As we gear up for the 2nd FORMER WEST Research Congress On Horizons: Art and Political Imagination, which takes place 4-6 November at the Istanbul Technical University, it seems an appropriate moment to browse the FORMER WEST Research Library in order to choose a selection of reading materials that touch on the themes and issues raised in the upcoming congress.
In his 1931 essay, “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin reminds us that books have their fates (Habent sua fata libelli), while he examines the myriad, wavering paths books take as they move toward the destination of a collector’s shelf or into a reader’s hands and mind. “The acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money or expert knowledge alone,” Benjamin asserts, “Not even both factors together suffice for the establishment of a real library, which is always somewhat impenetrable and at the same time uniquely itself.” While the materials in the FORMER WEST Research Library, curated and managed by Jill Winder, curator of publications at BAK, may not be pre-destined for their collection here, their relevance for FORMER WEST research feels, to an extent, inevitable. This selection of exhibition catalogs, artist monographs, art theory, and cultural studies publications as well as works from theory, postcolonial studies, political history, geopolitics, and other fields, has shaped and continues to inform our collective effort to record, theorize, and historicize developments in contemporary art and intellectual debates from 1989 to the present.
The list of twelve books I have unpacked from the Research Library is biased, in that it is subjective and drawn solely from that library, but my personal choices have some bearing on the 2nd FORMER WEST Research Congress sessions, as outlined in the congress program: Positing the Horizon in Art, Philosophy, and Politics; Horizontality Enacted; and Reclaiming a Horizon—Art as Political Imagination. Only a few of the books I have chosen are by authors speaking in the 2nd FORMER WEST Research Congress, but all of them should allow us to prepare in advance for discussions that will take place shortly. Some are inspirations for thinking beyond our present moment, others challenge or highlight the underlying concerns of our research. Each title in the online Research Library is accompanied by a short entry describing its significance to the FORMER WEST research initiative. You will find that entry and publication details when you click on the title in the alphabetical Research Library listing. Here are my twelve:
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis.
Claire Bishop, ed., Participation: Documents in Contemporary Art.
Will Bradley and Charles Esche, eds., Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader.
Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left.
Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space.
Kathryn Dean, Capitalism and Citizenship: The Impossible Partnership.
Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World.
Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, Sandy Nairne, eds. Thinking About Exhibitions.
Oliver Roy ed., Turkey Today. A European Country?
Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson, eds., Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.
Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddenseig, eds., Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective.
Please peruse the on-line Research Library and send suggestions of books you feel would be beneficial to our research, by sending an e-mail with the name of the author, the title, and publication data to info@formerwest.org.