1. FORMER WEST
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      1. Documents, Constellations, Prospects
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          1. Congress

            Documents, Constellations, Prospects

            18–24 March 2013

            Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (DE)

            1. About
            2. Contributions
            3. Contributors
            4. Currents
            5. Images
            6. Program
            7. Texts

        2. Text

            1. Art Production
              Boris Groys
              While the desire to transform society through the power of art is a fundamental characteristic of art practice at least as far back as the Romantic art movement of the nineteenth century, we today still struggle with the question of how art can effectively change society. Now we know from Karl Marx that it is primarily work that changes society and the world as a whole. So the best way to …
            2. Dissident Knowledges
              Maria Hlavajova
              The contemporary moment, largely perceived as one without a horizon and thus with no sense of direction, is also one that unmasks modernity’s misunderstandings about the place of the so-called West in the narration of the post-1989 world. Immersed in its own fiction of superiority, the West has continued to cling to its old sentiments of domination by spreading, often forcefully, misconceived …
            3. FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects
              Maria Hlavajova
            4. Learning Place
              Boris Buden
              There is a sort of meta-text for contemporary knowledge and art production. We work on it for a significant part of our lives, continuously expanding and improving it. Curriculum Vitae is its name but it is usually called by its abbreviation, “sivi” (CV). Structurally, the CV repeats, on the scale of individuals, the nineteen-century myth of progress. This is the fiction of linear progression …
            5. Infrastructure
              Irit Rogoff
              When we in the West, or in the industrialized, technologized countries, congratulate ourselves on having an infrastructure— functioning institutions, systems of classification and categorization, archives and traditions and professional training for these, funding and educational pathways, excellence criteria, impartial juries, and properly air conditioned auditoria with good acoustics, etc.—we …
            6. Insurgent Cosmopolitanism
              Ranjit Hoskote
              The structure of modern democracy has long been centered on a crucial relationship of delegation and representation that binds the state and the citizenry. By a fundamental political contract, the citizenry delegate a considerable proportion of their decision-making powers to the state apparatus in exchange for representation by the state. Yet we know from examples ranging from unpopular …
            7. FORMER WEST Berlin Public Editorial Meeting
              Simon Sheikh
              Boris Buden, Helmut Draxler, Maria Hlavajova, Marion von Osten, and Joanna Warsza, moderated by Simon Sheikh Taking the editorial meeting as its model, this roundtable discussion on the methods and topics of the final FORMER WEST publication inaugurates a two-year period of public, collective deliberations situating the possibilities of a formerizing of the West in specific international …
            8. Prospective Statements
              Boris Buden
              Nancy Adajania, Boris Groys, Ranjit Hoskote, Dieter Lesage, Suzana Milevska, Stefan Nowotny, Piotr Piotrowski, Irit Rogoff, and Bernd M. Scherer, among others, moderated by Boris BudenTo call the West “former” doesn’t mean to simply assign it to the past. For, it is not the time of the West that has passed. It is instead the very idea of being in the command of time, the idea of progress that …
      2. This site is the web platform of the FORMER WEST project. The project is organized and coordinated by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst. BAK is responsible for the website content.