Author(s): Jacob Lund

ART THEORY | STERNBERG PRESS

How our experience of presence, time and history are articulated in contemporary artistic practices.  Our present is defined by contemporaneity, understood as the interconnection of heterogeneous times, histories and temporalities.  The many and various times appearing today do not exist merely in parallel with each other, simultaneously.  They interconnect and are brought to bear on the same present, forming a kind of planetary present, and -  at least in principle - a global sharing of time, even though the possibility of taking part in and sharing these interconnections is most unevenly distributed.

In this collection of essays Jacob Lund explores how, in recent decades, the conditions for politically engaged art and aesthetic practice, for questioning the present, have changed, based on the assumption that our historical present and its temporal quality differs significantly from previous presents.  The Changing Constitution of the Present analyses how changes in our experiences of presence, time, and history are articulated in contemporary artistic practices.