Capitalist Realism is broadly inspired by the term Mark Fisher introduced in his eponymous book. Following Frederic Jameson’s infamous dictum that postmodernism has been the cultural logic of late capitalism, capitalist realism could be understood today as the cultural logic of TINA –Margaret Thatcher’s self-fulfilling prophecy that "There Is No Alternative", which proved to be the most succinct slogan for the modern capitalist system one could ever imagine. Living in an endless “eternal now”, we no longer seem able to imagine a future that might be different from the present. As several scholars have put it, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.

This second part of the exhibition approaches capitalism’s exploitative aspects in historical terms, describing or reflecting on an age of authoritarian regimes we seem to have moved beyond, and emphasising the dichotomies between centre and periphery, colonial and colonised, and so forth. The works here address the system through the dependence scheme, and many of them do so by negotiating the archival and its connection to public history and memory.