How to Build the Future

SCREENING:

How to Build the Future

Callum McGrath

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

How to Build the Future (2024) 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.  

Callum McGrath (b.1995) is an artist and researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne. McGrath’s desire to make and research stems from an interest in rearticulating and challenging dominant models and institutionalised aesthetics of historiography and archiving. McGrath’s research engages with underrepresented and undocumented aspects of queer history, by reimagining these pasts via an idiosyncratic and unconventional approach to image-based forms.

McGrath’s practice rearticulates institutionalised aesthetics of historiography, memorials, and archiving. Among his recent exhibitions include; The Party, UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2023); Embodied Knowledge, Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2022); The Weatherman, Metro Arts, Brisbane (2021); The Gay Agenda, The Walls, Gold Coast (2021); To Resound, Unbound, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2021); and Deviations, Brisbane Art and Design Festival (2021). In 2022 McGrath curated a cinema program titled In Queer Time at the Australian Cinémathèque at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. McGrath is also a founding contributor to KINK, a collective researching a history of queer Australian art. McGrath completed a PhD at Monash Art Design and Architecture, Monash University in 2024.