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Why the Backwards Smile?
Why the Backwards Smile?

Slavs and Tatars

Reverse Joy

Reverse Joy looks at the role of mysticism in the perpetual protest movement at the heart of the Shi’a faith for its radical reconsideration of history and justice. Inserting oneself, flesh and faith, into the events that transpired thirteen centuries ago; the collapse of traditional understandings of time; the reversal of the roles of men and women; and joy through mourning are only some of the topics discussed in this essay. Though each one of them demands an equally elastic...
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About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

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Should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea?
Should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea?

Zairong Xiang (ed.)

minor cosmopolitan

Around the turn of the millennium, academics and politicians predicted that the world would grow together as one and that people would become less bound by national affiliations. Almost twenty years later, there is little left of this vision. This is not such a surprise when we consider that the cosmopolitan ideal (as articulated during the European Enlightenment) wholeheartedly embraced the promises of a globalising economy, yet has remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalist exploitation, slavery, and colonialism....
  • cosmopolitics
  • art theory
  • politics
  • globalization
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Current Texts

Sandra Frimmel

Why should this be art?

I Hate the Avant-Garde. When an artist as self-ironic and self-reflective as Yuri Albert makes such a statement about art, then skepticism is called for. Like his overall series Elitist-Democratic Art, the title deliberately plays with simple affirmations and negations, and at the same time exhibits the inherent receptive dilemma of the series: a (large) part of the artistically trained viewers see these shorthand works as abstract forms, without understanding the text, and only the few who can read (Russian) shorthand perceive a text, which for them doesn’t necessarily have to be art. I Hate the Avant-Garde was created in 2017, after a sketch made in 1987 in reaction to a changed situation in the reception of nonconformist art. With the beginning of perestroika, unofficial art that had hitherto been excluded from the state-run art scene—that is, from the official infrastructure of museums and exhibition spaces, and from art scholarship...

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  • democracy
  • avant-garde
  • writing