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Events
Verdurin is a space for serious, engaged, and occasionally difficult conversations on vital aspects of today’s culture. We are committed to free expression and welcome diverse views. Our events will nurture debate without insisting that it leads to shallow agreement.
Our events include screenings, lectures, and reading groups on topics such as conspiracy theory and non-contemporary art history, as well as artistic interventions.
Philip Cunliffe
The National Interest23 July 2025
What does it mean for a nation to put its interest first?
Nina Power
Zeitgeist22 April 2025 – 3 June 2025
How do humanity’s great abstractions function over time? This course on the philosophy of history considers the subject in chaos, stasis, progress, and providence.
Tim Abrahams
Dogs That Don’t Bark11 June 2025
How are architectural visualisation of the future – from anglofuturist progress to ecological utopia – shaping the thing itself?
Cinema Cruelty
Fortnightly
A screening series exploring moral and social questions and examining cruelty, suffering, and evil in filmic artefacts chosen by members.
Past events
Simon Fanshawe, Mark Simpson
Over the Rainbow11 February 2025
The history of gay liberation has been a dance of two steps forward, a step backwards, and a few sideway jumps. Today, a new fight for another vision of LGBTQ+ freedom rages on.
Paranoia
1 February 2025
Why do so many artists and writers gravitate towards conspiracy and intrigue as a metaphor for aesthetics?
Jacob Koster
The Return of Aesthetics12 February 2025 – 16 April 2025
Long considered a moribund discipline, aesthetics has made a surprise comeback. This seminar asks what aesthetics was before it was subjected to a radical critique since the mid-19th century.
Ofri Ilany, Vanity von Glow, Travis Jeppesen, Ran Heilbrunn, Amir Naaman
Return to Sodom22 February 2025
Canonical gay art was once inextricably transgressive. Today, it’s free but saccharine. If, as artists believed merely decades ago, true freedom lives on in dystopia, who is today’s visionary Jean Genet?
Bertie Marshall, Travis Jeppesen, Marcas Lancaster, et al.
Dorian’s Attic23 February 2025
Verdurin leads a rare private tour of The Dorian Gray Attic at The Rainbow Museum of Queer Life.
Art of Darkness
Goya’s Demons24 March 2025
Francisco Goya captured the darkness of his time like no other artist. From war to personal torment, his visions still haunt us.
Ewan Morrison
Accelerationist Society and its Future9 April 2025
If we don’t control our present, is it too late to shape our future?
Benjamin Studebaker
Illegitimate Democracies9 December 2024
Ageing liberal democracies are plagued by a crisis of legitimacy. Efforts to save them only make things worse.
Cells and Salons
30 October 2024
Cells and Salons plants the seed of aesthetic desires and watches them give rise to new worlds. It extends the invitation to conspire and theorise to both faithful and aspiring members of Verdurin’s petit clan.
9/11 Watch Party
11 September 2024
Join Verdurin for the as-seen-on-TV event of the year and experience again the fear, tears, and paranoia of the live news channel analysis and raw unedited footage of the disaster.
Nina Power
Iconoclasm6 August 2024 – 27 August 2024
This four-part course will examine the question of images, their effect on us and what use we make of them.
Oliver Bennet
What We May Also Do2 July 2024 – 3 July 2024
A reading of a new play by Oliver Bennett exploring ideas of transference and authoritarianism, specifically written to accompany Anna Sebastian’s exhibition with which it shares its title.
Beyond Left and Right?
20 July 2024
Does the marriage of economic progressivism with social conservatism signal a politics beyond Left and Right?
Café Américain
The New Normal21 June 2024
How can we confront the post-Covid onset of the totalitarian New Normal? Café American editors and contributors Elana Lange, George Hoare, Daniel Hadas, and Chris Bateman discuss censorship and free speech, collectivist ideology, and societal vulnerability.
Jamieson Webster
The Psychoanalyst and The Artist12 June 2024
New York psychoanalyst and author Jamieson Webster explores the relationship of art and psychoanalysis, with the artist’s studio and the analyst’s couch as sites of convergence.
Theory Underground
Tough on anti-intellectualism, tough on the causes of anti-intellectualism24 May 2024
American anti-intellectualism is rampant and spreading. Theory Underground’s European tour brings a cast of “American Idiots” to London as unofficial counter-ambassadors of this movement.
Jacob Koster
What was Aesthetics?29 May 2024 – 31 July 2024
Long considered a moribund discipline, aesthetics has made a surprise comeback. In its current form, however, aesthetics has little to do with the Enlightenment notions on which it was originally based. This seminar led by Jacob Koster asks what aesthetics was before it was subjected to a radical critique since the mid-19th century.