In this sense we are looking at two distinct approaches to contemporaneity - one that has already been fully institutionalized, and another that still evades definition. There is a lot of work to be done here - how do we acknowledge the parameters that have already been established? At the same time, there is some agency in how it is left open - how can we also use this to form our own parameters for browsing, historicizing recent activity in a way that also recognizes the agency of its still-incompleteness, of its complex ability to play host so many narratives and trajectories without necessarily having to absorb them into a central logic or determined discourse .... before it forms a historical narrative and logic of exclusion that we would much rather disavow?

　　Most recently, I was invited by Hal Foster to respond to a questionnaire for October on a similar topic, "The Contemporary," in which one question asked whether this elusive condition might be caused by "a merely local perception." This may very well be the case, and I feel that a conversation on this topic could be most productive and urgent situated in Shanghai, one city among many in which canonical approaches to the history of modernism can examined with attention to its alternate uses and possible other readings. The lecture series will take place at the Sino-Soviet Friendship Hall, built as a gift from Stalin to Mao Zedong in 1955. Currently used as a trade show center for a variety of fairs, from luxury boats to contemporary art, it is in itself an artifact of a very different kind of modernity -- one that is very far from the purity of modernism that Danto refers to so apocalyptically in his book.

　　The conference will be structured as a series of short lectures and one or two panels, the contents of which will be subsequently published in the Fall issue of e-flux journal.

　　Anton Vidokle

　　Participating speakers :

　　Hu Fang is a fiction writer, art critic and curator as well as the Artistic Director of Vitamin Creative Space, an alternative art space in Guangzhou. He was one of the editors of Documenta 12 magazines.

　　Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist, and an internationally acclaimed expert on late-Soviet postmodern art and literature, as well as on the Russian avant-garde. Dr. Groys’s writing engages the wildly disparate traditions of French poststructuralism and modern Russian philosophy.