Objective: To bring a number of the most promising young minds working in the arts and culture from all over the world into direct dialog with the leading thinkers on the key questions of what it is to be in the conditions of modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity, and what it is to represent these conditions to each other. Theme: Recent events indicate profound realignments of modernity's great formations, as well as the emergence of new ones. Among these: 9.11.01; war in Afghanistan and Iraq; the uncertain prospect of a US Emperium; the question of Europe, internally and externally; the implosive fallout of the Second World; continuing conflicts in the Middle East, Central Europe, Africa, South America and the Pacific; the deadly inadequacy of tribalism versus modernization as models for decolonization; the crisis of post-WWII international institutions as political and economic mediators (UN, IMF, World Bank); the accelerating concentration of wealth in few countries, and within those countries its concentration in the few; ecological time-bombs everywhere; the ubiquity and diversification of specular culture; the concentration and narrowing of media versus the spread of internet; contradictions within and between regulated and coercive economies and deregulated and criminal ones; the coexistence of multiple economies and cultures within singular state formations (most prominently, now, China); and the distinctively different models of appropriate artistic practice foregrounded in major survey exhibitions, such as Documenta 11 of 2002 and the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. This conference will bring together the world's leading analysts of how broad historical formations manifest themselves in particularities and those who are active in shaping those particulars. Key questions about the complex relationships of the visual arts to modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity will be addressed. Philosophers, social theorists, artists, critics, historians and curators will explore the constraints upon, and the possibilities for, creation, reflection and interpretation in these times. They will ask if there is, in the configurations of constraint and possibility, a (paradigm) shift occurring? If so, can it be described as a shift from modernity to contemporaneity? Or are we experiencing another (lurching) turn of an older set of wheels? If there is a shift, is it to a state in which the older paradigms actually continue to run alongside the new? What of the webs of entanglement and breakage between these de-synchronous configurations? Are they not the (elusive yet persistent) stuff of contemporaneity? Some recent changes in the language of the visual arts alert us to these issues. "Contemporary" is the term now used everywhere for the art and culture of the moment. It is the label of preference for the spectacular occasions and edifices of the official creative industries, as it is for those who critically contest them. Like "modern" and "postmodern" before it, this usage is, often, an unreflective default, or it may perform a holding operation, awaiting the deliverance of a new direction. "Postmodernism" has long since vanished as a descriptor of current art, so how can "postmodernity" still be the right concept for the social and cultural conditions of that art's production? Lags between social domains are not unexpected: but the arts and epochal formation have been so entwined for so long that the question is now more urgently worth asking. On the other hand, there is a modest but noticeable revival of interest among younger artists and curators in modernisms of the recent past: does this indicate the persistence of the dominant twentieth century aesthetic, and, in turn, constitute one of the signs that social and cultural modernity did not disappear? Only, for a time, change its face? Or is it the siren call of the existing (modern) institutions, importuning their own survival? From a larger perspective, these developments may signal that art, now and from now on, will be, first and foremost, contemprist. And that it will emerge from a general situation, which is no longer subject to periodization? A condition, perhaps, of permanent contemporaneity?