Season Butler: Do You Remember the Good Old Days Before the Ghost Town? (2025) - Whitechapel Gallery

Season Butler: Do You Remember the Good Old Days Before the Ghost Town? (2025)

  • Season Butler Brown as a Nut , performance to camera (or keeping with your formatting) Performance to camera, Brown as a Nut 2018 © Season Butler

    Season Butler, Brown as a Nut, performance to camera 2018 © Season Butler

Sat 21 Jun 2025, 12-5pm

Gallery 2

Monday Closed
Tuesday 11am–6pm
Wednesday 11am–6pm
Thursday 11am–9pm
Friday 11am–6pm
Saturday 11am–6pm
Sunday 11am–6pm

Access Information

Topless dancer outside whitechapel gallery

London Open Live

Full Performance Programme

Performance
Season Butler: Do You Remember the Good Old Days Before the Ghost Town?

Season Butler presents a new, durational performance, which over the course of several hours, dramatises the Capitalocene condition, and the Proletarocene attempt at care, repair and persistence. In dialogue with academic and philosopher Lauren Berlant’s term ‘situation tragedy,’ which describes a condition of ever-diminishing certainty and always on the brink of collapse, the performance explores matter that, once altered by human use, cannot return to its original form. Transformation is a one-way trip, and the only certainty is change. ‘This piece is for and about London as a city under the ongoing betrayal and assault of austerity, and the labour of living in the ruins wrought by a ruthless ruling class – work we will do imperfectly, in state of flow and in frustration.

This is a durational performance and audiences are welcome to drop in and out.

About Season Butler:

Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and teacher. Her work looks at ideas of youth and old age; solitude and community; negotiations with hope and what it means to look forward to a future of elusive horizons. Butler’s artwork has appeared at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Tate Exchange, London; Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga; and Hotel Maria Kapel, The Netherlands. Her debut novel, Cygnet, was published in 2019 and won the 2020 Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel.

Butler’s current research looks at the US scholar Lauren Berlant’s notion of the ‘situation tragedy’, articulated in their 2011 book Cruel Optimism.  The central concepts of this research continue to inform Butler’s work: specifically, climate crisis and racial capitalism; the alienation and exhaustion of the contemporary worker; and flight as an evolving sphere of signification and conflict, from Icarus to The Tuskegee Airmen and beyond.

In addition to her creative practice, she is also on the curatorial team of the ANTI Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio, Finland.