Hadley Howes

How is abolitionist poetics changing everything, everything? Hadley is a QT white settler whose research focuses on civic monument and art in so-called “public” spaces as sites of shifting relations, concepts of subjectivity, and forms of co-memory. How have the colonial aesthetics of commemoration served to shape the city, the polis, and political subjects? What are the abolitionist practices that transform these shapes? Hadley’s interest in monument and public art comes from their professional experience creating art in public space, having worked on a number of “permanent” artworks in urban centres over the past seven years. They made the shift to public practice after exhibiting and performing in galleries and temporary sites including the 4th Marrakech Biennale, the 19th Biennale of Sydney, Seattle Art Museum, Kunstwerke Berlin, Witte de With Rotterdam, and the National Gallery of Canada. After years of complicity with white European art traditions and hierarchies, Hadley is reorienting toward abolition and refusal. At the heart of their practice is an interest in undoing the fantasy of the self-possessed, sovereign and propertied individual as the (white supremacist) central agent of western aesthetics.