CAPIm Research Annual 2026

Epochs organise and narrativize time and shape our way of seeing both the past and imagining the future. These metered and ordered descriptions blind us to our own present. Our self-reflection of being-in-a-time-period, within-an-era, shapes what can be thought, experienced, or known at all. The removed distance needed to describe and interpret periods of social reorganisation, industrial development, political upheaval and technological advancements is always imperfectly present. To live inside an epoch is to feel its weight, its pressure, its perplexities but to be perpetually behind in our understanding of it. How do we cope with being too late, and what are the implications for what is to come? How do we act with what can only be imperfect knowledge?

The second Research Annual of the Centre of Art and the Political Imaginary is an invitation to consider, explore and reflexively engage with shifting from the description of epoch/s to consider not just the concept of epochality but to address how and what it may imply for our ability to imagine with self-imposed limitations – to put a future within brackets. The inability of Western late capitalism to see itself through nothing more than negations is striking as we describe the world through a series of disorientations, monstrous transitions, bewildered confusions and ruptures from permacrisis to the pronouncement of the Anthropocene that declares no practical ends to human interference on the planet; nullifying limits, which announce an epoch to end all epochs. 

From the notion of epochality, we invite an examination of the role of art to imagine, to think, to make otherwise as of paramount political importance. Art holds the possibility of imagining, to momentarily conceive of stepping outside of our epoch, to possibly perceive the horizon beyond and to sense, to feel the edges of our time.  We suggest that the notion of epochality brings to focus the centrality and entanglement of time in artistic practices and aesthetic discourses for our shared political future. 

In order to think together on epochality, imagination and the limits of the present we are delighted to host a keynote by Professor Yuk Hui (Erasmus University Rotterdam), whose work has contributed one of the most sustained and influential bodies of contemporary thinking on technicity, art and our epochal condition(s). Our investigation of epochality will also take us to the newly initiated art centre “Epoken” in Mölnbo, directed by artists Signe Johannessen and Erik Rören for an embodied and aesthetic making of new time. We invite you to take time to practice new forms of attention where we work through art practices that possibly disrupt catastrophic thinking.

Friday 25 September
Yuk Hui is Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he holds the Chair of Human Conditions and directs the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Technology. He is the author of several monographs that have been translated into a dozen languages, including On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2016), Recursivity and Contingency (2019), Art and Cosmotechnics (2021), Post-Europe (2024), Machine and Sovereignty (2024), and Kant Machine (2026). He is the convenor of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology and has been a juror for the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture since 2020.

Saturday 26 September
Epoken marks a new phase in the evolution of Art Lab Gnesta, an art(ist)‑run institution in rural Sweden shaped by a long-term, inquiry‑driven and site‑responsive practice. Over seventeen years, this work has approached art not as representation but as a generative force—treating place, organisation, and institution themselves as artistic material. The move to a former industrial site in Mölnbo, a beautiful place beyond repair, continues this trajectory: a response to questions that require new spatial, ecological, and institutional conditions, and part of an ongoing attempt to think and act beyond the Anthropocene. Founded in 2009 by artist Signe Johannessen and Erik Rören, who continue to lead its development, Epoken extends the organisation’s commitment to slow, collective processes and to engaging other‑than‑human realities as active participants in artistic production.

The CAPIm Research Annual is open to the public with various modalities of engagement across three days. In the registration form, we request that you select the relevant participation options. 

On Friday, September 25, we welcome you to join us at the public launch event of the Second Annual Symposium with keynote contribution by Professor Yuk Hui at the Royal Institute of Art on Skeppsholmen in Stockholm.

On Saturday 26, and Sunday 27, September, we welcome you to facilitated engagements that pertain to the theme of epochality and its aesthetic and embodied practices. The programming will take place at the Royal Institute of Art and includes a half-day excursion to “Epoken” in Mölnbo. 

Please register to assist us in making the necessary arrangements for these activities.