Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism

Unbound Zine: Xiaomei Going Overseas is a 30-minute surreal drag performance mixed with field trip recordings of East and Southeast Asian queer self-publishing heroes.

Screened at LADA at Live Art Bookshop x Queer and Feminist Zine Spirits Across Borders on Saturday 13 Dec 2025.

Three short documentaries observe the creative process of Hooligan Art Community (founded in Kyiv in 2019) as the theatre company deals with relocation due to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Spanning the period May 2022 to October 2024, the films represent three distinct stages in the artists’ experience of displacement.

The three documentaries in this collection were made by Liubov Sliusareva (from Donetsk) who joined Hooligan Art Community in 2020 as filmmaker and art director. The films were produced by Peter Cant, co-founder and artistic director of Hooligan Art Community. Cant, an artist and theatre-maker from the UK is based in Berlin. He began working in Ukraine in 2016.

Video documentation of an interactive talk from artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Symoné. It explored agency and spectatorship in the intersections between live art and gaming.

The Hologram is a feminist health militia that produces networks where we can practice skills like trust, communication, and cooperation that will help us outlast capitalism.

Research Highlights: Documenting and understanding experiences of backlash currently being received against LGBTQIA+ cultural programming and/or creatives in the UK’s cultural sector from 2020-2025.

Sabrina Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals–where fat bodies were once praised–showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority.
Fearing the Black Body argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. An important and original work, it reveals that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

Sonia Boyce (b.1962) is a groundbreaking artist whose practice is founded on taking creative risks. Unafraid to play against set expectations about how art should behave, her collaborative interactions between audience and performer enable spontaneous and intimate social encounters, resulting in the creation of work that is simultaneously self-aware, visceral and open-ended.

This book is a much-anticipated introduction to the life and work of this extraordinary artist. Touching on her engagement with the work of other feminist artists and her time as a leading figure in the 1980s Black British Art movement, it contextualizes Boyce’s journey from her early pastel drawings and collages to her pivotal shift to film, sound, and performance art. Highlighting her artistic innovation as she experiments with medium to explore and question culture, identity and the boundaries between the public and private spheres in unexpected ways, it celebrates the visionary practice of a truly uncompromising artist.

What is performance? 31 performative programs to confuse the question.

Both in English and Spanish.

The Bolivian scholar and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a pre-eminent Latin American intellectual, world renowned for her work in postcolonial and subaltern studies.  She has long maintained that we must acknowledge how colonial structures of domination continue to affect indigenous identities and cultures. Even in contexts where diversity and the value of indigenous cultures have been officially recognized, “internal colonialism” operates as a structure that shapes mental categories and social practices.

This book considers this persistent colonial structure by examining artistic and popular practices of apprehending and resisting it, arguing that in Andean cultures there is a sustained practice of insubordinate image production and use. Combining this visual history with other instances of political resistance, the book offers an alternative narrative to the history of Latin American decolonisation.  This narrative challenges the common conception that mestizaje (race-mixing) and hybridity are liberatory formations, offering instead a new theorisation of the complex racial configurations produced by colonialism and its afterlives.

Given Rivera Cusicanqui’s vital contribution to critical epistemologies, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences and to everyone concerned with the key questions of critical theory today.

What do cinematic “universes,” cloud archiving, and voice cloning have in common? They’re in the business of foreverizing – the process of revitalizing things that have degraded, failed, or disappeared so that they can remain active in the present. To foreverize something is to reanimate it, to enclose and protect it from time and the elements, and to eradicate the feeling of nostalgia that accompanies loss. Foreverizing is a bulwark against instability, but it isn’t an infallible enterprise. That which is promised to last forever often does not, and that which is disposed of can sometimes last, disturbingly, forever.

In this groundbreaking book, American philosopher Grafton Tanner develops his theory of foreverism: an anti-nostalgic discourse that promises growth without change and life without loss. Engaging with pressing issues from the ecological impact of data storage to the rise of reboot culture, Tanner tracks the implications of a society averse to nostalgia and reveals the new weapons we have for eliminating it.

The global crisis of our time involves a complex of ecological, economic, technological and migratory challenges that no state is able to control. The result is a provincialisation of our democracies with respect to the new planetary powers confronting humanity. It is from this that our increasingly impotent and rabid politics stems.  Paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely the decline of the nation-state that is the source of the great nationalist uprising of our time.

We need a new planetary vision that is able to reclaim and liberate our world, starting today and engaging each of us. This is the task of philosophy as much as it is of politics, of theory as it is of activism. Connecting with a new generation taking to the streets across the globe, this book tells the story of the ever-closer union of our world, from the age of empire to the climate crisis, and presents a plea and a roadmap to step beyond the mental and material boundaries of our nations.

Against Interpretation is a selection from Susan Sontag’s early writings about the arts and contemporary culture. The book quickly became a modern classic and has had enormous influence here and abroad. As well as the title essay, ‘On Style”, and the famous ‘Notes on Camp’, the book includes discussions from such figures as Sartre, Simone Weil, Georg Lukács, Lévi-Strauss, Artaud, Genet, Brecht, Beckett, Bresson and Godard.