Outside of the public events being held in the space, C& Center of Unfinished Business is open to the public by prior reservation and appointment only. Please fill out this form in order to request an appointment, which is necessary to access the space. Please make your appointment at least one day in advance. You will receive an email confirming your appointment time.

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics and multimedia platform Contemporary And (C&) present C& Center of Unfinished Business at The New School, a roving reading room that speaks to the persistence and presence of colonialism in contemporary life. Conceived by C& Co-founders and Artistic Directors Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba, the project offers a selection of key, and, at times, unexpected texts that spark discourse on the enduring structures that continuously undergird colonial legacies in modern society. “Unfinished,” here, subtly echoes the “post” in postcolonial—hinting at an incomplete reckoning with colonialism and its evident and insidious aftermaths.

The Vera List Center iteration of the reading room features a curated selection of books, including titles from The New School faculty, alumni, and the VLC Fellows Library. Inaugurated during the 2022 VLC Forum and 30th anniversary celebration, the VLC Fellows Library is a collection of publications by each of the forty-four fellows the Vera List Center has hosted over its thirty-year history, celebrating and making available their research and work.

Both the installation and accompanying broadsheet publication are designed by New School students. As with previous iterations, the reading room upends traditional forms of display in both content and form. Books meander through angular shelves next to, above, and across from each other in challenging, experimental, unconventional ways to mirror the tension and discomfort historically embedded in discussions on colonization. To this end, the C& Center of Unfinished Business occupies The New School’s Social Justice Hub, an interstitial space designed and designated for conversations on equity and solidarity across communities.

The reading room plays host to public programs that inscribe the VLC’s 2022–2024 Focus Theme Correction* into colonial legacies and postcolonial realities. Conversations with local and international libraries as well as a public reading series explore libraries as sites of intervention, liberation, and repair.

About

The C& Center of Unfinished Business is a reading room conceived by Contemporary And that offers visitors an extraordinary, and also disconcerting, selection of books that are connected to the topic of colonialism in various ways—from the German colonies to Congolese fashion to 21st century capital markets, the reading room stretches the subject to the many different areas that are affected by it. However, it is not about creating a library on colonialism that is consistent and complete, because: when would it ever be? Colonialism is an unfinished business that continues to exist in many ways.

Launched in 2017, the reading room has traveled to art spaces and museums around the world, connecting in various ways with institutions such as ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), Transmediale in Berlin, school in Vienna, Musée Les Abattoir in Toulouse, Para Site in Hong Kong, or for its first US iteration the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is a non-profit research center at The New School in New York. Through its dynamic interdisciplinary programs, conferences, artist fellowships, residencies, exhibitions, and publications, the VLC imagines and supports new forms of politically engaged art, research, public scholarship, and community around the world.

The 2022–2024 Vera List Center Focus Theme: Correction* and the programs, fellowship projects, publications, and exhibitions dedicated to it explore the tension, discomfort, and potential it inspires to pose questions about the metaphorical, political, and social dimensions and implications of correction.

The VLC Fellows Library is a collection of publications by each of the forty-four fellows the Vera List Center has hosted over its thirty-year history and counting. It celebrates and makes available the rigorous research and wide-ranging work of the Center’s fellows.