Contemporary Art in a Hontological Perspective. Projected Passages

By the end of the 20th century, the future to which the dreams of art and society were directed ceased to be thought of as "bright" and began to evoke either anxiety or indifference. "Hontology"—a term proposed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and reinterpreted by the English pop culture researcher Mark Fisher—is the search for the lost idea of the future in the abandoned utopias of the past. "Projected Passages. Contemporary Art in a Hontological Perspective" is the first study of hontology in contemporary Russian and international visual art. Its heroes include Ilya Kabakov and Robert Smithson, Pierre Huyghe and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jeremy Deller and Alexander Gronsky, Jon Rafman and Taisia Korotkova, Daniel Lopatin and Andrei Tarkovsky. "Irina Kulik's book is a rare and fortunate exception in art criticism literature. This text is written by a person who loves art more than themselves in art. The book is devoted to a topic crucial for each of us: the image of the future, the search for new utopias, without which society cannot develop and a specific person cannot live. At the same time, it is a fundamental study of global and Russian contemporary art. It helps to see the immanent logic of its development and gives the attentive reader a magical key to understanding art," – Olga Sviblova, curator, founder and director of the Multimedia Art Museum, honored artist, academician of the Russian Academy of Arts.