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This anthology contextualizes art that proposes alternatives to the models of linear time that have underpinned both capitalism and progressive modernity. Contemporary art has explored such diverse registers of temporality as ‘wasting and waiting; regression and repetition; déjà vu and seriality; unrealized possibility and idleness; non-consummation and counter-productivity; the belated and the premature; the disjointed and the out-of-synch – all of which go against sequentialist time and index slips in chronological experience.’ While theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Mieke Bal have proposed ‘polychronic’, ‘heterochronic’ or ‘anachronic’ readings of history, artists have opened up the field of time to the extent that the very notion of the contemporary is brought into question. [editor summary]