Searching for the present is a bit like deep sea diving. How to dive without drowning in the turbulent waters of now? When to surface and how to ride a strong current? These are some of the questions that Raqs Media Collective address in their account of contemporaneity, guided by a motley collection of figures lost and found in the turbulence of their practice.

Seepage gathers together a compilation of texts authored by Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta).

An Exhibition Always Hides Another Exhibition is a collective portrait of Hans Ulrich Obrist composed by friends, collaborators, admirers, and inquisitors. From personal anecdotes to analytic estimations to visual representations, the contributions respond to the questions that frame the book: Who is HUO? What does HUO do? What has HUO done?

“Sisterhood” is a key concept and an impulse to work with imagination; built on the foundations of second-wave criticism of the patriarchal exploitation of women, it poses questions about the future from the perspective of feminist economics and ethics of care.

Botanical Drift explores the hermeneutics, historicization, semiotics, and symbiosis of plants—past, present, extant, and extinct—around the globe. Plant histories are explored by significant and diverse feminist, art-historical, and anthropological voices—from Germaine Greer to herman de vries—bringing new perspectives through photo-essays, fiction, performance, and interventions in ecological, film, and translation archives.

What is “work” today and what is its relation to art? What is the position of the artist if “creativity” has become a commodity? How can the artist’s conditions of production be described, and what role can art and architecture play in societal change?

Cybermohalla Hub, a hybrid of studio, school, archive, community center, library, and gallery is a structure that moves between Delhi and diverse art contexts. The Cybermohalla project, which takes on the meaning of the Hindi word mohalla (neighborhood), has been engaged in rethinking urban life, and reimagining and reanimating the infrastructure of cultural and intellectual life in contemporary cities.

Cultures of the Curatorial assumes a curatorial turn in contemporary cultural practice and discourse. Coming from a variety of disciplines and professional backgrounds, the contributors exemplify the entanglement of theory and practice, consider recent developments within the curatorial field, allow self-reflexive analysis, and explore the conditions—disciplinary, institutional, economic, political, and regional—under which art and culture become public.

The selection of essays included in this book seeks to highlight an ongoing topical thread that ran throughout the first eight issues of e-flux journal. It aims at providing a fresh approach to the function of an art journal as something that situates the multitude of what is currently available, and makes that available back to the multitude.