Afterall journal celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2009. In the late 1990s, Mark Lewis and myself, as researchers at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London, developed the idea to produce a publication that would occupy a double position in relation to artistic work, in some ways reflecting the different engagements each of us had with it. The journal was intended to offer a close reading of artworks, and at the same time relate them to the wider context from which they are born and upon which they act. Those ideas were brought to fruition in early 1999 with the first issue of the journal (issue 0), which featured the work Fiona Banner, Pavel Büchler, Jeremy Deller, Pierre Huyghe and Superflex. From its inception, Afterall was conceived as a critical organ that would, on the one hand, cover the individual artists (or artists' collectives) in depth, with multiple texts on different aspects of their work, and, on the other, include articles looking at the conditions of art in the world, especially its possible socio-political function and capacity for commentary. We are today aware that, at the beginning, the journal was a decidedly Western European publication - the majority of the artists and articles reflected the conditions in the old imperial centres at the end of the millennium. The addition of CalArts as a co-publisher and Thomas Lawson as a co-editor in 2002 strengthened a North American focus that had been there to some extent from the start, and in 2007 MuHKA in Antwerp joined the editorial group, bringing Dieter Roelstraete into the editorial team, adding a third issue per year, and restructuring