish-American artist Michelle Tylicki shows a plane flying over wildfires with the title “Fly Responsibly?”
18 Sept 2025
Can Make-up Help You Evade AI Surveillance?
Tylicki continues, "What’s creepier still, in some instances they can connect your face to data that’s already being collected, on your demographics, emotional responses, social connections, life events, health and political beliefs…. This is called metadata, it’s invasively collected and commodified without consent. The human face is tracked, profiled, herded.
So with this colorful act of resistance, dazzle makeup, we’re refusing to perform for the market. Makeup becomes a tool for messing with machine vision."
22 Sept 2022
Billboards ‘hacked’ across Europe in protest against adverts for airlines and fossil fuel
Artist Michelle Tylicki depicts a plane flying over wildfires, with the words "Fly Responsibly" for her advert that satirises airline KLM. It comes after swathes of land around the world -especially Europe - burned over the summer while temperatures hit record levels in many countries.
13 Jan 2020
The growing global movement to end outdoor advertising
“We set out to subvert the dominant narrative forced onto us by corporate advertising. It is important to reclaim the public visual realm – especially when we are being straight up lied to, as is the case with widely used greenwashing,” explains Michelle Tylicki, an artist who has collaborated with subvertisers.
15 July 2025
Apocalypse Museum
[The installation] also had a talks and workshop programme, which included one of the last legal talks by Francesca Nadin from Palestine Action, and an super popular workshop about using makeup to fool facial recognition cameras by our Hell Crew member & museum producer Michelle Tylicki.
7 August 2024
Art & Design Association
Climate Activists Slam Toyota's Role in 2024 Paris Olympics with Guerrilla Art Campaign
One of the artworks, created by Michelle Tylicki, depicts a gold medal with the Toyota logo dripping in oil. The work states, “Toyota, proud to be the most polluting sponsor of the 2024 Olympic Games.”
2 Nov 2020
Activists hijack HSBC Climate Advertising
Spoof HSBC adverts accuse the bank of 'climate colonialism' and call for an end to its financing of fossil fuels.
Tona Merriman at Brandalism, said: “Advertising is a key mechanism for big banks to shore up their public image. HSBC likes to position itself as a friendly high street bank through its marketing, but these artworks tell a much darker tale of human rights abuse facilitated by the bank’s activities.”
16 Feb 2016
Campaigners protest against BP sponsorship of British Museum
Hundreds of people have occupied the British Museum in protest against its relationship with longstanding sponsor BP and to highlight that the multinational lobbied the UK government to help it gain access to Iraq’s oil reserves prior to the war in the country.
“We are the people rising, when oil burns and armies grow” chanted protesters as they unveiled banners saying “Crisis colonialism” and “Stolen objects”, with the museum allowing the day of peaceful action.
26 May 2020
This Exhibiton Was Brought to You by Guns and Big Oil
In February, a group of activists smuggled a 13-foot-tall wooden horse inside the British Museum in London. The morning after they were joined by around a thousand people, who gathered inside the building to protest the oil company BP’s sponsorship of an exhibition devoted to the ancient city of Troy.
Such protests often provoke a passionate response from both the public and the art world. Perhaps this is because they cut to the heart of art’s social value: What, and whom, are museums for? Another question these protests raise is why art matters so much — not to the public, or even to museums, but to sponsors and donors.
6 Nov 2020
Campaigners' Spoof HSBC Adverts Expose Bank's 'Climate Colonialism'
“When advertising agencies launder their clients’ reputations, it skews public debate on substantive issues like climate change, human rights and colonial oppression… So we created a right of reply for the public, here and abroad, to provide a corrective to HSBC’s billboards.” says Tona Merriman from Brandalism.
4 Sept 2020
Brandalism Take Over 100 UK Billboards
Environmental activist groups from the ‘Brandalism’ network have installed over 100 parody car advert posters on billboards and bus stops in England and Wales. The billboard posters criticise the car industry for misleading adverts that have driven up demand for polluting vehicles and private car use – resulting in increased carbon emissions from road transport and worsening air pollution and congestion in towns and cities.
18 June 2018
Protest Performance Pressures Royal Shakespeare Comapny to End BP Sponsorship
A festival about freedom of protest at the Royal Shakespeare Company collided dramatically with real-life dissent. The theatrical activist group BP or Not BP? staged an unauthorized “Fossil Free Mischief Festival” to coincide with the RSC’s own Mischief Festival. Throughout its renegade festival, BP or Not BP? called on the RSC to stop accepting money from the oil company BP, which the group believes colludes with repressive governments around the world to silence protest, while contributing to climate change.
23 April 2019
Climate change must be a thing: it's on prime time TV
"I hope that the new climate movements will become open forums where ideas about radical social, political and technological change will be discussed. Let’s resist the pressure to corall the conversation within the mainstream’s ideological fences." - George Monbiot.
The photo shows the Renew Rebels theatre group, performing on Waterloo Bridge on Friday 19 August during the “Extinction Rebellion” protests. Oil (in black) confronts wave power (in blue), wind (in white) and the sun (in orange).
5 April 2017
Protest Update: "Fossil Fuel Smackdown"
Reclaim the Power said a group of activist clowns staged the “Fossil Fuel Smackdown”, a wrestling match outside [Barclays Bank, Piccadilly Circus] in protest at its 97% stake in Third Energy. The symbolic match saw clowns representing wind, tidal and solar ultimate triumph over coal, oil and fracked gas.
One of the clowns, Michelle Tylicki, said:
“With today’s performance we hope to deliver a knockout blow to Barclays’ fracking company Third Energy.
Our performance today is comedic but the issue of fracking is serious. Fracking has no public backing, destroys the climate, and threatens to wreck the local community in Ryedale. The government has failed us so far, so it’s up to us clowns to take action.”
5 April 2017
The Growing Global Movement to End Outdoor Advertising
"We set out to subvert the dominant narrative forced onto us by corporate advertising. It is important to reclaim the public visual realm – especially when we are being straight up lied to, as is the case with widely used greenwashing," explains Michelle Tylicki, an artist who has collaborated with subvertisers.
Her work has included making a spoof film poster about the UK fracking firm Cuadrilla – in the style of the horror movie Godzilla. Fracking in the UK has now been suspended following years of pressure from campaigners.
Tylicki also made a poster series that was displayed during 2018's climate negotiations in Poland to challenge the greenwashing and ‘business as usual'. At this summit it was decided that they will ignore the key 1.5 degrees IPCC report. This shouldn't come as a surprise considering the ‘climate summit' was sponsored by Polish coal companies."
During the summit, the right to protest was severely restricted. One of her billboards (in Polish) read: "Belchatow power station emits more CO2 than is absorbed by all Polish forests. Poland, business as usual. High time for climate justice."
