'What is this new modernity...?'

Five #08, Lightjet Print (Edition of 10), 1000mm x 700mm (2008)

Excerpts from a short interview with Nicolas Bourriaud on Tate's website.

In a way, History is the new continent as we are living in an era where ... every millimetre of [Earth] has been mapped [and] controlled... there is no Terra Cognita anymore. The last one is History, the last continent to be discovered is Time ... so on one side you have artists who are really trying to explore the planet in a different way and artists trying to explore time as if it was a jungle or a desert.

When I do have answers about something I can write a book. When I do have questions I'm curating a show...

Excerpts from an interview with Nicolas Bourriaud in Art World Australia, Issue 7. pg35.

The idea was to affirm strongly something that I really believe - that postmoderism is over. And then to ask what is this new modernity...?

There is a wandering attitude. Most of the artists [involved in the 2008 Tate Triennial] are evolving within a huge landscape of signs and connecting them, building pathways between culture and society and economics. They are wandering both in space and in time. Many of the artists are exploring the past as if it was the last continent to explore.

It's important to me, the idea that we are living in a maze; it's not like the old modernist times at the beginning of the 20th century, where we believed that there was a direction of history... it's an ability to wander into a maze, and produce meaning out of it.