Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989

Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989
Edited by Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh

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BAK, basis voor actuele kunst is pleased to announce the release of Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989. This publication includes over 70 texts, visual essays, and conversations by artists, thinkers, and cultural practitioners worldwide, and marks the culmination of an eight-year artistic and curatorial research experiment, FORMER WEST.

The volume explores with and through art the social, cultural, politico-economic, technological, and ecological repercussions of the end of the Cold War on the contemporary. In a nod to a supposed counterpart, the “former east,” the book proposes to “former” the west as a way of resisting the west’s continued coloniality, and appeals to art’s critical potential for thinking and living through alternatives.

Asking how to envision such alternative trajectories, the contributions probe the distinctions established within the post-1989 geopolitical order, specifically those of a global north and global south, and seek to align the post-communist condition with the postcolonial constellation. They consider in parallel the cultural, political, and environmental upheavals that structure the present moment with the post-ideological, posthuman, and posthistorical formations that have emerged in intellectual and artistic response. The book queries not only history and historicization in their western guise, current conditions defined by wars, creeping normalizations of contemporary fascisms, post-truth, and algorithmic cultures, but also solidarities in the context of global class recomposition and migration, unfolding in chilling relevance to the political atmosphere of today.

Contributors include: Nancy Adajania, Edit András, Athena Athanasiou, Zygmunt Bauman, Dave Beech, Brett Bloom, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Buck-Morss, Campus in Camps, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Jodi Dean, Angela Dimitrakaki, Dilar Dirik, Marlene Dumas, Keller Easterling, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Federica Giardini and Anna Simone, Boris Groys, Gulf Labor Coalition, Stefano Harney, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Tung-Hui Hu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Sami Khatib, Delaine Le Bas, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, Isabell Lorey, Július Koller, Sven Lütticken, Ewa Majewska, Artemy Magun, Suhail Malik, Teresa Margolles, Achille Mbembe, Laura McLean, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Aernout Mik, Angela Mitropoulos, Rastko Močnik, Nástio Mosquito, Rabih Mroué, Pedro Neves Marques, Peter Osborne, Matteo Pasquinelli, Andrea Phillips, Nina Power, Vijay Prashad, Gerald Raunig, Irit Rogoff, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Naoki Sakai, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini, Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Schöllhammer, Susan Schuppli, Andreas Siekmann, Jonas Staal, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinović, Paulo Tavares, Trịnh T. Minh-Hà, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Marina Vishmidt, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark, and Eyal Weizman.

Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 is edited by Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh. Visual introductions to book chapters are curated by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.

Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 has been published in the context of the curatorial and artistic research experiment FORMER WEST (2008–16), developed by BAK and realized through manifold partnerships with artists, theorists, activists, as well as art and educational institutions transnationally. Leading up to this publication, a series of public editorial meetings has been held in Utrecht (2014), London (2015), Budapest (2015), and Warsaw (2015), in which themes, contributions, and propositions for this publication have been considered in dialogue with the public.

The publication is out now and can be ordered via MIT Press.