Curated by Sabine Breitwieser

The dual condition of modernity—at once enlightenment project (secular democracy, social equality, and universal human rights) and catastrophe (totalitarianism, imperialism, exile, and world war)—provides a notoriously fraught heritage for our present. Assembling about one hundred works made over the past half century by thirty-one artists and collectives, from older generations (Gustav Metzger, Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark) to midcareer and emerging figures (Runa Islam, Paulina Olowska, Marine Hugonnier), curator Sabine Breitwieser (along with fellow catalogue essayists Cornelia Klinger and Walter Mignolo) hopes to reveal new ways of comprehending modernism’s parallel valences, its perceived failures and unfulfilled promises.

— T. J. Demos