How to Build the Future

SCREENING:

How to Build the Future

Callum McGrath

6:30-8pm, Saturday 9 August, 2025

How to Build the Future (2024) by Callum McGrath offers a glimpse into the political ideology of the infamous gay billionaire Peter Thiel, the man behind PayPal, the angel investor in Facebook and the co-founder of Palantir Technologies. Over its runtime, the narrator takes an (almost) chronological journey through some of the lesser-known aspects of Thiel’s life and financial endeavours. This includes his founding of The Stanford Review, a conservative college newspaper; his support for the presidential campaign of outsider candidate Ron Paul; his reporting to U.S. intelligence officers; and his longtime friendship with neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin.

As the video progresses How to Build the Future explores Thiel’s recent involvement with younger reactionaries in New York City, such as the Praxis Society and Trevor Bazile the co-founder of the New People Cinema Club. It is in this account of Thiel that the viewer faces a depiction of recent history where right-wing/libertarian anti-establishment views becomes indistinct from the Marxist/ leftist critique of the professional managerial class and major corporations. How to Build the Future historises Thiel as a dissident queer, genealogically tracing how he has donated and invested his money through various political, cultural and technological ventures.

This screening includes an in-conversation with curator and writer Hilary Thurlow.

Born in Meanjin/Brisbane and based in Naarm/Melbourne, Callum McGrath is a research artist whose work explores relationships between historicisation and systems of power in queer contexts. McGrath has exhibited across Australian, with recent exhibitions that include; The Ramsay Art Prize 2025, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2025); Unbecoming, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo (2025), You Get to Determine the Reality, MADA Gallery, Melbourne (2024), The Party, UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2023); Embodied Knowledge, Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2022). In 2025 McGrath co-curated You are Here Too at the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane with an accompanying publication. McGrath is a founding contributor to KINK, a collective researching histories of queer Australian art. In 2024 McGrath completed his PhD with Monash Art Design and Architecture at Monash University.

Hilary Thurlow is a PhD candidate in Art History and Theory at Monash University, where her research focuses on the work and life of Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. She is also the Managing Editor of Memo Magazine.