M HKA Ensembles

Book, 14.7 x 19.3 cm, 150 p, language: English, publisher: Pedlar Press, ISBN: 189714136X (ISBN13: 9781897141366).

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2025/995).

Literary synopsis

Set in a dystopian near future, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed is a novel - a kind of post-capitalist soap opera - about a group of people who regularly attend ‘the meetings.’ At the meetings they have agreed to talk, and only talk, about how to re-ignite the left, for fear if they were to do more, if they were to actually engage in real acts of resistance or activism, they would be arrested, imprisoned, or worse. Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed is a book about community. It is also a book about fear. Characters leave the meetings and we follow them out into their lives. The characters we see most frequently are the Doctor, the Writer and the Third Wheel. As the book progresses we see these characters, and others, disengage and re-engage with questions the meetings have brought into their lives. And throughout all of this the meetings continue: aimless, thoughtful, disturbing, trying to keep a feeling of hope and potential alive in what begin to look like increasingly dark times. Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed asks us to think about why so many of us today, even those with a genuine interest in political questions, feel so deeply powerless to change and affect the world that surrounds us, suggesting that, even within such feelings of relative powerlessness, there can still be energizing surges of emancipation and action.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed is a novel that relates to Jacob Wren’s art practice only in tangential and indirect ways. It is mainly just a novel he wrote.

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