Is this R.I.P. Germain’s most chilling show yet?

As exceptionally private artists go, R.I.P. Germain is exceptionally private. Neither his birth name nor his alma mater are public knowledge. All we know is that he’s from Luton, a town he ascribes his ​“anti” nature to, and that he now lives between London and Los Angeles (probably, anyway).

It’s a Thursday afternoon when we join him at South London’s Cabinet gallery, hours before the opening of his new exhibition, Anti-Blackness Is Bad, Even The Parts That We Like.

The artist is polite and cheerful yet capable of switching into impassioned talk around his work’s main themes: clandestine worlds, British Blackness, class. Today, he’s wearing a saffron-coloured Nike hoodie, duck camo trousers and Air Max 1s, while his hair is shaved and he sports a neat beard. He’d prefer to keep details about himself sparse.

Although one of the most astute antagonists to come out of the UK in the last decade, R.I.P. Germain admits he ​“binned off” art for eight years after graduating from an undisclosed university in London. ​“Being young, Black and at art school – it’s fucking shit,” he says.

In fact, he only returned thanks to the encouragement of Marilyn Thompson, the founder and curator of a now-defunct project space that ran in Elephant and Castle shopping centre, Peak. As he explains, Marilyn, who is now his partner, bullied him back into the industry, giving him both a show and a kick up the arse. Looking back at the preceding years, he feels he would have been better off going to university in his late twenties: ​“It’s just one of them things now where I advise, say, my nephews or younger cousins, [to] let uni arrive to you. You don’t arrive to uni.”

In previous exhibitions, such as 2023’s ICA show Jesus Died For Us, We Will Die For Dudus!, R.I.P. Germain has crafted large scale installations, recreating criminal fronts or underworld meeting points: British cannabis caffs, hazy UV grow rooms, trap houses operating as clothing boutiques, all specced out with IYKYK details.

This new show, however, is unexpectedly minimal. Entering Anti-Blackness… is to face only a prison door, laid flat in the middle of the room, perspex windows revealing flashing police lights below.

Downstairs, inside a basement that’s been sterilised with disinfectant and had its temperature set to five degrees celsius – the standard in British morgues – a police escort van is turned on its side, mimicking a coffin.

The artist explains the installation is based on Ghanaian casket making, for which designs are personalised and arrive in the shape whatever the deceased held dear – that could be a plane, a fish, a shoe.

Audience members are encouraged to lay down on the coffin’s seatbelt-equipped bed, have the lid closed, and view 101 hour psycho (2024 – 2025): 101 hours’ worth of UK drill-related footage that R.I.P. has been screen-recording and downloading onto hard drives since 2018.

Among the footage – which includes music videos by Newham’s S13 CGE (Chadd Green Estate), OFB (Original Farm Boys), Harlem Spartans, 67 and 410 – are news segments, interviews, pictures, documentaries and prison Snapchat videos, as well as footage of jailbreaks, bank robberies and murders.

“One of the Snapchat feeds is of a kid that gets kidnapped, stripped naked, taken to a forest and beaten,” he says. ​“There’s one video of a woman being slashed in the face. There’s footage of a guy being stripped naked outside a nightclub and beaten to the point where he starts convulsing.”

R.I.P. Germain points to these incidents as some of the more gruesome consequences of the UK drill scene. Having witnessed its predecessor, grime, blossom in the ​’00s, R.I.P. Germain is keenly aware of how the celebration of a genre can fail to address the actual lives of the human beings involved – something the 42 rapper mugshots he collaged for the show’s poster highlights.

“Don’t people actually want these people to become functioning members of society?” he says, noting that the depicted musicians’ sentences amount to 663 years and eight months – an entire genre incarcerated. ​“I mean, they’re definitely not lazy.”

It’s an addressing of the good, the bad and the ugly that is consistent with R.I.P. Germain’s broader work. Take, for example, his recent, gun-wielding ghoul, What Does A 🧢 A 🏆 And A 🎣🥣 Have In Common? (2025), which showed as part of Rose Easton and Ginny on Frederick’s group exhibition, Yay, to have a mouth. Or works such as the Tyson series (2018), a set of UK drill karaoke videos that viewers can sing along to while accompanying visuals depict the lyrical content. Both refuse to hide the horrifying aspects of the scenes they also venerate.

Anti-Blackness… unfurls with similar effect. If anything, it’s R.I.P.’s most chilling show because of how refreshingly direct it is.

“I don’t see myself as an arbiter of knowledge or morals or standards. I’m making a body of work that I want people to look at and engage with in an intellectually sincere way,” he says, noting that some people will struggle with how visceral the work is. ​“If there are parts of it that you can’t have, that’s fine. At least then I know you’re emotionally engaged.”

R.I.P. Germain’s Anti-Blackness Is Bad, Even The Parts That We Like is at South London’s Cabinet gallery until 10^th May.