Mayfair Marxist Manifesto

“We have principles, and if you don’t like them… we have others.”

Recycled cast-iron Victorian bench, wax and wood.120 × 50 × 70 cm.

Mayfair Marxist Manifesto reimagines a discarded Victorian cast-iron bench—an object historically associated with the public spaces of Britain's wealth and civic order—as a translucent wax sculpture that glows from within. Preserving its familiar form while fundamentally altering its material nature, the work transforms a symbol of permanence into one of fragility, memory and contradiction.

Engraved into the luminous wax seat is a variation of the famous quip attributed to the Marx Brothers: “We have principles, and if you don't like them… we have others.” Humorous and unsettling in equal measure, the phrase reflects the ideological flexibility that increasingly characterises contemporary political life. Convictions are performed, discarded and reinvented with remarkable speed, while public discourse becomes ever more polarised.

The work emerged from a broader investigation into repetition and conversations surrounding rage, conformity and the erosion of dialogue. Today we inhabit a world saturated with information yet increasingly shaped by algorithmic certainty rather than genuine exchange. As digital communication replaces embodied conversation, nuance gives way to reaction, and complexity is flattened into competing certainties. Rage has become not only a political emotion but also a political technology—mobilised across the ideological spectrum to consolidate identities, manufacture division and weaken the possibility of shared understanding.

Throughout her practice, Laura Dzelzytė remakes culturally significant objects in wax, using the material's paradoxical qualities to question how meaning is constructed and preserved. Wax faithfully records every detail while remaining inherently unstable: capable of melting, cracking and reforming. By remaking historical artefacts in this vulnerable material, she exposes the instability of the social, political and cultural systems they once appeared to embody.

Rather than offering a manifesto, Mayfair Marxist Manifesto proposes a place to pause. A bench traditionally invites rest and conversation. Here it becomes an invitation to consider whether, in an age of ideological performance and perpetual outrage, dialogue itself has become the most radical act. It was exhibited for the first time in January 2026 at Hockney Gallery, The Royal College of Art, London, and subsequently at Koppel Projects, London in June 2026.