FREE ENTRY / Postcollapse Art: Art Since 1989 - Open Call

We are pleased to invite artists, writers, and scholars to submit work for inclusion in Postcollapse Art: Art Since 1989, an anthology that seeks to explore contemporary art and visual culture since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

Postcollapse Art: Art Since 1989 is an art and theory book that assembles a vast range of creative and critical work that has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet model of socialism in 1989. The book begins with the end of the Cold War and questions the declaration that the triumph of capitalism has marked “the end of history.” In doing so, the book collates and presents a diverse array of artwork, artist interviews, essays, memoir, poetry, archival material, found footage, and experimental practices to demonstrate the complex dialectics of the promises and failures of ideological worldmaking. The book’s “eastward out” vantage begins in “the east” through the specific examples of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the carving of new nation-states across East Europe and Central Asia; it ventures outward to East Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as to the sweeping reach of global diasporas to help picture, if not process, contemporary art and theory amidst ever-shifting and volatile grounds.

Not simply geographic therefore, we seek to define postcollapse as a porous temporal space in which to grapple with the psychic life of normalized instability, the fractured human experiences, widespread dispossession, renewed nationalisms, war profiteering, resource extractions, climate catastrophe, and the overwhelming dread that define our global contemporary. Ultimately, the book proposes “postcollapse” as a critical framework for rethinking human relationships and responsibility so that we might imagine otherwise.

We invite creative and critical work from artists, writers, and scholars that chronicles, reflects on, challenges, and otherwise engages the broad spectrum of social, political, economic, and ecological shifts in the decades following the collapse of the Soviet model of socialism. We welcome work that responds to overt social and political happenings, but we are also equally interested in works that investigate the ways in which artists rethink formal aspects and conceptual implications in response to the changing world. Personal accounts, memoirs, and works based on lived events are especially interesting. Please be sure that your work is written in a style or approach that can appeal to a wide audience. We welcome works that challenge Eurocentric humanism through “other-than-western” and decolonial approaches, and invite proposals that enable a comparative or dialogic vantage to rethinking the global contemporary.