All proceedings of FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects are available here.

Artworks, talks, discussions, rehearsals, and performances in various constellations of documents and prospects offer a multitude of encounters with the public for negotiating the way of the world from 1989 to today, and thinking beyond.

FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects is organized into five currents. Each day, students are involved in Learning Place—realized in collaboration with international cultural institutes, universities, and art academies—folded into contemporary negotiations on Art Production, Infrastructure, and Insurgent Cosmopolitanism. In addition, Dissident Knowledges contributions propose dynamic interventions into the ongoing program with artworks, performances, and statements.

For more information regarding FORMER WEST, see here.

CURRENTS:

ART PRODUCTION

The gap that has traditionally existed between artistic and non-artistic labor is increasingly narrowing, with artistic labor becoming more representative of society’s functioning as a whole. As the Internet has become the main worksite for art production and thus has become controllable in ways it never was before, this current raises new questions concerning the political dimensions of art and the role of the artist in contemporary society.

With contributions by: Franco Berardi Bifo, Alice Escher, Boaz Levin, Stefan Träger, Till Wittwer, Marina Naprushkina, Office for Anti-Propaganda, Qiu Zhijie, Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle.

Conceptualized by Boris Groys.

INFRASTRUCTURE

When we in the West, or in the industrialized, technologized societies, congratulate ourselves on having a well-functioning infrastructure, we forget the degree to which these have become protocols that bind and confine us in their demand to be conserved and resisted. In recognition of the need to think far beyond the models of organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or institution, this current offers a starting point from which to develop new pathways to understand infrastructure.

With contributions by: Köken Ergun, Stefano Harney, Adrian Heathfield, Louis Moreno, Füsun Türetken with Burak Arikan.

Conceptualized by Irit Rogoff.

INSURGENT COSMOPOLITANISM

Our comprehension of the polity has long been centered on the assumption of a consensual political contract between citizen and state. Recent insurgent upheavals, however, have unmasked this consensus as fiction, retrieving the ideal of cosmopolitanism as an active and critical strategy that sets itself against the grain of national(ist) restrictions. This current explores the continuing presence of a revolutionary hope of achieving solidarity through identifying points of affinity, shared criticality, and common affirmation.

With contributions by: Homi K. Bhabha, Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani, Ranjit Hoskote, Nikos Papastergiadis, Rasha Salti, Praneet Soi and Allan deSouza, Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan.

Conceptualized by Ranjit Hoskote.

DISSIDENT KNOWLEDGES

Defying conventional fictions and their established doctrines and institutions requires tapping into knowledges that offer new archives from which to read our contemporary moment. Often kept hidden in the cracks of our attention economy, this current uncovers and formulates knowledges that, by being at once embedded and excluded, have the power to both resist the known and propose new imaginaries of how things could be otherwise.

With contributions by: Maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durham, Daniel Baker, Neil Beloufa, James Benning, Ethel Brooks, Tania Bruguera, Chen Chieh-jen, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Phil Collins, Josef Dabernig, Ekaterina Degot, Manthia Diawara, Marlene Dumas, Marcus Geiger, Nida Ghouse, IRWIN, Hassan Kahn, Július Koller, Nicolas Kozakis and Raoul Vaneigem, Li Ran Thomas Locher, Sharon Lockhart, Teresa Margolles, Radhouane El Meddeb, Aernout Mik, Nástio Mosquito, Rabih Mroué, Marion von Osten, Stefan Panhans, Piotr Piotrowski, Rasha Salti, Christoph Schlingensief with Nina Wetzel, Matthias Lilienthal, and Paul Poet, Keiko Sei, Mladen Stilinovic, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, and Tom Trevatt, Ultra-red.

FORMER WEST Berlin Public Editorial Meeting moderated by Simon Sheikh.

Prospective Statements moderated by Boris Buden.

Conceptualized by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.

Learning Place

Learning Place

18.–24.03.2013

FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects—Learning Place