Elsewhere East

Working as a curator often means operating in the unknown, attuned to the immediacy of contemporary developments and responding to artistic practices as they unfold. Over the course of more than ten years of practice, this has led to the unintentional formation of a media art collection in which I highlight post-digital influences that I may not have consciously registered at the time. Instead of letting these works disappear into computer files, I decided to bring selected excerpts into visibility, responding to a need for their recognition and presence.

Elsewhere East goes beyond self-presentation with a curatorial portfolio and seeks to function as an archive of media art, documentation of performances, and object-based art within the post-digital condition.

Elsewhere East engages critically with these dynamics by drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory, particularly Dipesh Chakrabarty’s proposal to “provincialize (Western) Europe.” Rather than treating Europe as a universal epistemic center, Chakrabarty’s framework enables a reorientation of historical narratives from within their own situatedness. In a similar vein, Elsewhere East repositions post-Soviet contexts not as peripheral case studies, but as epistemic sites through which dominant categories of modernity can be re-examined.

This theoretical reorientation is further expanded through Yuk Hui’s notion of “after Europe” and technodiversity, which challenges the homogenizing tendencies of global technological development. Hui’s argument that both European and non-European thought must be reconfigured beyond their inherited frameworks opens up a space for thinking technological futures as plural rather than universal. Elsewhere East situates emerging media practices within this horizon, foregrounding the coexistence of divergent technical, cultural, and philosophical systems.