The conference reconsiders the questions that concern both human society and the entire planet, thus, all of nature, and are, in this sense, universal.

The time of the coronavirus pandemic has accumulated and more clearly exposed various crises – the environmental crisis, the migrant crisis and the crisis of public systems, especially of healthcare, education and culture – which all have a common denominator: global capitalism. Times of crises – typically exploited by those who use them to make a profit – give birth to authoritarian regimes and lead to increased violations in universal human rights and the rights of nature. To this list, we could also add the crisis of politics or, more precisely, the crisis of political alternatives capable of drawing up programmes that, in view of the abovementioned, must today function universally.

Throughout the decades of the post-modern critique of totality, grand narratives, and utopias and the emphasis on the significance of particularity, difference, polycentrism, etc., universalism as a political and ideological project of social progress in the modern age has been devalued. In fact, the very concept of the universal has lost some of its meaning. Parallel with this devaluation and loss of meaning, the project of neoliberalism has been equated with globalism, becoming the absolute force that – according to the measure of the market – determines the world.

The coronavirus pandemic, at least seemingly and temporarily, has shaken the main premises of neoliberalism. It has shown that what was only yesterday unimaginable, the slowing down of the economy, for example, is possible. It has shown that the problems of rapid economic progress and growth and the destruction of nature and the environment – long-warned by their critics – have truly been brought to the extreme and that the pandemic is their consequence. The pandemic has given us a lesson on the meaning of solidarity and co-dependence. It has shed light on the urgent need for public goods, the public sector, cooperation with civil society and sustainable and close-to-nature development.

And how has the pandemic that has shaken the entire world impacted art and its institutions? What does the “entire world” mean in these concrete circumstances? How much is this entire world also our world?

Throughout the 20th century, many considered that art had to be universal and it had to search for generally valid patterns, an (abstract) art language beyond national borders and cultural differences, beyond the particular. What we have also learnt from this period is that particular – hegemonic, imperialistic, and colonialist – interests can hide behind the concept of the universal. Today, when the art world is oriented towards geographical and cultural differences and racial, sexual, and other particularities, capital has taken over the task of abstracting. Artistic imaginaries follow both; just as we have increasingly more “realisms” and community-based projects, so the artists engage in the visualization of the dominant abstract forces of capital.

The conference will focus on two broader topics in the framework of the conditions described above:

• The first concerns the particular questions that, through art and its system, touch on various agencies and micro policies – from advocating for the rights of various minorities and communities and all sorts of improvements in local environments to the fight against racism, the growing nationalisms and populisms, the destruction of nature, etc. Today, we certainly cannot imagine the concept of the common without addressing the question of the particular. Must art and its institutions thus remain more committed to particular and concrete topics, or can they connect them into a transversal critical platform?

• The second tackles the question of how art today imagines universalism and how it represents the all-encompassing forces, such as the force of global capitalism. How can artists represent totality, the universal, today? What can historical social and artistic projects on the universal teach us about the needs of the present time? How does art represent the fact that we live in a time of digital abstraction and the rule of abstract capital?

Join us in reconsidering the universal in the time of global capitalism and the pandemic and in rethinking our common future and the presence of art in the (entire) world that is (not yet) our world.

She is also a visiting professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She is particularly known for her work on the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, and is the author of numerous articles and books including The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (MIT Press, 2003), The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008), Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions (NSU Press, 2008), Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (Verso, 2012), and, most recently, What is Sex?

Groys’s work focuses on the avant-garde as well as contemporary art and art theory. His curatorial projects include the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011) and his work as co-curator of the Shanghai Biennale (2012). He also curated the 8th Triennial of Contemporary Art U3: Beyond the Globe, at the Moderna galerija, Ljubljana (2016). His books include: History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (MIT Press, 2010), An Introduction to Antiphilosophy (Verso Books, 2012), Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media (Columbia University Press, 2012), On the New (Verso Books, 2014), In the Flow (Verso Books, 2016), and Russian Cosmism (MIT Press, 2018).

He has been a member of the editorial board for the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory since 2004 and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books. He is the author of The Theatre of Production (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010; 2nd edition, 2017), and co-author of the Cartographies of the Absolute (Zero Books, 2015). Toscano, also a translator of Negri, Badiou and others, has published widely on critical theory, politics, and culture.

She worked as a professor and the head of the Monumental Department (Department of Public Art) at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 2003 until 2008. She completed her PhD at the Malmö Art Academy of Lund University in Sweden in 2013. She has been a professor at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts since 2014.
Šušteršič develops transdisciplinary and participatory projects for and within the public space. The following are some of her works: Home Design Service (Casco Projects, Utrecht, 2001), Garden Service (with Meike Schalk, Edinburgh International Festival, 2007), SUNSETCINEMA (with Bik van der Pol, Luxembourg, 2007), Community Pavilion Hustadt (Bochum, 2011), and Neighbours and Citizens (Gävle, 2015–). She has exhibited extensively, including at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Berlin Biennale 3, Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, the Generali Foundation in Vienna, the Tirana Biennale 3, Muhka in Antwerp, and the 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture.

In 2018, ruangrupa co-initated GUDSKUL: a contemporary art collective and ecosystem studies. GUDSKUL is a public learning space established to practice an expanded understanding of collective values, such as equality, sharing, solidarity, friendship, and togetherness.
As an artistic collective, ruangrupa has been involved in many collaborative and exchange projects, including participation in large exhibitions such as the Gwangju Biennale (2002, 2018), the Istanbul Biennale (2005), the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, 2012), the Singapore Biennale (2011), the São Paulo Biennale (2014), the Aichi Triennale (Nagoya, 2016), and Cosmopolis at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2017). In 2016, ruangrupa curated transACTION: Sonsbeek 2016 in Arnhem, NL. Most recently, ruangrupa has been selected as the artistic director of the documenta 15 (Kassel, 2022).

Demos is the author of numerous books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award – and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). Demos co-curated Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas, at Nottingham Contemporary in January 2015, and organized Specters: A Ciné-Politics of Haunting, at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2014. During 2019–21, with the Center for Creative Ecologies, and as a Getty research institute scholar, he’s working on a Mellon-funded research project, art exhibition, and book project dedicated to the questions: what comes after the end of the world, and how can we cultivate futures of social justice within capitalist ruins? His new book, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing was recently released by Duke University Press.

He collaborates with the cultural festivals Indigo, Sonica, and Grounded as well as projects in development Gallery Cukrarna and European Capital of Culture Ljubljana 2025.