Every newspaper is programmatic in essence. It does not only respond to the demand to propose in itself a space of actuality, but it also addresses a public that constitutes its audience. With this hereby launched edition of the online newspaper Zombie a double confusion is at work, which we have chosen to embrace as its founding moment.
The figure Zombie marks a threshold. It introduces a delay, a presence in relation to both sides of a temporal gap. Neither belonging entirely to the realm of the living nor merging completely into the realm of the dead, it is a figure out of joint. But as much as Zombie indicates something that is still present, that remains and that comes back again and again, it is also a symptom of that, what cannot appear properly within its time at all. Zombie therefore is as well an element of the present that only can appear as if being out of time.
Accordingly Zombie transgresses different places in time and suggests an intricate mode of appearing. But the past that lingers in it shouldn't simply be addressed in order to convey it for a prosperous future. Where one might observe an obsession with the repetitive promise of a future to come, with Zombie we would like to establish a position, which acknowledges its being out of joint in the first place. As simple as it might sound, Zombie is about both the experience of time and the question of appearing in time.
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The newspaper Zombie investigates the destiny of Ukrainian contemporary art, since it died in its most recent appearance, that is the remake according to the Western model that the Ukrainian culture as such experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among other symptoms this situation presented itself with the disappearance of proper funding for non-profit art institutions. Now the corps of Ukrainian contemporary art became alive - without thought and will, and bound to the control of local capital. De-intellectualized and separated from factual social problems, this condition can indeed be treated as a life after death.
Zombie is interested in the Ukrainian experience, an artistic ghetto, for different reasons. One is that Zombie wants to relate this experience, which from time to time might appear to be tragic in its forced idiotism, to the international state of contemporary art. Since the Ukrainian artistic situation is a brutal caricature of the international art situation, it could become an effective instrument of its critique as well. Practices and knowledge aligned with them could turn out as a mean for undoing the so called neo-liberal model of culture.
With Ukrainian contemporary art as its subject Zombie acknowledges in this regard that its actuality is dispersed, that it is rather to be found amongst the gaps and ruptures that form the ground of contemporaneity than in the present-bound production as which contemporary art is maintained today - an endless succession of repetitive events, it seems. But returning such a scattered memory with Zombie suggests a place at which past and present enter a constellation in tension. The actuality Zombie proposes consists in a notion of contemporaneity that would take into account the different time-places, which are at work in the present.
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Other questions emerge. For instance – how could the practice of art and theory possibly relate to the failure, or rather the non-appearance of an anticipated future? How to those hopes that didn't come true, that never came into being? How to the distance and the gap they leave? Or else, are such gaps always already inscribed within our current practices and modes of appearing at present?
Zombie takes into account the unaddressability of past experiences, maybe for the simple reason that the concrete and rare experiences of a moment of collective and public freedom and those practices aligned to them have been transformed and couldn't be passed on as such. But as much as Zombie doesn't seek to situate itself as the possibility of a future already at present, it won't suggest an anachronistic position that adheres to a past gone lost. It rather aims at an experience of the temporal gaps that disrupt history.
Now, Zombie has to do with resemblances. The first issue Doubles therefore returns this question of resemblance to the experience of an appearing that relates both sides of a temporal gap. It does so in view of the proclamations of new beginnings, of gestures and guises borrowed from predecessors - worn again. How then could these gaps and doubles propose the space for a newspaper?
An example of them becoming text lies in the quote. Quoting as such is a practice that is entangled in tradition and its transmission, in writing forth and building upon. But the quote exposes a double gesture. It is also destructive as it always means a violent act of ripping something out of its context. Quoting decontextualizes, but at the same time can it be regarded as a destruction that saves, what it withdraws from its given context. With the quote and thus with Zombie something is at issue that can always anew enter different constellations and contexts, while it remains foreign to them. Something that is within time, but that is temporally placeless.
If Zombie as a newspaper is thus about time and about speech that assembles, it is an attempt to literally introduce different voices out of time towards a scattered chorus, not voices from different times, but texts as if speaking from within their time-places at present.
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With Doubles we would like to review some of the gaps in Ukrainian contemporary art as well as the formats of display it related to, it established, or it came to appear in. The here selected texts, taken out of their initial contexts, address the question, which modalities of appearing the space of contemporary art – and its institutions – can still offer today.