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Gregory Sholette, Time Against Itself: Cultural Resistance in the Radical UnpresentPlease note our new venue: Room 739, IOE, 20 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AL, United Kingdom
Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism named a condition in which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Gregory Sholette’s new book, The Radical Unpresent: Cultural Resistance in a Fractured World argues that this condition has since mutated into something even stranger: capitalist unrealism, or the Unpresent — a temporal inversion in which time itself is flipped inside out leaving the world and its institutions at once familiar and strangely transformed. MAGA (Make America Great Again) foregrounds a key symptom: as crystallized during the January 6th, 2021 Washington, DC insurrection we find a (retro)vanguard cultural movement that simultaneously thrives on the Unpresent’s broken temporality, even as it insists on restoring a past that never existed: American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and white, ethno-nationalist supremacy. Against this diagnosis, Sholette proposes the “phantom archive”: a surplus and fragmented repository of unrealized cultural endeavours, experiments, and hopes that contemporary artists access not by simple inheritance or restoration, but through conspicuous acts of repair, repurposing, and reenactment. The unfinished liberatory struggles of the past are made accessible for critical use as historical collaboration seeks to posit a future free of both nostalgia and historical determinism.
Dr. Gregory Sholette
Dr. Gregory Sholette is a New York–based artist, writer, activist, and alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Critical Theory and the Center for Advanced Study of Visual Art (CASVA) in Washington, DC. A co-founder of the collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D, 1980–1988); REPOhistory (1989–2000); and Gulf Labor Coalition (2010–ongoing), his research addresses collective cultural labor, socially engaged art, and historical representation. Sholette’s books include The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art (2022), Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (2017), and Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2010). He is an Emeritus Professor of the City University of New York (CUNY).
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UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way,London, United Kingdom
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