MIT Press has published Gregory Sholette's new study 'The Radical Unpresent: Cultural Resistance in a Fractured World', released on 20 October 2026. The book examines how contemporary artists and activists are responding to a moment in which the experience of time itself feels profoundly disturbed, and proposes that creative practice can push back against that dislocation.

The argument builds on Sholette's earlier idea of the art world's 'dark matter': the vast, often unseen mass of creative activity that never reaches the spotlight. Where that earlier work mapped hidden productivity in space, the new book moves into time. Sholette names the current condition the 'unpresent', a state in which things look unchanged on the surface yet have been transformed underneath, leaving neither a usable past nor a clear future.

He traces this unsettled temporality through a sequence of shocks: Britain's Brexit vote, Donald Trump's first election victory, the COVID pandemic, the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and the return of MAGA politics in 2025. In his reading, MAGA is not simply a step backwards but a new kind of 'retro-vanguard', a movement that tries to escape the present by manufacturing an imagined past. Against that, he sets what he calls a 'phantom archive': a surplus store of activist methods, unrealised possibilities and ghostly histories that artists tap into by fixing, reusing and restaging.

The examples range from Dread Scott's reenactment of a slave rebellion to protest art from Belarus, alongside Michael Rakowitz's reconstruction of a looted Assyrian artefact and Zoe Beloff's restaging of a Brecht play in Zuccotti Park. Launch events follow in New York on 5 November and in London on 3 December, where Sholette will discuss the book with fellow writers and artists.