Apple Music's The Replay Gallery Was a Creative Tour de Force
Every December, Miami turns into an experimental lifestyle playground remixing art, fashion, design, and music. But over the weekend, Highsnobiety and Apple Music staged a mind-bending moment the likes of which Miami Art Week has never seen: The Replay Gallery, two days of programming that fused gallery, symposium, and dance floor into a single frequency.
Apple Replay, Apple Music’s year-end portrait of your top artists, songs, and the patterns behind them, served as the starting point for The Replay Gallery: a group exhibition that brought together a diverse group of global artists — Angel Otero, Calida Rawles, Devon Turnbull, Gabriel Moses, Henry Taylor, Jeremy Deller, Sara Sadik, and Tommy Malekoff — whose work encapsulated the year in music.
The invite-only exhibition opening on December 5 attracted rapper Offset, singer Khalid, artist Rachel Korine, model Alana Champion, artist Chris Cadaver, model Salem Mitchell, Mets third baseman Mark Vientos, and DJ and music producer Kitty Ca$h, all while rapper and artist Kilo Kish served up her American Gurl Burgers
Stepping inside the gallery, one found the treasure trove of meaningful work from the spotlighted artists. Deller’s 2018 film Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984–1992 turned a high school lecture into a crash course on the sociopolitical conditions that birthed electronic music. A graphic mapping the connections between place, genre, and movement hung beside it like a blueprint for rave culture.
Two Los Angeles painters hung in dialogue: Rawles’ Echo My Moonlight (2020), a woman floating underwater, that feeling of being submerged in a dreamy track; next to it, Henry Taylor’s 2025 Untitled painting, a figure in sunglasses clutching a red electric guitar.
Tommy Malekoff’s two-channel video imagined the promise and collapse of Detroit, Memphis, and Galveston, Texas — three American cities situated by water and consumed by industry. Jetskis rip through dolphin-filled waters under a ghostly green light as Rafael Anton Irisarri’s soundtrack builds pressure. “I got lost in it,” said Khalid, fresh from presenting the Art Basel Award for Best New Artist the night before. “It felt really immersive. I just stopped, and it was like no one was around me. I really took it in, and it felt very visceral, very beautiful.”
Elsewhere, Gabriel Moses showed a tight image pulled from his music video “Chains & Whips,” Clipse and Kendrick Lamar’s meditation on luxury, power, and their moral cost. “We’d done these slit scans, because I like the concept of stretching images and stretching people's faces, like an image wrapped around so you see the whole of a human being in one frame,” Moses said.
Puerto Rican painter Angel Otero contributed The Sea, a large-scale work of a lone black piano staying afloat amid violent waves. “I like how beautiful the artwork is,” said Vientos. “I could see that there's a deeper meaning with that painting.”
Devon Turnbull installed his sculptural OJAS speakers in partnership with sound system designers NNNN, flanking The Replay Gallery’s stage. “These speakers are part of a series of pro audio speakers that we build regularly for high-end nightclubs and live music, as well as listening,” Turnbull said.
Sara Sadik showed La Potion (EH) (2023), a single-channel video narrated by a gamer testing a new avatar — voiced by Sadik’s husband — that plays like a digital inner monologue about emotions as one plays, accompanied by an inflated snake-like seating element named from a line in Ninho’s “OG.” “I really want to bring some French culture to these countries,” said Sadik. “I really just want people to be curious about the title, typing it, seeing what it is, listening to it, to give some curiosity.”
The next day, The Replay Gallery opened to the public for three talks. Turnbull opened with Listening Closely, a deep look into the tracks that shaped his evolution from fashion designer to sonic artist. “I'm the guy who, [when people ask], What kind of music do you listen to? I say, Everything,” Turnbull said in conversation with Highsnobiety branded content editor Jason Meggyesy, tracing influences from the Abbey Road master tape medley to Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres” with Keith Jarrett, and Nala Sinephro’s “Space 2.”
Later, Sadik joined Highsnobiety deputy editor Claire Landsbaum for Symphotic Interiors, discussing her practice and working with youth from France’s North African diaspora, known as Maghrebi. “My work is about vulnerability, their life experiences, their emotions,” Sadik told the audience. “They are super vulnerable during the process within the video, and when the video is shown in the show, like super vulnerable. So I really take care of having them be super comfortable with everything.”
The final talk, I See A New World, paired Moses with Highsnobiety fashion director Sebastian Jean for a conversation about his career and making his work accessible beyond the room. “There's a million people that aren't going to come out tonight,” Moses said. “There's a kid in Nigeria that needs to feel that work, and I feel like that's the only way the work and what I'm trying to say can be communicated in a way that's accessible.”
At 7pm, the gallery went dark, the lights reset, and the room transformed into a dance floor for the closing party. The line stretched around the block. Inside, the crowd closed out the week with music progeny Julez Smith and Selah Marley, models Mazzy Joya and Indira Scott, and TikTok personality Jay Guapõ. France’s next wave — the multidisciplinary artist and DJ Crystallmess — opened with tracks like Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” before cutting into the extended remix of Ready for the World’s “Love You Down.” The crowd lost it to Playboii Sony’s “Tou Chaje,” then bounced in unison to every bar of Waka Flocka Flame’s “No Hands.”
Then the icon took over: Detroit’s Kenny Dixon Jr., known as Moodymann. “Whaddupdoe,” he said, greeting the crowd with Detroit’s signature welcome, before taking them on a journey through music history — James Brown’s “I’m Satisfied,” The Beatles’ “Come Together”, Kelis’s “Millionaire,” Patrice Rushen’s “Haven’t You Heard,” before closing the night with Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” “Don’t you ever let nobody tell you who the f*ck you are, because ain’t nobody in that mirror but you,” he preached to the crowd in the middle of his set. “And if you ever want to see one of the baddest motherf*ckers on the planet, just look in the mirror.”
Two days, eight artists, three talks, and one dancefloor — The Replay Gallery turned the year in music into an environment that thought, moved, and breathed, inviting visitors to reflect on their own identity through the work that moved them and the sounds that defined their year.
