Description
TINA – There Is No Alternative is a new publication that builds upon the eponymous exhibition that took place at The Showroom between 5 June–17 July 2019; the first solo commission in the UK by artist Navine G. Dossos. This major new commission 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 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.
Texts in the book include new essays by Navine G. Dossos, Rob Faure Walker and Lily Hall alongside contributing writers who have engaged in written dialogues: Sadia Habib, Hassan Vawda, Rachel Coldicutt, Tarek Younis, Shezana Hafiz & 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.
At the core of the project at The Showroom was the act of questioning what an alternative to Prevent could look like, both visually and sociologically. Working with philosophical principles of image and space-building from the tradition of aniconism within Islamic art – where it becomes possible to represent the un-representable through analogies with geometry – Navine G. Dossos’ hand-painted and collaboratively produced murals explored ideas of authenticity, appropriation, positionality and the possibility of generating new visual languages in the context of transgressive political and conceptual frameworks.
This publication forms part of the trans-disciplinary programme Radical Citizenship, a cooperative project between The Showroom and Goethe-Institut London.
First edition, 2021
297 x 210mm
126 pages
Soft cover with contrast wraparound and PVC sleeve; contrast stitching
ISBN: 978-1-8380450-0-5
Designed by Mark Hurrell
Co-published with The Showroom
DOWNLOAD: A digital edition of TINA – There Is No Alternative is available HERE
WATCH: A roundtable discussion on the occasion of the launch of TINA – There Is No Alternative on Monday 11 October 2021 at The Showroom, London, with Navine G. Dossos, Rob Faure Walker (The Prevent Digest), Tarek Younis, Azfar Shafi (CAGE), William Skeaping (Extinction Rebellion), Lily Hall (The Showroom), Lillian Wilkie (Chateau International) and designer Mark Hurrell.
* The Prevent policy forms part of the the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism strategy, ‘Contest’. It was first developed by Sir David Omand and the Home Office in early 2003 as the immediate response to 9/11, and a revised version was made public in 2006. Further revisions were published on 24 March 2009, 11 July 2011 and June 2018. The UK government has launched a review into the effectiveness of Prevent for protecting those ‘vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism’, and updated terms of the policy were published in March 2021.
