Thief in the Night

Bill Posters – ‘Thief in the Night’

Installation in Chesshyre Avenue Council Estate, Manchester – Plywood, paper, spraypaint on wooden stand.

“The multinational financial institutions and banks, the hedge funds and derivatives markets paid no price – by criminal conviction or financial regulation, for their greed that caused the current financial crisis that is effecting all UK citizens. The recession is worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, through no fault of the vast majority of the British public. It appears that we are collectively suffering from ‘intellectual capture’ – as we continue to identify with and and even defend the oppressors that are systematically destroying the remnants of our civilised society. It is the economic manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome.

We reward international banks, institutions and financial markets with bail outs and massive tax breaks via financial hubs like the City of London, whilst they hold a gun to the heads of society and threaten our future if we do not follow them as they continue to try and salvage their Neoliberal project.

For decades we have identified with the values of our captors, for our culture has been hijacked by consumerism and we are sympathetic. Our captors allow us debt via credit, loans, and mortgages to obtain the types of lifestyles and carefully packaged visions of success that perpetuate and reinforce our faith in their oppression. It is the same for governments as it is for us individually. When we adopt the same values as the aggressor, they no longer become a threat and we legitimise their actions. We concede. By normalising the extrinsic values that they promote, we sacrifice our ability and liberty to imagine and create truly democratic and representational alternatives to the Kleptocracy that is our reality. As a result, the recent words of George Osbourne become our reality – we are all in it together. A collective hallucination that this is the only way.

Our current economic reality is a system that sees us ruled by the wealthy through extraction and enclosure. The government and the financial markets they legitimise, are thieves, plain and simple.” – Statement from the artist, Bill Posters

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.