FORMER WEST is a long-term, transnational research, education, publishing, and exhibition project in the field of contemporary art and theory. The project grapples with the repercussions of the political, cultural, and economic events of 1989 for the contemporary condition. It does so in the search for ways of formerizing the persistently hegemonic conjuncture that is “the West”; to be able instead to simply refer to “the west,” and with it, suggest the possibility of producing new constellations, another world, other worldings.
Through the propositional imaginary “former West,” the project brings forth a means by which to assess the contemporary at the intersection of two temporal constructions of “the West”: one equated with the “first world” of a post-WWII, tripartite Cold War arrangement; the other, synonymous with the notion of Western ultramodernity
