A recording of the "What We May Also Do" written by Oliver Bennett in response to Anna Sebastian's exhibition of the same title. Staged at Verdurin in July 2024.

A woman approaches the gate of a walled city. Her admission depends on the depth of her moral liberation and embrace of boundless self-determination. A border guard assesses her character for its fit with the city’s society. In a series of interrogations, a charged relationship develops between the supplicant and her assessor. The process ultimately tests their belief in the system.

Bennett’s play develops a theatrical language that responds to Sebastian’s work and engages with the psychoanalytic ‘Gloria’ films which also inspire the paintings. It challenges contemporary attitudes to sex, religion, and power by exposing liberal values upheld by flawed individuals.

Written and directed by Oliver Bennett

Performed by Oliver Bennett and Kristin Milward

Verdurin - exhibitions, events, store

Information about the play and cast

Anna Sebastian's exhibition at Verdurin

Recording: Cameron Lee and Aimee Armstrong

Who do you turn to at the brink of the apocalypse? What might help us to mitigate the financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural collapse for which we may be heading? 

Museums and Societal Collapse proposes an unlikely hero in this narrative. Robert Janes’ text explores the implications of societal collapse from a multidisciplinary perspective and considers the potential museums have to contribute to the reimagining and transitioning of a new society with the threat of collapse.

Arguing that societal collapse is underway, but that total collapse is not inevitable, Janes maintains that museums are well-positioned to mitigate and adapt to the disruptions of societal collapse. As institutions of the commons, belonging to and affecting the public at large, he contends that museums are both responsible and capable of contributing to the durability and well-being of individuals, families, and communities, and enhancing societal resilience in the face of critical issues confronting our species.

• The Museum COP at Tate
• Museum pressure groups: The Empathetic Museum, Museum as Progress, Museum Human.
• The Australian Museum’s mission statement
• Phipps Conservatory, Pittsburgh
• Museum of Homelessness
• Horniman Museum

Robert R. Janes is an independent scholar whose work draws on his many year’s experience as a museum director. He is the editor emeritus of the Museum Management and Curatoriship journal, a visiting scholar at the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, and the founder of the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice. He is the author of multiple books on the social role of museums.

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Museums and Societal Collapse
The Museum as LifeboatRobert R. Janes

Published by Routledge, 2023
ISBN 9781003344070

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Artists Remake the World puts forward an account of contemporary art’s political ambitions and potential. Surveying such innovations as evidence-driven art, socially engaged art, and ecological art, the book explores how artists have attempted to offer bold solutions to the world’s problems.

Simoniti systematises the perspectives of contemporary art as a force for political and social change. At its best, he argues, contemporary art allows us to imagine utopias and presents us with hard truths, which mainstream political discourse cannot yet articulate. Covering subjects such as climate change, social justice, and global inequality, Artists Remake the World offers a philosophy of contemporary art as an experimental branch of politics.

Vid Simoniti is a Lecturer in Philosophy of Art at the University of Liverpool. He is the co-editor, with James Fox, of Art and knowledge after 1900.

• Ryan Trecartin, P.opular S.ky (section ish), 2009
• My conversation with Fuller and Weizman on Forensic Architecture and Investigative Aesthetics

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Artists Remake the World
A Contemporary Art ManifestoVid Simoniti

Published by Yale University Press, 2023
ISBN 9780300266290

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American democracy is in crisis. The economic system is slowly subjecting Americans of nearly all income levels and backgrounds to enormous amounts of stress. The United States lacks the state capacity required to alleviate this stress, and politicians increasingly find that if they promise to solve economic problems, they are likely to disappoint voters. Instead, they encourage voters to blame each other. 

The crisis cannot be solved, the economy cannot be set right, and democracy cannot be saved. But American democracy cannot be killed, either. Americans can’t imagine any compelling alternative political systems. And so, American democracy continues on, in a deeply unsatisfying way. Americans invent ever-more elaborate coping mechanisms in a desperate bid to go on. But it becomes increasingly clear that the way is shut. The American political system was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it.

Benjamin Studebaker speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the runaway effects of globalisation, the false hope industry, cultural non-politics, and the very unlikely get-out scenarios. 

Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist whose work focuses on notions of legitimacy. He hosts the podcasts Political Theory 101.

• The equality/equity meme
• The 1619 Project
• No Labels, the ‘commonsense majority’ party

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The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy
Benjamin StudebakerThe Way is Shut

Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2023
ISBN 9783031282096

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Then let the story really begin in 1968, though it has little to do with May. By chance it opens in January of that year, and it really concerns me rather than the world of political events, though these are always on my mind, as they were always on my mind. 

Future Imperfect, Adrian Rifkin’s short Bildungsroman sets beside each other the fault lines of events and moments recalled without a diary with the verification and sometimes undermining effects of new research of materials, the recovery of what was known, what might have been known, and what was merely probable, as if this were a history of the history of art.

Adrian Rifkin speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the uses of radical pedagogy, dreams, art history, and the economy of memory. Wagner and the Teletubbies also feature.

• Adrain’s performance Hypotheses and Loving Contradictions at Haus der Kunst, 2017
• The White Pube 🎨🖌️🐀
• Jeffrey Steele
• Robert Motherwell
• Artangel
• Afterall
• Allan Sekula’s Fish Story
• Elizabeth Price
• Anne Tallentire
• Hanne Darboven
• Hans Eysenck

Adrian Rifkin is a writer and art historian engaged in contemporary art, film, classical and popular music, canonical and mass imagery, literature and pornography. Until recently he was Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths. He is the author of Street Noises: Studies in Parisian Pleasure, 1900-40, and Ingres Then, and Now. His collected essays appeared as Communards and Other Cultural Histories and his work was the subject of the anthology Inter-disciplinary Encounters.

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Future Imperfect, The Past Between My Fingers

Adrian Rifkin

Published by Ma Bibliothèque, 2022
ISBN 9781910055885

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On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the flames engulfed the museum’s castle. Rare objects and valuable paintings were destroyed. The flames at the Smithsonian were not the first—and certainly would not be the last— disaster to upend a museum in the United States. Beset by challenges ranging from pandemic and war to fire and economic uncertainty, museums have sought ways to emerge from crisis periods stronger than before, occasionally carving important new paths forward in the process.

The Museum explores the concepts of the multiple “crises” of the museums, and these historic institutions attempts to dealt with challenges ranging from depression and war to pandemic and philosophical uncertainty. 

Samuel J. Redman speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the fires, floods, wars, and existential crises that have redefined what museums do and how they think of themselves and their public, asking challenging questions about American cultural life. Not deterred by these institutions' tendency to forgot their even recent past, Redman argues that cultural institutions can, and should, use their history to construe their future identity.

Samuel J. Redman is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums and Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology.

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The Museum
A Short History of Crisis and Resilience

Samuel J. Redman

Published by NYU Press, 2022
ISBN 9781479809332

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On the centenary of the fascist party's ascent to power in Italy, Curating Fascism examines the ways in which exhibitions organised after the fall of Mussolini's regime to the present day have shaped collective memory, historical narratives, and political discourse around the Italian ventennio. It charts how shows on fascism have evolved since the postwar period in Italy, explores representations of Italian fascism in exhibitions across the world, and highlights blindspots in art and cultural history, as well as in exhibition practices. 

Curating Fascism treats fascism as both a historical moment and a major paradigm through which critics, curators, and the public at large have defined the present moment. It interweaves historical perspectives, critical theory, and direct accounts of exhibitions from the people who conceived them or responded to them most significantly in order to examine the main curatorial strategies, cultural relevance, and political responsibility of art exhibitions focusing on the Fascist period. 

Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida speak to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the role which post-war exhibitions played in shaping our understandings of Italian Modernist art's relationship with Fascism, their contested curatorial and art historical strategies, and the continuing difficulty of reading political signs in aesthetics. 

• Post Zang Tumb Tuuum at Fondazione Prada
• Maaza Mengiste's Project 3541

Sharon Hecker is an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary Italian art. She is the author of A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture, and co-editor of Postwar Italian Art History: Untying the Knot  and Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art . For her work on Italian art, Hecker has received fellowships from the Getty, Fulbright, and Mellon Foundations.

Raffaele Bedarida is Associate Professor of Art History at Cooper Union, USA. An art historian specializing in transnational modernism and politics, Bedarida focuses on cultural diplomacy, migration, and cultural exchange between Italy and the United States. He is the author of Corrado Cagli: La pittura, l’esilio, L’America and Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States from Futurism to Arte Povera. Bedarida has received fellowships from the Center for Italian Modern Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art

On 'fascism' in contemporary art: Larne Abse Gogarty. ‘The Art Right’. Art Monthly, April 2017. Read and weep.

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Curating Fascism
Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to TodayEdited by Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida

Published by Bloomsbury, 2022
ISBN 9781350229457

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In Uncommon Sense, Craig Leonard argues for the contemporary relevance of the aesthetic theory of Herbert Marcuse, an original member of the Frankfurt School and icon of the New Left, while also acknowledging his philosophical limits. This account reinvigorates Marcuse for contemporary readers, putting his aesthetic theory into dialogue with anti-capitalist activism.

Craig Leonard speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about anti-art, habit, the practice of defamiliarisation, a subversion of common sense. Leonard brings forward Marcuse’s claim that the aesthetic dimension is political because of its refusal to operate according to the repressive common sense that establishes and maintains relationships dictated by advanced capitalism.

Craig Leonard‘s research and teaching interests include artist publications, sound art, performance and sculpture. His recent exhibitions include Central Art Garage (Ottawa), Darling Green (New York) and Double Happiness (Toronto). He is associate professor of art at NSCAD.

Uncommon Sense
Aesthetics After MarcuseCraig Leonard

Published by MIT Press, 2022
ISBN 9780262371681

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