Congress

4-6 November 2010

2nd FORMER WEST Research Congress, On Horizons: Art and Political Imagination

Photo by Ilgin Yanmaz

A detailed program and video recordings of all lectures presented during the 2nd FORMER WEST Research Congress, On Horizons: Art and Political Imagination, are available here.

The 2nd FORMER WEST Research Congress, titled On Horizons: Art and Political Imagination, takes place on 4–6 November 2010 and revolves around the theoretical notion of the “horizon” in relation to contemporary artistic production and political imaginaries. As part of the series of public gatherings aimed at rendering visible and furthering the artistic, curatorial, and academic research in which the project FORMER WEST is grounded, it conceptually links to and departs from work undertaken during the 1st FORMER WEST Research Congress (November 2009), which brought together international artists, educators, scholars, and curators in a collective effort to critically map post-1989 artistic, theoretical, historical, and political developments with respect to the problematic of the West’s “formerness.”

On Horizons: Art and Political Imagination understands the contested term of the horizon as not only suggestive of political aims or utopias, but as the very frame for any aesthetic and political project. Since the 1989 (default) victory of capitalist democracy over the only functioning competing ideological system, communism, the loss of an overarching project of social progress seems to have left the world bereft of a horizon of opposition to the dominance of free-market capitalism. Nevertheless, an idea of the political understood as an impulse for empowerment against the illusion of hegemonic consensus seems to have found its home in contemporary art, reclaiming with renewed vigor art’s potential as a mode of practice that can lead to social change. The international artists, scholars, and curators participating in the 2nd FORMER WEST Research Congress, On Horizons: Art and Political Imagination, explore how diverse forms of artistic and cultural production, as well as their discourses, designate or foreclose certain aesthetic and political horizons, and how they partake in specific imaginaries or may even produce new ones.

Speakers include, among others: Beatriz Colomina (architecture historian and theorist, Princeton), Bülent Diken(sociologist, Lancaster), Caglar Keyder (sociologist, Binghamton and Istanbul), Vasif Kortun (curator and writer, Istanbul), Ernesto Laclau (philosopher, Paris), Lisette Lagnado (curator, São Paulo), Peter Osborne (philosopher, London), Ultra-red (artist collective, New York), Shuddhabrata Sengupta (artist, Delhi), Simon Sheikh (curator, Berlin), Hito Steyerl (artist, Berlin), Gerald Raunig (philosopher, Vienna), and Dmitry Vilensky (artist, St. Petersburg).

Venue: Istanbul Technical University, Taskisla Campus, Room 109, Istanbul.

For more information regarding FORMER WEST, see here.

Suggestions from the archive

Sint Maarten Parade

22 October–10 November 2023

BAK at the Sint Maarten Parade 2023

For Sint Maarten Parade 2023, Tools for Action—a non-profit organization that develops artistic interventions for political actions—collaborates with Utrecht-based members of Filipino, Caribbean, and other communities to collectively dream a parade compartment.

Crowdfunding Campaign

09 September–08 December 2023

Join Our Crowdfunding Campaign: Support Freefilmers!

The project To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023) and the project To Watch the War, In Solidarity are accompanied by a crowdfunding campaign in support of Freefilmers—some of its members are artists and activist filmmakers included in the exhibition and public program.

Panel Discussion

30 September 2023, 16.30-18.30

To the Other Side of the Concrete Wall

A book launch and panel discussion reflecting on the Jina Uprising, one year after its beginning.

Saturday, 30 September, 2023, 16:30–18:30 hrs at BAK, basis actuele kunst, Utrecht Organized by Jina Collective, a Netherlands-based feminist, leftist, anti-capitalist, anti-sexist, and pro-LQBTQIA+ action group that emerged from the Jina Uprising. This event launches a book of translated essays, co-published with BAK, which include some of the first English translations of texts by journalists […]

Public Program

09 September–29 October 2023

To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023)/Public Program

To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023) involves a hybrid off- and online sequence of conversations and screenings around discursive and artistic interventions that reimagine the social implications of watching the war through ways that disrupt, subvert, resist the media’s incessant spectacularization of war.