Shall we deep dive into the ‘present-ness’ of the past? Most endeavours in contemporary art, architecture, and design fields have persisted through deconstructing, adapting, or redoing what was once created, while creating anew. The broader historical tides of ‘what once was,’ have led creatives to perceptions of ‘what is,’ with time as a dynamic medium of prescient performances.

Through instances of inter-generational acts, i.e. restaged works, creative ‘backdating’ becomes a genre in itself; works carried over time to the present in its whole; creative rituals repeated and reinterpreted; creative capsules that let us view our history from the present. We recontextualise and retrospect as an attempt to understand all our creative pluralities, in relation to our creative lineage.

This issue dispatches creative restaging, viewing yesteryear's works from an extant lens: ‘Marina Abramović’ captures five decades of the influential artist with a restaging of four of her iconic acts; Daniel Shieh expounds on his exhibition, ‘Where Time Runs Backwards’; ‘The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century’ re-examines the cultural influence of hip hop as a lived movement over the last fifty years.

Creative coordinates through time and cultures endure, as the past is read not just linearly, but as a multivalence depicting itself via retrospective content now. Is the creative future selectively derivative, as yesterday becomes tomorrow, and tomorrow becomes today?