With artist Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Rob Faure Walker (The Prevent Digest), Tarek Younis, Azfar Shafi (CAGE) and William Skeaping (Extinction Rebellion), Hassan Vawda, Lily Hall (The Showroom), Lillian Wilkie (Chateau International) and designer Mark Hurrell.

We are delighted to present TINA – There Is No Alternative, a new publication that builds upon the eponymous exhibition that took place at The Showroom between 5 June–17 July 2019; the first solo exhibition in the UK by artist Navine G. Khan-Dossos. There Is No Alternative took shape as a performative, durational installation combining live painting, a research archive and a series of workshops, talks, and events open to the public.

This publication, co-published by The Showroom and Chateau International, takes as a starting point Khan-Dossos’ ongoing research into the complex context of the UK government’s development of pre-crime and surveillance policies, in particular Prevent, questioning the politics of representation and the positioning of care that the strategies around those policies generate.

At the core of the project at The Showroom has been the act of questioning what an alternative to Prevent could look like, involving a shared process between Khan-Dossos and all those who became collaboratively involved. In this way, the work of the exhibition involved collaborative research, discussion, sharing knowledge and critical thinking between Khan-Dossos, The Showroom team, and those who became a part of the project: a democratic process which this publication now seeks to extend further.

Texts in the book include new essays by Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Rob Faure Walker and Lily Hall, with a foreword by Elvira Dyangani Ose, alongside contributing writers who have engaged in written dialogues, Sadia Habib, Hassan Vawda, Rachel Coldicutt, Tarek Younis, Shezana Hafiz and Azfar Shafi from advocacy organisation CAGE, and William Skeaping from Extinction Rebellion. A text by Alexander Massouras, revised from his exhibition review of There Is No Alternative for Art Monthly in 2019, is also included. The book is designed by Mark Hurrell.

The Launch event at Claire de Rouen on Saturday 16 October also presented the newly published The Emergence of 'Extremism': Exposing the Violent Discourse and Language of 'Radicalisation' (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Rob Faure Walker. Pre-sale copies were available on the day.

‘The idea that the expression of radical beliefs is a predictor to future acts of political violence has been a central tenet of counter-extremism over the last two decades. Not only has this imposed a duty upon doctors, lecturers and teachers to inform on the radical beliefs of their patients and students but, as this book argues, it is also a fundamentally flawed concept. Informed by his own experience with the UK’s Prevent programme while teaching in a Muslim community, Rob Faure Walker explores the linguistic emergence of ‘extremism’ in political discourse and the potentially damaging generative effect of this language.

Taking a new approach which combines critical discourse analysis with critical realism, this book shows how the fear of being labelled as an ‘extremist’ has resulted in counter-terrorism strategies which actually undermine moderating mechanisms in a democracy. Analysing the generative mechanisms by which the language of counter-extremism might actually promote violence, Faure Walker explains how understanding the potentially oppressive properties of language can help us transcend them. The result is an imminent critique of the most pernicious aspects of the global War on Terror, those that are embedded in our everyday language and political discourse. Drawing on the author’s own successful lobbying activities against counter-extremism, this book presents a model for how discourse analysis and critical realism can and should engage with the political and how this will affect meaningful change.’

– Rob Faure Walker