Issue 1

For the Afterall pilot issue, we have invited five artists whose work reflects upon the legacy of modernist ideas and strategies as they impact on our fractured and hybrid culture at the end of the century. The afterword to our last issue described this territory as ‘the realm of the familiar and the déjà vu‘, and the texts reflect this idea through their concentration on the transfer of existing information and knowledge from one situation to another. In particular, this issue concerns itself with the many metaphors for travel, departure and arrival – both geographic and chronological – as ideas, objects, data and people move between locations or are revealed as different layers coexisting in time.

The perceived failure of modernism in terms of its socially transformative ambition also looms in the background. This failure is not interpreted negatively but as a condition of art that acknowledges the new possibilities created by a shift in focus to the specific and local. The artists here are neither interested in producing models for a perfect society nor in an ironic encounter with the impossibility of making art. Instead, they examine particular histories, sites and concepts and draw these aspects into a dialogue with the viewer that is necessarily personal and contingent.