PROJECT 1975 Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Unconscious

Out now!

Get your copy at:

* SMBA bookstore
* Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam bookstore
* black dog publishing

Project 1975 started as a two-year program of Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. The project was set on exploring the relationship between contemporary art and postcoloniality, which gains more and more relevance to artists and thinkers in a context of a globalizing art world. It addressed key questions such as: How do artists today view the historic or contemporary acts of colonial powers? Do colonial mindsets persist ?in art and its institutions? What can replace the tacitly embraced multicultural normalization of the 1990s? These questions elicited versatile artistic and critical responses, many of which are presented and discussed in freshly released volume Project 1975 - Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Unconscious.





In the title, 1975 refers to the year of the questionable transition from colonialism to postcolonialism. Project 1975 exposes some of the complex and unresolved issues arising from colonialism, and the ambivalence that is inherent to the term ‘postcolonial’. Contemporary art is an eminently suitable outlet for reflections on these issues, not least because of? its widespread critical tendency towards today’s geopolitics and its concurrent involvement with it.

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Project 1975 is structured around two art-theoretical positions offered by Sven Lütticken and Ashley Dawson respectively. It furthermore comprises interviews by and with some of the artists and curators who contributed to the project: Alfredo Jaar, kari’kacha seid’ou, Koyo Kouoh, Charl Landvreugd, Senam Okudzeto, Vincent Vulsma and Katarina Zdjelar.

The book also contains visual overviews and information of the exhibitions, presentations, debates, commissioned art works and publications made in the framework of Project 1975, in SMBA and elsewhere.

Project 1975

Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Unconscious

Editors:
Jelle Bouwhuis & Kerstin Winking
Design:
Bitcaves
Publisher:
SMBA Amsterdam / black dog publishing, London, 2014
Paperback, 184 pages
170 b/w and colour ills, 24.0 x 17.0 cm
ISBN: 978 1 908966 22 3
Price:
€23,- / $29,95 / £19,95