The New Dictionary of Old Ideas - book release

We took the theme of Central Europe, a formation between the East and West, which in the course of centuries has changed its geographic as well as political dimensions more times –– as a departure point. Even though the identity topics seem to have been thoroughly discussed in the past few decades, yet the topic of Central Europe keeps striking back with the current situation, the rise of nationalistic politics, populism, and extremism –– tendencies that can be observed not just locally but on the whole continent. Since we were looking for what issues in society bother and interest contemporary artists the most, we strove to keep the project framework as open as possible, but it still needed at least rough outlines. Hence we put together several initial terms, wittingly rather vague, as a sort of lexicon –– The New Dictionary of Old Ideas, which you can find in this book. Taking those as a starting point we were interested in the way they can be developed, researched and expanded.
 

With contributions by Milena Bartlová, Cristina Bogdan, Boris Buden, Data Chigholashvili & Alba Folgado, Anetta Mona Chişa, Flóra Gadó, Lucia Kvočáková & Piotr Sikora, Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Agata Pyzik, Oleksiy Radynski, Jan Sowa and others 

and artworks by Erick Beltrán, Verónica Lahitte, Elena Lavellés, Irmina Rusicka, Monika Szpener, Adéla Součková, Katharina Stadler, Sandro Sulaberidze, Nino Zirakashvili, Jiří Žák and others

Edited by Lucia Kvočáková & Piotr Sikora


The New Dictionary of Old Ideas project is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The project is organized by MeetFactory / Prague (CZ) in cooperation with TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art / Szczecin (PL), hablarenarte / Madrid (ES), and The State Silk Museum / Tbilisi (GE).