This essay was written for a book on Anupam Roy’s 2025 exhibition …ing: Sceneries without Sovereignty, Project 88 in Delhi, India.
I fell in love with Anupam’s work because it isn’t “what it is,” it's something more. Anupam’s work is like slip healing fragments of broken clay.
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Because Ed Sheeran doesn’t exist. Not really. He may have at one point, but the avatar that cried onstage in Philadelphia and wants you to cry for him isn’t, in the end, a human with their own wants and needs, separate from the system he’s spent so much effort ingratiating himself to. Make enough decisions that fail to mark where you stand in relation to history, and you eventually vanish completely. Incapable of love, of fairness, of courage or even a modicum of individuality. Just another piece of flotsam aimlessly drifting through the tepid flow of capital.
Read MoreWe have held up both utopia and dystopia as symbols of alterity, to express this, often keeping them at not such a great distance from each other. The Communist Manifesto, for example, is utopian or dystopian depending on how you understand the dialectic of things such as abolition of private property. In a world ruled by the maxim ‘There is No Alternative,’ the first attraction of dystopia is it shows there quite obviously is….
Read MoreImage incorporates an original artwork by Tish and Adam Turl, Born Again Labor Tract 51: No Words are Good Enough for the Martyrs (2026)
The twin determinist-fatalisms of Social Democracy and Stalinism, and consequently the crisis and collapse of these two trends and the mass parties they led, have relegated discourse over the shape of the future to the halls of economic abstraction — to a grand numbers game a dedicated cadre of critics and political economists conduct in perpetuity. The wider movement, meanwhile, either cheerleads all perceived sites of resistance to the main imperialist power, or limits the political horizon to immediate economic and democratic demands, with socialism relegated to a gesture of intent.
Read MoreImage incorporates a glitched version of an original artwork by Laura Fair-Schulz, Gaslit: Fires and Flutters.
Our forebears said evil is banal, but still we were unprepared for the crushing weight of the everyday as it unfolds parallel to the shifting tectonic plates of history pursuing the darkest timeline. Politicians gather (like generals… in their masses) and pull levers that threaten to shift ethical poles and move continental thought patterns, leaving collateral damage in all four corners. A future army is set on the march. It might be made up of drones. It will be comprised of killers... Back home your son wants a particular dish, cooked in some specific way. The drains are blocked, in some anomalous way. The algorithms of war pump more data. The real estate magnate botches another sales pitch. It doesn’t matter — he’s not selling anyhow. He’s stealing. Meanwhile, you’ve got a lesson to teach, a bill to pay, a podcast to record, a meme to post, a pizza to cook… all as global techno fascism comes rolling in.
Read MoreDon’t worry. / Don’t hesitate. / You are good. / You are righteous. / And righteous goodness / can never be cruel.
Read MoreOne day I woke up / and somebody called me “elder,” / and I almost checked my pulse. / Then I remembered— / queer years run on dog-time.
Read MoreWhither the Burgerkrieg auf Normal Island? The UK economy is at near perfect standstill. The state is busy hammering the repression button, the only thing it knows works… and it’s not so sure it works.
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Read MoreIt was four years since the attempted self-immolation by my body. Three years since my body was named The Idiot. Two years since The Idiot had any contact with sister, mother or father. A year and a half since The Idiot’s prayers had been answered. In the wrong way.
Read MoreThe people who became us lived under oaks. / In the canopy two rat snakes were in love, / spending their days in a warm caduceus.
Read MoreTish Turl and Adam Turl, Born Again Labor Tract 49: The Strong Images Flew Away - mixed-media collage and painting, digital prints, marker, ink, wig hair, graphite, Post-It notes, coffee, glitter, stickers, cotton and ash on salvaged "thrift store painting" (2026)
Don’t bury your images in the yard. / You’re supposed to starve the faeries, / mow down grave mushrooms, / take off your Scotch bonnet and / burn your scalp with moonlight.
Read MoreTHE BOREDOM Artist was set to retire. He would give one more performance. London’s Festival Hall was sold out as a result. Last chance to see. One-thousand seven-hundred and ten people, people who liked and appreciated what he did, would go with Dave to a place he had never gone before, though midnight, past the hour-mark. A clock behind them counted down.
Read MoreIf you held to your guns you’d still have guns. / Mean like Lenin without the mean, wrap / yourself in Jacobin bylines like a letter jacket, / forget the golden rules.
Read MoreMainstream right wing politicians have been experimenting with summoning their fascist golems. Suella Braverman who, in November 2023, was Home Secretary, after being frustrated at being unable to prohibit a peace march in London on the same weekend as Armistice Day, suggested that ceremonies at the Cenotaph on Whitehall were under threat from “hate marchers” displaying “thuggish intimidation and extremism.” The far right took this, fairly obvious, cue and descended on Whitehall, drunk and high. With no one to fight, they first fought the cops, then each other. Plus la change. Braverman largely blamed the police for this debacle. By December 2023, she was a back bench MP.
Read More“Who are… Do I know you…?” Jake was puzzled. The voice came from a woman, tall, olive skin with dark, greying curly hair. She was standing just inside the street light, on the corner of the alleyway, leading from the High Street to Dyvenor Road. After a moment of figuring this out Jake realised she was holding him, gently but firmly by the shoulder. “What do you want…?”
Read MoreYou’ve been hiding in the closet / of the abandoned K-Mart. / You’ve become a pastor to pigeons
nestled in trusses and rafters. / They coo to your sermons of / plentiful seed and a multiverse of millet.
Tish Turl and Adam Turl, Born Again Labor Tract 45: You Grew Up in a Forest - mixed-media collage and painting, digital prints, acrylic, marker, ink, coffee, post-it notes, stickers, wig hair, glitter, cotton and ash on stretched canvas, 60 x 48 inches (2025)
1. The first thing you smell when you hit Main Street is: A. Burnt oil and fryer smoke. B. The ghost of the factory, coughing in the dust. C. Your own nerves. D. All of the above.
Read MoreDigital technology appears as naturally artificial when it is actually shaped by political economy and intensive ideological encoding. It appears as a phantasmagorical being — a neutral cloud of invention floating above everyday life.1 In actuality it is a product of social life, including its privations, exploitations, and oppressions — and it reinforces or undermines those aspects of life, usually for financial and political reasons.
Read MoreThe socialist politics of art is, in part, centering both the rational and ineffable aspects of being on the actuality of a living revolutionary subject; the working-class both as it is, and as it could be. This includes the aspects of life that resist categorization, mapping, utility and rationality. Accepting this is not a concession to superstition. It is placing a working-class claim on all that it is to be human.
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