ARTMargins will release its first issue in February 2012 (MIT Press). The print publication joins the well-known ARTMargins website, which was started in 1999. ARTMargins will publish articles, essays, reviews, and interviews that critically reflect on Eastern European contemporary art and curatorship in an expanded context comprising Eurasia, North Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central Asia. Mindful of the different geo-political realities that characterize these regions and of the global economic forces that drive their development, ARTMargins invites artists, art theorists, art historians, and curators to reflect on what editor Sven Spieker has called the “thickened global margin.” Within the very fabric of a present moment characterized by different (and often incompatible) temporalities and national agendas, ARTMargins wants to help locate transversal commonalities and zigzagging trajectories that connect post-Socialist Eastern Europe with other regions.

A far cry from the emphatic claims to homogeneity and universalism that characterized postmodern globalism, such an endeavor implies a shift in the definition of what it means to speak to, or from, the margins: away from the binary center-margin model (East/West) that dominated modernism and postmodernism alike to one that conceives of the periphery as a nomadic zone of contact in which the possibilities for a different future may be explored. ARTMargins will be as interested in following artists from Northern India as they chart a trajectory from Delhi to Warsaw, as it might investigate modernist tendencies in Moldovan art practice of the 1970s, or concurrent takes on global migration by photographers from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The point here is not to objectify the perceived or real similarities between heterogeneous regions of the world but rather to argue that there may be such a thing as an ever-widening (yet non-homogeneous) global periphery created and animated by artistic practices whose description and analysis cannot rely on the paradigms inherited from the pre-1989 era.

The first issues of ARTMargins will include texts by Boris Groys, Angela Harutyunyan, Svetlana Boym, Octavian Esanu, and others.

Alongside ARTMargins, ARTMargins Online will continue to publish original reviews, podcasts, review articles, and interviews that reflect on the state of contemporary art in Eastern Europe. ARTMargins Online and ARTMargins are separate publications that do not duplicate each other’s content.