Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this publication will contain names of the deceased.

Correction, or the willingness to re-evaluate time-trusted protocols, is often demanded, yet rarely applied in the nuanced, considered, humane way necessary to foster social justice, equity, and inclusion. At the Vera List Center, we have just concluded the first year of our biennial research Focus Theme Correction*. Embarking on the second chapter of thinking through correction, we continue to question its potential for transformation and repair as well as its corollaries in discipline and censure. The asterisk in Correction* speaks to the complexities of correction, the necessity to consider subtexts and invisible histories as we navigate our current historic moment as a community of progressive, diverse, and creative people from all over the world. This year, we turn toward artistic modes that precisely center the “we” to respond to these complexities, prompted by artists and collectives working in community to advance social justice around the world through collaborative practices on a global scale.

An international, annual convening of key participants in the field of art and politics, the Vera List Center Forum 2023 is organized at The New School within the framework of our two-year investigation of Correction*. This publication accompanies the VLC Forum 2023, which celebrates the Aboriginal urban art collective proppaNOW, recipient of the Vera List Center’s 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice.

Offering an entry point to Correction*, the first section of this publication is dedicated to the work of the Jane Lombard Fellows, who were finalists for the prize: the Pan-African collective Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) was nominated for its project Another Roadmap School; Mexico’s Colectivo Cherani for its Cherán Cultural Center; Indonesia’s KUNCI Study Forum & Collective for its School of Improper Education; and Khalil Rabah for the semi-fictional Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind. The section features artist statements by each of the Jane Lombard Fellows reflecting on the potentials and contradictions embedded in “correction” alongside adapted essays on the projects for which they were nominated written by Özge Ersoy, Qinyi Lim, Nabila Abdel Nabi, and Fabiola Palacios with Pablo José Ramírez.

The second part of the publication spotlights proppaNOW. The exhibition proppaNOW: There Goes the Neighbourhood! is presented in the context of the VLC Forum 2023 and marks the first institutional presentation of the collective in the Western hemisphere, twenty years after their founding in Brisbane, Australia. This section features introductions to proppaNOW with essays by prize nominator Dawn Chan and member Warraba Weatherall as well as a curatorial essay by VLC’s Eriola Pira and a screening program by Camila Palomino. The section culminates with a dialogue between members of proppaNOW—Tony Albert, Richard Bell, Megan Cope, Lily Eather, Gordon Hookey, and Warraba Weatherall—and Turtle Island-based public secret society New Red Order—Jackson Polys and Zack Khalil—in which both groups reflect on their respective connections to land and country, to language and identity, to the political and the polemical.

A detailed guide to the forum rounds out the publication, featuring workshops, conversations, a keynote lecture by farid rakun of ruangrupa, highlighting polyvocal, collective processes moving the world forward.