The central question of the Congress was “What impact did the events of 1989 have on the West and its art? A mental map and a space for discussion was laid out by the organizers to begin thinking of the West as “former”; it soon became clear that many seminal events took place during the same year — the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Tiananmen square protests, the withdrawal of Russian troops from Afghanistan and Cuba, the end of dictatorships in South America, and many others, not least the initial stages of the World Wide Web.

Four key-note speakers set the tone on the fi rst day. Sarat Maharaj discussed three seminal 1989 exhibitions — “Magiciens de la Terre” at the Center George Pompidou, “The Other Story” at the Hayward Gallery and the Havana Biennial — to elaborate on the shift in curatorial practices from juxtaposition to entanglement. He suggested looking at the “rise of the rest” rather than the “demise of the West,” shifting the perspective from the East-West to a North-South set of “complex entanglements of competing realities” divided by what he termed the “Visa-line” — those who do and those who don’t need a visa to enter “the West.” Boris Groys formulated the present as a production site in which everyone is an artist. Assembling collections of images and information in archives on individuals’ websites, social networking sites, YouTube and blogs, consequently enables (re-)constructing personal history and identity. The last two speakers addressed the topic from a more sociological and psycholanalytical point of view. Sociologist Paul Gilroy dismissed the term “former West” as wishful thinking within a neo-imperialist politics and our continuous state of war. Philosopher

and sociologist Renata Salecl diagnosed late capitalism with feelings of anxiety, guilt and shame as a consequence of seemingly unlimited freedom of choice and the pressure of the option to always become a better ‘you.’ Presentations rather than conversations took place during the following days focusing on globalization and the fall and possible rise of Marx(ism), institutional critique and its political possibilities, and attempts to formulate a (conceptual) history of exhibition making (Pablo Lafuente, Piotr Piotrowski and Simon Sheikh). The diversity of experiences and positions was perhaps most clearly exemplifi ed by Okwui Enwezor’s intervention, which suggested a mapping of global entanglements and histories in which the West, or Europe, should be one province among many others. Simultaneously at BAK was the exhibition “Surplus Value” by Romanian artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, curated by Cosmin Costinas. Paintings, photographs, films and videos displayed a highly personal reworking of only one, specifi cally Romanian, experience.