The Covid-19 pandemic has attacked not only our individual bodies, but our collective body as well. Through thirteen contributions by writers who are mostly from former socialist countries where the space of freedom is contracting once again, this special issue of e-flux journal asks what this collective body actually means, and what it has become.

Through its aesthetic liberation of things, ideas, and layers of time, art constructs imaginaries of interdependence, which in their own way contribute to a society of solidarity. Today, during this time of pandemic, we like to talk about us all being in the same boat, a metaphor that has replaced the catastrophic image of overcrowded boats of refugees crossing the Mediterranean. But the most powerful metaphor of the present time is the metaphor of the virus, which represents how everything influences everyone. But this is only our view of viruses, our exploitation of its properties. What viruses themselves think about this, nobody knows.

Continued from Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe, Part I Zdenka Badovinac: What you’ve mentioned leads me to the question of identity versus other international questions that were being explored around 1968. How much are we forcing this Eastern European identity? This question only occurred after the Soviet regime collapsed. Before the fall of the wall, in Russia or in other Eastern and Central European countries, did artists talk about this? Piotr Piotrowski: They did…

While the discourse and study of conceptual art in the West is supposedly well-formed, artists in Eastern Europe have worked with a similar formal vocabulary for decades. Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, where I am director, was the first institution in Europe to start systematically collecting works by mostly Eastern European neo-avant-garde artists since the 1990s. Since then, the collection Arteast 2000+ has steadily grown, and yet for many highly complex reasons the history of…

When the editors of e-flux journal invited me to write about contemporaneity, they suggested that I take my own professional experience as a starting point. And it seems that, in order to understand contemporaneity, we cannot neglect the particularity of various approaches. Contemporary theory, however, and especially Badiouan theory, teaches that this can lead us astray and we should rather devote ourselves to thinking about a new understanding of universality. For this reason, I have…

When we try to resolve the problems of the present, we often look to the past. One chapter from the unfinished past is, without doubt, the project of communism. What can cultural revolution have in common with potential solutions to the current financial crisis? Today the world’s esteemed economists and sociologists assert that the key to solving the economic crisis lies not in some new mechanical device, but rather in the creativity of as many people as possible and the development of new…