This project examines modernity as a promising socio-political movement which, basing itself on industrialization and technology, on the principles of human rights and democracy, on the right to self-determination, on the principle of education for all, on secularisation and Enlightenment philosophy, and above all on the underlying notion of progress and continual development, aspired to form a universal language. Hence, art no longer stood in a direct functional relationship to its former patrons, the Church and the aristocracy, but instead became committed to the ideology of autonomy. The arts were accordingly required to portray modern life not only in adequate forms but also with analogous contents as part of this movement, in order to reflect the utopian potential of modernity but also the destructive and regressive sides of revolution and upheaval. Modernism attempted to illustrate the experiences and ramifications of modernity in artistic forms – and in undertaking this project it was almost post-modern.

Such promises of a better and more beautiful world are juxtaposed with considerations problematizing the notion and category of modernity, defining a fundamental critique on its rhetoric and conditions. Western imperial projects, and especially the colonial expansion, had modernity not as a precondition but as constituent part of their essence according to Walter Mignolo forming its “hidden, darker side” of this “European narrative”. Jacques Rancière claims an “aesthetic regime of art” whose prevailing “indifference” goes back to the democratic principle of a radical demand for equality. Assertions come from Bruno Latour according to which we “have never been modern” because the strict dichotomy in the modern between nature and society was never surmounted.