Free, booking essential 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 open

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