The fifth thematic volume from the NGV’s 2020 Triennial.

This one takes speculation seriously; pitching it as a way artists, designers and architects imagine futures while living inside systems already marked by instability. Essays and project texts move across urban planning, waste, automation, labour, precarity, exhibition-making, queer space and the visual economies through which contemporary life is organised.

The range is deliberately elastic. One contribution considers planned retreat from cities; another looks at waste as design problem and political residue; elsewhere the book turns to arts funding, collective exhibition practice, artificial intelligence, architecture and the future of work. What connects them is the sense that everything is bound to material conditions, institutions, economies and the uneven distribution of who gets to imagine a future in the first place. As a standalone object, it is a great, and quite beautiful anthology of contemporary art writing; as part of the Triennial set, it catches a cultural sector trying to think through crisis while still inside it.

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2020. First edition; Volume 5 of the NGV Triennial 2020 thematic publication series. Illustrated paperback. Light shelf wear; internally clean and bright.