“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.” — Herbert Marcuse

Rhi Stanton is an artist and maker, born in Bow, East London, in the 1980s. Her practice is shaped by class, labour, and memory by what’s been handed down, and what’s been left behind. She works with found objects, rope, nails, scraps, paper, and traces. Things are already marked. Already touched.

Her work emerges from a Marxist understanding of power and asks how progressive art might hold space for others not in the abstract, but in the human, daily, insistent way that people who have been denied space know how to do. She is interested in what remains of the Chthulucene, the offcuts, the scraps and what that means for you and I. Not to mourn, but to rework them into gestures of care, love and rage.

There’s hope here, but not the soft kind. Radical hope, hard-won and deliberately chosen. The kind that sits beside radical kindness, which is not sentiment, but refusal: a refusal to let cruelty be the currency of survival.

In the words of Immortal Technique, not for their violence, but for their clarity of desire:

[Kutipan panjang tidak disertakan.]

This, too, is an ethics. A politics. A poetics.