After Year Zero : Geographies of Collaboration (Paperback)

The project (ie the exhibition and the publication) After Year Zero takes as its starting point the realignment of global relationships after the Second World War – Europe’s “hour zero.” However, it does not recount the post-1945 confrontation of the ideological blocs of the Cold War, and rather focuses on the world-historical caesura of decolonization.

This investigation does not revolve around the confrontation, or the separation of identities, between the global North and South, but around models and geographies of collaboration, and reflection on the processes by which the “universal” is generated. By highlighting particular historical developments, it takes into account the fundamental interconnection of European and African history along with their respective narratives.

To design and build new narratives of these historic events, to re-discover unpredictable and forgotten connections and alliances magazines, journals and newspapers will serve as a main source but also as a topic for the divers essays, written by researchers, authors, artists, curators, critics, architects and scientists. “Where no art history exists, critical journals and other related platforms are crucial to molding its discourse and involve all the intellectual processes that such an undertaking implies.” This first sentence of the mission statement of NKA - Journal of Contemporary African Art, which was co-founded in 1994 by Okwui Enwezor, the artistic director of Documenta 11 and head of the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich, crystallises the main concern of many magazines launched at various times and different places within the African continent or the African diaspora.

The format of magazines is not so much understood as a business model but rather as a periodical and often temporary intervention against a hegemonic voice. These were often set up under precarious circumstances as a collaborative artistic form of organizing discourse, critique and self-expression, but also as a format which renders possible the necessary task of creating a new language to talk about art, life and politics. 

The publication After Year Zero  is not only a collection of new text-essays which accompanies the correspondent exhibition (at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in 2013 and at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2015) but contains also eight different visual-essays around different emphases which are designed like a collage of documents, quotes, images, short contextual texts serving as the apparent surface of the historic narrative. Another relevant part of the book span the works by more than twenty artists present in the exhibition.