Navine G. Dossos: TINA – There Is No Alternative

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. There Is No Alternative 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 the 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, with a foreword by Elvira Dyangani Ose, alongside contributing writers who have engaged in written dialogues, Sadia Habib, Hassan Vawda, Rachel Coldicutt, Tarek Younis, Shezana Hafiz and 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 has been the act of questioning what an alternative to Prevent could look like, involving a shared process between Dossos and all those who became collaboratively involved. In this way, the work of the exhibition involved collaborative research, discussion, sharing knowledge and critical thinking between Dossos, The Showroom team, and those who became a part of the project: a democratic process which this publication now seeks to extend further.

--

Interconnected launch events took place at The Showroom and Claire de Rouen Books on Monday 11 and Saturday 16 October 2021. At The Showroom a round-table discussion took place, and the recording is available in The Showroom Library, with artist Navine G. Dossos, Rob Faure Walker (The Prevent Digest), Tarek Younis, Azfar Shafi (CAGE), William Skeaping (Extinction Rebellion), Hassan Vawda, Lily Hall (The Showroom), Lillian Wilkie (Chateau International) and designer Mark Hurrell. The launch at Claire de Rouen also presented the newly published The Emergence of 'Extremism': Exposing the Violent Discourse and Language of 'Radicalisation' (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Rob Faure Walker.