The culture and politics of our present have become subject to the rapid and shape-shifting spread of conspiracy. Offering seductive fictions that claim to expose the hidden machinations behind the organisation of power, the fantasies of conspiracy recur across cultural and political history. Today, their plots echo those of the past: driving political campaigns, distorting debates on public health, promoting racism and hatred of difference, contesting the authority of mainstream media, and cultivating moral panic. The reactionary logic of conspiracy claims to pose a challenge to the cultural and political establishment by attacking hierarchies of expertise and knowledge, while remaining in thrall to exclusionary authoritarianism. Yet the history of conspiracy is also the history of militancy, secret associations, and the possibility of unsettling received histories and the entrenched relations of power and capital. 

Conspiracies presents four contemporary artists working at the seam of knowledge, conspiracy and cultural memory: Hannah Black, Caspar Heinemann, Sam Keogh, and Shenece Oretha, and asks them to respond to the Warburg Institute’s collections. These four artists draw upon objects and visual histories that engage with fate and fortune, myth and reality, as well as the associative structure of knowledge prized by Aby Warburg. Here, conspiracy becomes a mode of storytelling, assembling unruly associations between materials and histories, presenting it not only as a pathology of our present but as a counterflow to the experience of political disorientation.

Curated by Larne Abse Gogarty, Associate Professor and Head of History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, and author of What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (Sternberg Press, 2023).