At this stage of the FORMER WEST research project, which began in 2008, the titular object of our research—a former West—is absent, and the outcomes are unpredictable. This is in part due to the collaborative, exploratory nature of the project which, without lapsing into a historicist fetishization of dates and chronological development, studies the global legacies and ramifications of the artistic, political, cultural, and economic events of 1989 within the expanded field of contemporary art. It goes without saying that 1989 was a momentous year in the late twentieth century for myriad reasons. But the celebratory images of the destruction of the Berlin Wall, broadcast and published worldwide that November, are arguably the quickest to arise in our collective memory because they depict a tangible breakthrough in what was an ongoing and frequently inscrutable economic, military, and political restructuring of the world. Those images provide literal, concrete proof of historical change (there was no real Iron Curtain to tear down, after all) and bear a heavy symbolic burden. Over time, they have come to simultaneously represent the end of the Cold War, the erosion of borders between East and West, and the triumph of capitalism over communism in the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. They mark a homogenizing passage from the temporal mode of ‘actually existing’ to the mode of being former, a passage that necessarily involves the interdependent and conflicting processes of commemoration and forgetting.
FORMER WEST does not seek to predict or portray a similar eventual passage of the West into the state of being former, in some future hence, or to provide a definitive account of contemporary art of past two decades. Rather, it is driven by aspirations to speculate about the characteristics of this still uncharted terrain—a world emancipated from western domination and neoliberal capitalism—and to arrive at a critical vantage point from which to view and interpret our contemporaneity. It proposes to achieve this primarily through careful attention to and analysis of contemporary cultural artifacts and a strong engagement with post-communist and post-colonial thought. FORMER WEST is a heterogeneous, transdisciplinary project that involves rethinking and rearticulating the relationship between art, politics, and social change in the present and for the future, and as such resists totalization and easy consensus.
If a former West is beyond our grasp, except metaphorically, the diverse materials that comprise FORMER WEST research in progress are accessible throughout the duration of the project, whose research cycle official ends in 2013, but whose repercussions we trust will endure. FORMER WEST research is developed through exhibitions, research congresses, seminars, and publications, as well as in a major international exhibition, a critical reader and catalogue toward the end of the research trajectory. Within this online platform you will find a visual and textual record of the research undertaken to date by a wide range of artists, curators, scholars and institutions, and it will continue to be enriched with content from upcoming events.
There is no ideal way to navigate this platform. The singularity of the propositions, even when grouped together in a specific seminar or exhibition at one of the partner institutions, maintain. They offer partial, multi-referential, and challenging ways of thinking through the vast, continually shifting dynamics of global capitalism and its cultural and political effects. However, regular editorials will provide updates and draw attention to specific problematics, themes, and artistic practices and priorities assessed, as well as new theories tested, within the FORMER WEST research trajectory. We hope that you will benefit from this initiative and encourage you to become informed and get involved in our activities.
Vivian Rehberg, curator of research