The Radical Unpresent

This is the New York launch of the book The Radical Unpresent: Cultural Resistance in a Fractured World (MIT Press), taking the form of a conversation between its author, Gregory Sholette, and the artist and writer Naeem Mohaiemen. Sholette's book examines how artists navigate a collapse of historical time, tracing a rupture through Brexit, Trump, COVID, and the J6 Capitol attack, and arguing that MAGA acts as a "retro-vanguard" manufacturing its own imaginary past. Against this, he proposes the "phantom archive," in which artists resist through repair and reenactment, from Belarus protest art to Michael Rakowitz's reconstruction of a destroyed Assyrian artifact. Mohaiemen, whose work on excavating institutional memory is featured in the book, joins for an evening on memory, resistance, and what remains unfinished.