About a year ago, while trying to develop a wiki archive for contemporary art at e-flux, we encountered a small technical problem in deciding how to implement a simple menu structure to allow readers to navigate such an archive. We thought first to organize it according to movement. Yet there have been no significant movements in the past twenty years, and artists have not been interested in organizing themselves around any. By medium? But contemporary artists work with their materials in a variety of different, and more often hybrid, ways. By geographic region? Well, that approach is probably better suited ...

It’s yet uncertain what the lasting legacy of 2020 will be. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us,” Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940, “that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” We already know that in the US, the summer of 2020 will be remembered for its sustained state of emergency, when we emerged from stratified isolation and convened, in the millions, in the streets to affirm that black lives matter, that black breath is stolen at an overwhelmingly higher scale by the pandemic and by the largely extralegal military organization known ...

The Covid-19 pandemic has attacked not only our individual bodies, but our collective body as well. Through thirteen contributions by writers who are mostly from former socialist countries where the space of freedom is contracting once again, this special issue of e-flux journal asks what this collective body actually means, and what it has become. These changes are not only happening in Europe’s former socialist countries. Something similar is also occurring in Greece and Turkey, where two essays in the issue originate. This is not to say that all is well elsewhere, that democracy is thriving in Western Europe and North ...

After an all-night conversation with an old friend, you are ready to start the revolution together. But the next day, discussing the finer points over breakfast, you realize no, it’s impossible—in fact, this friend is actually a fascist. Her sentiment is right but her strategies could be disastrous. In order for the revolution to succeed, you will probably have to kill her. And this friend is thinking the same thing of you—a cowardly ideologue who hides behind an antiquated idea of historical progress in order to feel like a good person. Your grand political project from last night draws closer ...

Celebrating the arrival of 2013 on New Year’s Eve, many people must have wondered why they still existed. Wasn’t the world supposed to end on December 21 with the Mayan apocalypse?.. Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle The End of Neonationalism: On The Comparative Certainty of Extraterrestrial Life and its Significance for Humankind (Earth and the Solar System Section) The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind Epistemological Gaps between the Former Soviet East and the “Democratic” West Keti Chukhrov Freedom from Everything: Freelancers and Mercenaries Hito Steyerl Allegories of Art, Politics, and Poetry Alan Gilbert Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part II Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer, Cristina Freire, ...

Projections of the future that were made in the past are often striking in their bold naïvete—didn’t people understand then that future projections always end up looking like caricatures of past concerns? But whereas these projections do little to actually activate the future they foresaw, they do function as expressions of pure intention, and in this sense they are probably not so naïve. Rather, they indicate a certain bold willingness on the part of people of a certain time to define in explicit terms exactly how the future should function, and indeed, most of these projected futures never come to pass—they remain ...

The Heritage of 1989. Case Study: The Second Yugoslav Documents presents a re-enactment of the last big art exhibition in Yugoslavia. Titled Yugoslav Documents ’89, it was curated by the artists Jusuf Hadžifejzović and Rade Tadić and realized under the auspices of the ZOI ’84 Olimpijski centar Skenderija in the 8,000-square-meter Skenderija Center in Sarajevo in 1989. This was surely one of Yugoslavia’s largest exhibitions, if not, indeed, the largest. This re-enactment is interested in Yugoslav Documents primarily because this was the largest exhibition that bore the label “Yugoslav,” a label that, among other things, was meant to strengthen the ...

In the early years of the 21st century, Europe seems uncertainly placed between a deep sense of its own historical importance and anxiety about where it may go in the future. The European project, which for many of our institutions was a guiding principle, has run aground on the rocks of neo-liberalism and an economic priority that forgot about society’s politi- cal and cultural dimensions. The national project, on which the foundations of our museums (along with most of Europe’s other cultural institutions) were based, retains little of its 19th century ambitions to progressive, democratic thinking. As a result, cultural ...

The seventh volume of Carta(s) bears witness to the molecular fabric comprising Museo en Red, an exercise in alternative institutionalism which encompasses a relational framework of neighbourhood-city-State-world. Gathering these materials constitutes an exercise of revising and self-evaluating in response to the uncertain terrain the COVID-19 pandemic has charted, where affection has been accentuated, inequalities enhanced and the need to weave collaborative networks foregrounded.

In June 2015, Moderna galerija hosted a conference to coincide with NSK: from Kapital to Capital. This exhibition, an exhaustive project undertaken by Zdenka Badovinac, was an unprecedented coming together of the practices of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK)’s members: the multi-media group Laibach, the artists IRWIN, Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, the design department New Collectivism, the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy, Retrovision, Film, and Builders.

This book began as a two-part issue of e-flux journal devoted to the question: What is contemporary art? First, and most obviously: why is this question not asked? That is to say, why do we simply leave it to hover in the shadow of attempts at critical summation in the grand tradition of twentieth-century artistic movements? A single hegemonic “ism” has replaced clearly distinguishable movements and grand narratives. But what exactly does it mean to be working under the auspices of this singular ism? Widespread usage of the term “contemporary” seems so self-evident that to further demand a definition of “contemporary ...