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Stanya Kahn, Deny, Defend, Depose (2026, still), 30:28 min Courtesy of the artist
On the morning of 4 December 2024, the Los Angeles-based artist Stanya Kahn opened X (formerly Twitter) to get her daily news digest, when she, like many Americans, was inundated with a mass chorus of tweets—ranging from celebratory snark to unbridled vitriol—about the assassination of United HealthCare’s chief executive Brian Thompson.
“The compression of anger and joy that I was seeing people write that day was astonishing,” Kahn tells The Art Newspaper; she immediately felt compelled to capture the torrent of reactions. “At first I was bookmarking them, and then [screenshotting] them, and fairly quickly my thought was to gather these up because the algorithm might start shutting them down.”
Fairly quickly, the Trump administration announced that any celebration of the killing could be criminalised. But with an ever-growing archive and a long-held practice as a time-based media artist, Kahn decided to create a film that chronologically presented the public’s rapidly unfolding response to this now-infamous event.
Flyer for Deny, Defend, Depose (2026) Courtesy of Stanya Kahn
Titled Deny Defend Depose (2026)—a play on the words scrawled on three shell casings from bullets fired in the shooting, and the strategy invoked by major healthcare providers to reduce payouts and increase profits—Kahn’s film is now screening across the country at artist-run-spaces, cinemas and galleries. The New York non-profit space Participant Inc will screen it on 13 November, with more showings to come.
Originally, Kahn planned to release the film in the lead-up to 9 September, when the state trial of Luigi Mangione was due to take place in New York. Now that Mangione’s 14 August guilty plea—an attempt to avoid double jeopardy—has postponed the state hearing until 10 December, with a federal hearing to follow on 18 December, Kahn plans to continue updating the film with more responses from the public as the saga continues unfolds.
When it all began, she had considered turning the project into a coffee-table book, which would afford a funny inversion of X’s quippy, short-form format. But switching to a film, her primary medium, afforded an opportunity for in-person film screenings, which enabled the originally solitary experience of watching the commentary unfold online to be transformed into a collective viewing experience.
Set to a dramatic soundtrack of acid and jungle, the 30-minute film takes viewers on an emotional rollercoaster. Watching the tweets unfold in sequence together, the audience collectively holds its breadth as anticipation builds to the moment the suspect is revealed as Mangione, laughs as tweets comment on his attractiveness or the Monopoly money found in his backpack, and sighs at the devastating state of healthcare in the United States when statistics regarding industry salaries and investment patterns, or personal anecdotes about life-threatening denials, are shared.
Just like Kahn was glued to X that morning in late 2024, viewers of her film are often transfixed as they relive their reactions to the still-unfolding story at top speed.“The poignancy of such a broad spectrum of the American public responding in kind to what was basically a public political assassination felt like a rupture, especially in party-based politics,” Kahn says. “It cut across the entire political spectrum and the common ground that suddenly emerged in this flashpoint seemed like a new beacon for potential mass movement, because it was a unity that emerged spontaneously and instantaneously, it wasn’t something that got hammered out in time.”
The outpouring of affection for Mangione has been staggering, Kahn says. “Without blinking,” she adds, “people were in full-throat applause of [an alleged] murderer.”
Attention from the media and public has remained steady since the early days of the manhunt, Mangione’s arrest and the trial, with comparisons to Robin Hood, lookalike contests and wanted posters for other healthcare company executives. While the extent of the public’s celebration of Thompson’s killing took many by surprise, Kahn sees this reaction as evidence of just “how deep the pain and anger and frustration is in this country about the evilness of the healthcare system and its inaccessibility”. (Per capita spending on healthcare in the US is double the average of other wealthy countries, and has been increasing faster than inflation for decades.)
Thompson’s killing and its aftermath are hardly a black-and-white tale of righteous moral vengeance. Though some originally attempted to paint Mangione as disaffected and radicalised, his Ivy League education and privileged upbringing told a different story. And the responses to the event “weren’t just coming from more radical spaces”, Kahn says. While capturing their reactions in real time and reviewing the posters’ profiles, she found, “it was literally just ‘every man’—people with five followers and five million. It was regular people because they were pissed.”