Off-Modern

Svetlana Boym writes a new genealogy of modernity moving beyond older debates between modernism and postmodernism to focus on the intersection of art architecture technology and philosophy in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of Georg Simmel Henri Bergson Aby Warburg and Jacques Derrida Boym presents the off-modern as an eccentric self-questioning anti-authoritarian perspective with roots in the Russian avant-garde now developed in surprising ways by contemporary artists architects and curators around the world. She illustrates the off-modern in discussions of (and with) figures as diverse as architect Rem Koolhaas Albanian artist-turned-mayor Edi Rama an art collective in Delhi and the creator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Both a manifesto and a memoir <i>The Off-Modern</i> often returns to themes of travel and immigration exploring issues of diasporic intimacy and productive estrangement amid nostalgic landscapes of urban ruins.