This book was produced by students at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in 2015. Dear Helen reads through “Escapement,” a short story by J.G. Ballard published in 1956. The book’s authors have collaged the full text of “Escapement” with commentary, essays, reflections, and, for a few pages, another short story that runs alongside Ballard’s original text.

Dear Helen, then, functions both as a work of curation as well as a sort of curatorial manifesto, working with concepts teased out of “Escapement,” like time, loops, and history, as well as the concept of escapement itself. The book includes an especially interesting “Program for Communicative / Didactic Curating” by Roxana Fabius and Natalia Zuluaga.