Time and Relative Dimensions in Curating

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.

Fungi Media positions performance art of bodily mutations as a form of corporeal philosophy. Examining ecologies of rot and fungal decomposition, it outlines a theory of fungosexuality beyond sexual reproduction and binary gender roles. This theoretical perspective repositions queer sexualities in the context of the original meaning of the term ‘queer’, which is ‘rot’ – and which stands for a fungi-induced process of decomposition. With this, Fungi Media explores the foundational importance of rot for both breaking down and sustaining bodies, relationships and life as such.
The project was developed in a squatted sewage space in London, adopted by the author as a laboratory for mutant performance. The space hosts Chronic Illness events, where Internet-inspired body artists enter an environment populated with fungi. The interventions of human performers are incorporated into the rotten physiology of the space, which itself becomes a live entity. This book involves those events in the analysis of connections between media technologies and primal life processes. It also offers strategies for urban dwelling which transcend normative family life.

Read more at Open Humanities Press– Fungi Media

Documents the work of fourteen performance artists who marked the personal and political resonances of the new Millennium in a series of site-specific actions. Contrasting with the epic, populist and homogenising nature of the official celebrations, these works focused on forgotten and ephemeral experiences, enacting small but significant interventions in the public sphere.

Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology-fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling.

Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies “worthy of defending” and those who who have been disarmed and rendered defenseless. That those subject to the most violence-the enslaved, the colonized, the oppressed-have been forcibly made defenseless raises, for any movement of liberation, a question: Can violence be used in the interests of self-defense?

Philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self-defense. With a historical gaze that captures slave revolts, British suffragists’ training in jujitsu, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Black Panther Party, queer neighborhood patrols, and Black Lives Matter, Dorlin discovers a “martial ethics of the self”: a practice in which violent self-defense is the only means for the oppressed to ensure survival and to build a livable future.

Translated from the French by Kieran Aarons.

Audio documentation of an evening considering durational performance art with Marilyn Arsem on Friday 18th April, 2025 at The Garrett Centre.

For this special event, Marilyn presented an artist talk reflecting on her body of work and sharing her research on performance art and time. Following the talk, there was a Q&A chaired by curator Joseph Morgan Schofield.

This event was part of CEREMONY: A Festival of Performance, presented by Future Ritual, in April, 2025.

This series of interviews, held by curator and writer Gilane Tawadros are focussed entirely on Stuart Brisley’s practice and directed by him. The artist’s narration of his practice demonstrates an unswerving resistance to controlling the narrative or fixing the meaning of his works.

A Way Away uses the mode of correspondence course to explore ideas around distance – spatial and temporal, physical and social, imagined and real.

Structural Violence seeks to redraw the conventional map of violence against women. In order to understand violence as a fundamentally heterogeneous phenomenon, it is essential to go beyond interpersonal partner violence and analyse the workings of institutional and structural violence.

The volume’s thirty pieces—which include poems, short essays, position papers, letters, and personal reflections—cover violence against women of color in its myriad forms, manifestations, and settings, while identifying the links between gender, militarism, reproductive and economic violence, prisons and policing, colonialism, and war.

Contributors. Dena Al-Adeeb, Patricia Allard, Lina Baroudi, Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), Critical Resistance, Sarah Deer, Eman Desouky, Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, Dana Erekat, Nirmala Erevelles, Sylvanna Falcón, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Emi Koyama, Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez, maina minahal, Nadine Naber, Stormy Ogden, Julia Chinyere Oparah, Beth Richie, Andrea J. Ritchie, Dorothy Roberts, Loretta J. Ross, s.r., Puneet Kaur Chawla Sahota, Renee Saucedo, Sista II Sista, Aishah Simmons, Andrea Smith, Neferti Tadiar, TransJustice, Haunani-Kay Trask, Traci C. West, Janelle White

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together.