Text by curator Thorsten Sadowsky, taken from the introduction of the publication, ‘This World Is White No Longer‘:

“How can an Austrian art museum that has stated its support of a diverse and inclusive society take a critical and appropriate view of phenomena like racism and xenophobia? How can it look at issues such as physical and structural violence, cultural identity, and social exclusion, and also promote the decolonization of thinking? Key points of reference are self-criticism and the deconstruction of the white gaze onto the world, which has always been wrong and one-sided, but whose validity has only been challenged in recent decades.” 

This book documents and continues the discourse initiated in 2021 with the two-part exhibition ‘This World Is White No Longer’ by the Generali Foundation at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, 24 Apr — 10 October 2021. The focus is on artistic positions that deal decidedly with questions of racism and xenophobia and examine the “change of perspective” as a method for questioning the supremacy of one’s own worldview.

English and German text.

From the Museum der Moderne website:

“This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again,” the American writer James Baldwin declared in his essay Stranger in the Village in 1953. Baldwin’s prophetic dictum represents both a forceful critique of white Western thinking and an impassioned call for a universal humanism. The exhibition… proposes a stance that makes an effort to take off the “White glasses” and explores the potentials of a shift of perspective as a practice designed to decenter our own gaze on the world…With works by Karo Akpokiere, Lothar Baumgarten, Danica Dakić, Forensic Architecture, Samuel Fosso, Charlotte Haslund-Christensen, Alfredo Jaar, Voluspa Jarpa, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Adrian Piper, Lisl Ponger and Kara Walker.