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 Interest

    Philip Cunliffe
    The National Interest

    23 July 2025

    What does it mean for a nation to put its interest first?

  • Beyond Belief: Cults and Crowds

    Beyond Belief

    31 May 2025

    Are human beings predisposed to be cultic?

  • Zeitgeist: a philosophy of history course

    Nina Power
    Zeitgeist

    22 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 Bark

    Tim Abrahams
    Dogs That Don’t Bark

    11 June 2025

    How are architectural visualisation of the future – from anglofuturist progress to ecological utopia – shaping the thing itself?

  • Cinema Cruelty

    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

  • Over the Rainbow

    Simon Fanshawe, Mark Simpson
    Over the Rainbow

    11 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

    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 Aesthetics

    Jacob Koster
    The Return of Aesthetics

    12 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.

  • Return to Sodom

    Ofri Ilany, Vanity von Glow, Travis Jeppesen, Ran Heilbrunn, Amir Naaman
    Return to Sodom

    22 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?

  • Dorian’s Attic

    Bertie Marshall, Travis Jeppesen, Marcas Lancaster, et al.
    Dorian’s Attic

    23 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 Demons

    Art of Darkness
    Goya’s Demons

    24 March 2025

    Francisco Goya captured the darkness of his time like no other artist. From war to personal torment, his visions still haunt us.

  • Accelerationist Society and its Future

    Ewan Morrison
    Accelerationist Society and its Future

    9 April 2025

    If we don’t control our present, is it too late to shape our future?

  • Benjamin Studebaker: Illegitimate Democracies

    Benjamin Studebaker
    Illegitimate Democracies

    9 December 2024

    Ageing liberal democracies are plagued by a crisis of legitimacy. Efforts to save them only make things worse.

  • Alfie Bown: Not Funny

    Alfie Bown
    Not Funny

    25 November 2024

    Are we living in a post-comedy word?

  • Cells and Salons

    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

    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: Iconoclasm

    Nina Power
    Iconoclasm

    6 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 Bennett: What We May Also Do

    Oliver Bennet
    What We May Also Do

    2 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?

    Beyond Left and Right?

    20 July 2024

    Does the marriage of economic progressivism with social conservatism signal a politics beyond Left and Right?

  • Café American: The New Normal

    Café Américain
    The New Normal

    21 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 Artist

    Jamieson Webster
    The Psychoanalyst and The Artist

    12 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-intellectualism

    Theory Underground
    Tough on anti-intellectualism, tough on the causes of anti-intellectualism

    24 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?

    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.

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