When the curators of the Fifth Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic, announced the troika of cornerstone concepts around which they would assemble and organize, however cursorily or tangentially, their exhibition, their choice of the concept of the _thing_—along with those of ‘the human’ and ‘use’—seemed especially timely.

Questions of thingness, of the contested primacy of the object in art and of the status and fate ofmaterial culturemore generally, have clearly re-emerged at centre stage of the contemporary art scene in recent years.* They were preceded, some years ago, by a resurgent interest in the issue of craft and craftmanship, form and formlessness, that signals a renewed desire for (or at least a definite willingness to return to) materiality, or a more immediate experience ofmaterial reality, that could be said to have been born froma general disillusion, growing fatigue, and downright discontent with the regime of dematerialization that reigns supreme in the global information economy.

Although this does not necessarily mean that art production is now suddenly steeped in base or literal materialism—and we were told early on that this year’s Berlin Biennial would feature a night exhibition, Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours, conceived specifically to accommodate the curatorial challenges of immaterial art’smany guises: discursive practices, film, performance and sound art etc.—it does seemfair to state that some of the most important developments in contemporary art are shaping up around concerns and questions (deemed irrelevant and obsolete only a generation ago) of a decidedly ‘materialist’ bent.

A return to matter and stuff, to “things themselves” then, as the phenomenological creed would have it—and maybe the crux of this dynamic lies not so much in the things to which we appear to be returning, as in the very movement of returning, of turning and going back, of looking to past preoccupations in both anger and love, curiosity and sadness. Seen in this light, the revival of a sensuous materialist sensibility could be framed
within themuch larger context of the culture ofmelancholy retrospection and partial nostalgia that have become hallmarks of continental European art of the late nineties and the noughties in particular.

It is no coincidence that so much attention in the current issue of A Prior is being lavished on the ultimatemanifestation of thingness—thatmost emblematic and melancholy prone of things, that is themonument. Solid and built to last for posterity, often outlasting the ideologies that they were meant to embody, monuments are a defining feature of contemporary Berlin. And not only does Berlin boast one of the world’smost awe-inspiring and eclectic collections of monuments, it is also the (former) home of the one monument that most dramatically incarnates the many traumas and tragedies of Europe’s long and dark twentieth century—the eponymous Berlin Wall. The Wall itself may be long gone, but its ghostly shadow continues to cast a spell on the imagination of many artists born in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, behind what was once called an Iron Curtain. Their work continues to provide a singular inroad into understanding recent European political history. Alexander Vaindorf, born a Soviet subject in Odessa in 1965 (and the only artist featured in this issue of A Prior who does not participate in the Berlin Biennial), confronts the dark side of the rampant materialism that engulfs the hearts and minds of so many of his compatriots, revealing the alienating, noxious effects it has had on the very structure of public space as a physical phenomenon—its parks, monuments and buildings all silent witnesses to the unfolding drama of a rather bare daily life.

The current issue of A Prior features three participants in the present Berlin Biennial who hail from various more or less ‘peripheral’ zones of Eastern Europe—Croatia, Estonia, Romania—that together comprise a large part of the heartland of the aforementioned retrospective activity. The research-based artistic practices of Zagreb-based Croatian artist David Maljkovic, the Tallinn-based Estonian artist Kristina Norman and Berlin based Romanian artist Daniel Knorr, share a number of telling characteristics (and this is not to overlook that they are also, thankfully, wildly divergent). Foremost among them is a shared readiness to attend to the fragmented testimony of history’s material traces in their respective native or newly-adopted home countries. As such, their works shares a distinct enthusiasm for things, whether they be minute scraps of paper or giant monuments left to rust in the post-political wilderness—as active repositories of historicalmemory. Theirs is an essentially optimistic, yet elegiac, brand of dialectical materialism that thrives particularly well in a self-consciously nostalgic metropolis such as Berlin.

The authors and artists who have assembled in this A Prior’s Visions section—though doubtlessly sympathetic, or even indebted, to the Benjaminian view of history—appear to bemore sceptical. They sound amore or less unanimous call for amore apprehensive and balanced reading of the world ofmatter and ‘stuff’, while also warning of the dangers of the particular brand of retro-materialism that has long been called Ostalgie. This is certainly the case in the work of Alexander Vaindorf, as well as in that of Czech artist Kateriná Seda (also a bb5 participant), who take a surprisingly novel view of the social implications of state socialism’s dramatic demise, revealing how the desperate dream, shared by so many in the former ‘East’, of a return to discredited or otherwise abandoned forms of communal experience really speaks of a desire for another future—one in which the tremendous potential of human interaction can be thought and mined anew.

Dieter Roelstraete _ Els Roelandt

• The title of our editorial refers to a string of exhibition titles that have cropped up of late: “LastThings” at theWestfälischer Kunstverein (January–March 2008), “Poor Thing” at the Kunsthalle Basel (June-September 2007), “Surreal Things” at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (February-September 2008)—and the Fifth Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art itself of course, elusively titled “When Things Cast No Shadow”.