No More Westerns

Recognising the possibility that Europe and America’s economies may play a secondary role in the future compels us to enquire into the cultural changes our world will undergo as a result. What might a global media landscape - that can no longer be called ‘western’ - look like, and how might it affect cultural practice? Commissioned in 2008 by WGSN, a forecasting agency under pressure to supply global cultural trends, Potter launched a four-year project with Shanghai-based researcher Samantha Culp to investigate ‘non-western’ contemporary creative practice. Due to the unprecedented scope of the project - 12 reports including Global South Futurism, Afrofutures, Chinafrica Arts and JPEG politics, based on extensive research trips to China, India, Indonesia, Senegal, South Africa, Russia and Brazil - Potter and Culp were commissioned to co-curate the 2012 Impakt Arts Festival, titled ‘No More Westerns in Utrecht’. This included the festival exhibition ‘The Impossible Black Tulip’. Discussions on post-western futures occur on online platforms such as Africa is a Country and in disparate memes such as Futuristic Masjids, however these impulses have not been collected and displayed as artworks within a cohesive exhibition format. 18 young artists, most of whom had never exhibited in Europe, were invited to critically explore ideas of multi-directional cultural flows, hybrid languages and indigenous innovation along a south-south arts axis. The CBKU-Gallery was reconstructed into a mutated ‘white cube’, leading the audience through a utopian-whitewashed atrium into the semi-lit ‘backstage’, commenting on formal and informal channels of global culture. Funded by the Mondriaan Fund, a Dutch state-financed cultural organization, The Cultural Participation Fund and the Arts Collaboratory, supporters of knowledge sharing between Africa, Asia and Latin-America, the event aimed to generate new knowledge on post-western culture. Subsequent funding has been received from the Utrecht Peace Treaty to launch an online platform in November 2013 called ‘PoW! – Charting the Post-Western’.