Off-Modern is an interdisciplinary examination of contemporary art, architecture, and public culture that offers an alternative approach to periodization and artistic experimentation across media, beyond the quest for novelty and nostalgia. It proposes a new vocabulary to study the art of asynchronic modernity in international art through concepts of nostalgic technology, ruinophilia, embarrassing monumentality, and diasporic solidarity.
Svetlana Boym was a writer, artist and scholar. She wrote about many artists, filmmakers, and architects, including Raqs Media Collective, Anri Sala, William Kentridge, Amie Siegel, Rem Koolhaas, Tobias Putrih, Ilya Kabakov, and Komar and Melamid. Boym was the author of The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Another Freedom(2010), and Architecture of the Off-Modern (2008). She took part in major exhibitions, including The Fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, the Venice Architectural Biennale, Promises of the Past at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Historiar-Imaginar in Madrid. She lectured at the Dia Foundation, the Vienna Kusthalle and at MoMA. She was professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature and an associate of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.