Join us for an evening with Gregory Sholette in conversation with Dr. Kim Charnley to celebrate the launch of Sholette’s new publication: The Radical Unpresent – Cultural Resistance in a Fractured World.
The Radical Unpresent examines the disorienting contemporary moment in which our experience of time has become profoundly disrupted. Building on his earlier work on “dark matter” in the art world, Gregory Sholette introduces the concept of the unpresent—a condition in which everything appears the same yet is completely transformed, lacking both a past and a future.
The book traces the emergence of this uncanny temporal state through Brexit, Trump’s first election, and the COVID pandemic, culminating in the January 6 insurrection and the rise of MAGA 2.0 in 2025. Sholette analyzes how this temporal crisis manifests in both progressive and reactionary cultural responses, arguing that MAGA represents not simply regression but also a new kind of “retro-vanguard” that seeks to escape the unpresent by restoring an imagined past.
Sholette reveals the inner workings of a “phantom archive”—a surplus repository of activist practices, unrealized possibilities, and spectral histories that artists access through repair, repurposing, and reenactment. Through examples ranging from Dread Scott’s slave rebellion reenactment to contemporary Belarus protest art, he demonstrates how artists are creating temporal interventions that acknowledge historical wounds while opening pathways to alternative futures.
The Radical Unpresent is published by The MIT Press, 20 October 2026. Copies of the book will be available for purchase, generously supported by The Gilded Acorn Bookshop, London.
About the speakers
Gregory Sholette is Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York; he was a Co-Founder of the Mellon Foundation-funded project Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY), and previously was an associate of the Art, Design, and the Public Domain program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is the author of The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art, Delirium and Resistance, Art as Social Action (with Chloë Bass), and Dark Matter.
Dr. Kim Charnley is senior lecturer in Art History at the Open University in the UK, and author of Sociopolitical Aesthetics: Art, Crisis and Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury, 2021). He is an art theorist and art historian who researches contemporary art, especially socially engaged art, social practice, art activism and institutional critique. His work has focused especially on the way that collectivity functions as a way of working, and as an ideal, in art that aims at political action and social change.