The Van Abbemuseum, together with its partners in the European museum confederation L'Internationale, opens a new three-year programme that sets out to demodernise the museum and its collection. The opening is marked by three days of debate, workshops and celebration. Thought of in conjunction with the need to decolonise, the demodern approach aims to undo the modern museums' focus on exclusivity, autonomy and separation, seeking to facilitate substantial re-readings of the modern canon combined with new user-driven programming.

Between 2017 and 2020 the Van Abbemuseum organises a series of collections exhibitions and projects. The exhibition The Making of Modern Art situated at the ground floor of the collection building - developed in cooperation with the Museum of American Art, Berlin - is part of this series. This exhibition combines modern master pieces from the Van Abbe collection, like Mondrian, Picasso, Sol LeWitt, Kandinsky and Leger, with an experimental story, which tells the 'making of' of the classical canon of modern art. In a set of specially designed 'atmosphere rooms', the exhibition addresses the role of museums, and shows how exceptional collectors and influential exhibitions contributed to the formation of the modern canon, which also lies at the foundation of the Van Abbemuseum collection. Curated by Christiane Berndes, Charles Esche and Steven ten Thije.

A Temporary Futures Institute will attempt to turn the museum into a laboratory or studio, and to bring together two contexts that have certain things in common: art and futures studies (also known as foresight). The initial impulse was to compare their two speculative domains. Perhaps they are disciplines, perhaps not. How do art and futures studies relate to knowledge? In art, the concept and practice of knowing is always contested: sometimes under-rated, sometimes over-rated, often in conflict with thinking and feeling. In futures studies, the desired object of knowledge – the various futures that might be – is per definition always absent, because it doesn't yet exist. Co-organised by Anders Kreuger and Maya Van Leemput.

Mário Pedrosa (Pernambuco, 1900 - Río de Janeiro, 1981) was one of the foremost 20th-century Brazilian and Latin American thinkers. Pedrosa embodied the paradigm of the public intellectual committed to the debate over the future of society, both politically and culturally, and was a spokesperson in the forming of Brazil's modern culture. In this exhibition a selection works by artists who Pedrosa analysed articulates different plastic fields to afford a view of the subject matter he was concerned with. The discussion around architecture and urbanism and the impact on social organisation, to which Pedrosa dedicated a number of writings, is also present in the exhibition. Co-curated by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro and Michelle Sommer.

In recent years the little-known research group Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. While providing crucial evidence for international courts and working with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International and the UN, Forensic Architecture has not only shed new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe, it has also given rise to a new form of investigative practice, to which it has given its name. The group uses architecture as a methodological device with which to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, and to cross-reference multiple other evidence sources such as new media, remote sensing, material investigation and witness testimony. This exhibition introduces the practice, outlining its origins, history, assumptions, potential and double binds. Curated by Rosario Güiraldes with Eyal Weizman, Anselm Franke and Christina Varvia.

Show Me Your Archive and I Will Tell You Who is in Power combines an exhibition with a public program of lectures, panel discussions, performances and screenings to present stories from the history of feminist struggle. Issues of race, gender and class are covered from a so-called intersectional perspective, an approach that works to bring to the fore the combinations of discriminatory practices and the dynamics they engender. The project wishes to extend its scope beyond Western, white feminism and to trace the beginnings of a transnational and intersectional perspective in Belgian feminism and beyond. Co-curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Wim Waelput.

The Heritage of 1989 / Case Study: The Second Yugoslav Documents presents a re-enactment of the last big art exhibition in Yugoslavia. Titled Yugoslav Documents '89, it was curated by the artists Jusuf Hadžifejzović and Rade Tadić and realized under the auspices of the ZOI '84 Olimpijski centar Skenderija in the 8,000-square-meter Skenderija Center in Sarajevo in 1989. The project focuses on the largest of the exhibitions that include the adjective "Yugoslav" in their titles, i.e. exhibitions that contributed to building a common Yugoslav cultural space. It attempts to reconsider the idea of the commons from the vantage point of it being something inherently conflicted that in the time of socialist Yugoslavia, in an atmosphere of multiculturalism and collectivity, nonetheless stimulated the ability of social connectivity and solidarity.

Curated by: Zdenka Badovinac and Bojana Piškur

SALT's final L'Internationale exhibition attempts to provoke original responses and readings from its users of what SALT Galata, as a cultural entity, is or could be. Four artistic interventions/architectural gestures -by Abbas Akhavan, Refik Anadol, Futurefarmers, and Laure Prouvost- embrace the user through their reinvigoration of previously under-used aspects of the building and its resources, such as the archive, bringing to the foreground suggestions of different potential functions or possibilities that temporarily reframe the institution.

Under the remit of the project The Uses of Art – The Legacy of 1848 and 1989, L'Internationale confederation has proposed to examine the relevance of the decisive period of the 1980s from a current perspective. The seminar The Eighties Against the Grain, accompanying the exhibition Hard Gelatin. Hidden Stories from the 80s, will present some of the projects developed by these European institutions, accompanied by case studies conducted recently in Spain by a generation born in that era, which highlight the need to look to the past in order to find all the possible futures that could not be, and to understand and rewrite the present.

Focusing on the period 1977–1992, the exhibition reflects on a series of historical events of a socio-political nature. It features the work of groups, cultural activists and artists who went against the grain by embodying attitudes that, ten years earlier, had been symbols of refutation, irony and political dissent. The project aims to recover the experiences and memories of that period, from today's perspective and based on possible accounts.

The exhibition is based on a selection of events that shaped developments in Slovene art in the final decade of Yugoslavia. Social changes, the political crisis following the death of the Yugoslav President Josip Broz - Tito, and the economic crisis inevitably impacted art and culture. And early in the decade, a wave of new art swept over Yugoslavia just as it did over the rest of Europe.

The NSK from Kapital to Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst – An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia exhibition, the first major survey show in Russia of the Slovenian art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) will be on view at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. The exhibition was developed by and first staged in Moderna galerija in Ljubljana last year, and has traveled to the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands earlier this year.

What would happen if museums put relationships at the centre of their operations? Through this symposium we explore the possibility of a museum in which the visitor is not a passive receiver of predefined content, but a member of a constituent body who provokes, informs and co-produces programmes. The event consists of presentations, discussions of case studies and workshops. These are led and facilitated by constituents, theorists, artists, and cultural workers.

Participants include Broadcasting the Archive; artists Barby Asante, Céline Condorelli and Burak Arıkan of Graph Commons; activist and researcher pantxo ramas (aka Francesco Salvini); curators, educators and constituents of the L'Internationale and of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

One and the Many is a research-based exhibition that looks into the production and distribution of things. It tackles the period 1955-95 in Turkey, by following the material results of gradual industrialization as well as its contingent infrastructural disposals. The exhibition traces a timeline through the period's material culture, setting it in relation to how it was made accessible to the public gaze.

The fifth seminar of Glossary of Common Knowledge, international speakers will engage in discussions about the commons as they are manifested in various ways that encourage, celebrate and protect the right to diversity. They are signified by a decentralized structure, which moves away from 'traditional' methods of making artistic statements, protests, or social critiques in the globalized world.

Rave culture from the 1980s and '90s was Europe's last big youth movement. During this period of radical social and political change which also followed the rapid decline of industrialism, rave, in its various guises, migrated around the continent from its epicentre of Great Britain, Belgium and Germany. Energy Flash will look at rave as a highly politicised phenomenon, considering it through the four key notions of 'autonomy', 'civil liberty', 'technology' and 'creativity'.

The 1980s - Today's Beginnings? presents an alternative view on the 1980s from five different European perspectives: Slovenia, Turkey, Spain, the UK and the Netherlands. This collaborative exhibition comprises a diverse mix of artworks, music, TV, graphic and archival material, exploring a wide set of socio-political themes through the lens of culture.

At the fourth seminar, thirteen internationally renowned theorists, curators, and activists will present thirteen terms associated with constituencies. Within the cultural sphere, it could now be argued that constituencies provide the building blocks for museums, galleries and equivalent 'public' institutions to re-imagine their role, function and positions within the production of new forms citizenship.

The seminar consists of six sessions, each co-organised by a L'Internationale partner, who have invited an artist or theoretician and a curator to select a key-term that defines his or her artistic production of the 1980s (Amna Malik and Nick Aikens, Erman Ata Uncu and İştar Gözaydın, Borut Vogelnik and Adela Železnik, Carles Ameller and Teresa Grandas, Muntadas and Carlos Prieto del Campo). The term will act as a lense through which the wider social-economic and political context of the moment is discussed. Alongside four public lectures are organised at KASK: Borut Vogelnik, Irwin group (22 February), Nav Haq, M HKA (7 March), Teresa Grandas, MACBA (11 April), Muntadas (28 April).

The Office of Useful Art: 2015 – Localist Worker opened to the public on 19th October 2015. It aims to promote art as a tool for social change. A wide cross-section of constiuencies attended and began to plan, think through and imagine ways of using the space for making, building and forging creative alliances. It is not an exhibition but a campaign field station and propaganda machine for the movement of Arte Útil.

At the third seminar, thirteen internationally renowned theorists, curators, and activists presented thirteen terms associated with geopolitics. Even if the prefix geo- seems too simplistic today for comprehending the contemporary locus of politics, the geographies of power urgently need to be readdressed in a time in which frontiers are controlled, and territorial dispossession and exploitation intensify, with increasing violence.

How did we get here traces the origins of the current context of Turkey at this turning point, in relation to the recent past and via elements of popular culture and social movements that took hold after the coup d'état. The documents and artists' works deal with the political and cultural climate of the 1980s, to contribute a broader understanding of the national struggles and social dynamics it entailed.

The conference tried to shed light on the legacy and present-day significance of the NSK collective through a series of talks and panel discussions, organised around the following topics: From Kapital to Capital, NSK and the Legacy of Historical Avant-gardes, What Was the Alternative - the Relationship between NSK and the Alternative Culture of the 1980s, Art History and Institutional Critique in the Light of Geopolitical Relations, Capitalism and the State.

The exhibition does not look back with nostalgia at the welfare state in its "classical" form as a utopian blueprint for an egalitarian (and homogenous) society in postwar Western Europe. It does not invite artists to "illustrate" political and social engagement. But it does ask some fundamental questions. What is the "imaginary" of the welfare state? Does it have a "form"? Can it be "shown"?

NSK from Kapital to Capital is the first retrospective exhibition of the NSK art collective, with a special focus on the transformational decade of the 1980s. In the final decade of the slowly unravelling Yugoslavia, when only lip service was still being paid to its system of socialist self-management, NSK loudly and clearly proclaimed the emperor naked - from Laibach's first poster action in Trbovlje in 1980 to the collective's last coordinated series of projects in the early 1990s, entitled Kapital.

At the second seminar, 18 internationally renowned narrators will present 15 terms associated with subjectivization, such as unrest, self-determination, interest, evidence, over-identification, fragility, loser, transvestite, radical imagination, etc. The terms are specific to their local contexts of utterance, which brings to the surface the inexpressibility of universal ideas and the distinctive aspects of the phenomena in the context of place and time.

The key purpose of the seminar which took place at Tate Liverpool was to open up lines of inquiry and discussion – around the perceived need to radically redefine institutions in the management and defense of the common good – by inviting representatives of the L'Internationale confederation, Liverpool John Moore's University and Tate Liverpool to begin debating the conditions of such an inquiry.

The conference addresses the visual arts' approach to "history" through the fields of art history, art practice and the role of the institution. Not so much focussing on the question of evidence, but on the question of how art visualizes (and therewith produces) notions, ideas, concepts and―equally important―sensual, bodily inquiries of history.

In this seminar, critics, artists, curators and activists are invited to explore the languages and practices of decolonisation that question the imperial and Eurocentric narratives and representations upon which the museums of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were founded.

The exhibition presents a diverse mix of historical material, design and contemporary art projects to reflect on but also to use. It takes its title from the Romantic art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, who in Stones of Venice (1869), presented a holistic and ecological view on the relation between art and life as a perpetual and necessary struggle with human imperfection.

The exhibition endeavours to position the notion of critical pedagogy as a crucial element in collective struggles, and explore the tension between individual and social emancipation through education with examples that are both historical and current, and their relation to organisational forms capable of leading unified resistance to the reproduction of capital.

"Don't You Know Who I Am" is a phrase we might expect to hear from celebrities being refused entry to a nightclub, or politicians trying to dissuade a policeman from giving them a parking ticket and expecting to get away with it because of who they are. In this case it also refers to the fact that many of the artists in the exhibition are less well-known to a wider audience. This exhibition is intended as a large-scale survey of the modes and means for considering identity and identification.

The Glossary of Common Knowledge is a five-year research project with twofold goal: to compile a glossary of art terminology that differs substantially from what is found in the existing literature on art, and to do so in collaboration with institutions and individuals from Europe and other parts of the world who will propose terms relating to their own practices and contexts, and subsequently compare them. The first seminar focused on the referential field Historicisation.

The exhibition L'œil se noie is the result of an intuitive dialogue between the two French artists Eric Baudelaire and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc. Their work stems from a shared interest in the gaps and fissures that make up stories, as well as the challenges and promises they hold.

This is a two-day programme of interventions, screenings, organised in conjunction with the exhibition L'œil se noie, dealing with the militant image and its resonances. What remains of the unassailable alliance between cinema and politics that was happening in the 1960s and 1970s? Can an understanding of past dreams and illusions lead to reinvigorated notions of responsibility, commitment and resistance?

This event reflects on the formation of new cultural and political agents as a result of the insufficiency of the institutional structures that have articulated the European project up to now. Structured into workshops and round tables, the event seeks to pave the way for a renewed social pact between institutions and civil society.

For the past ten years the artist Tania Bruguera has been teaching and researching Arte Útil (it roughly translates into English as "useful art" but it goes further suggesting art as a tool or device) through an academy in Havana; the Arte Útil lab at Queens Museum, residencies at Immigrant Movement International, New York and
most recently the Museum of Arte Útil, in the Old Building of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

In this selection of works from its collection, the Museo Reina Sofía takes a close look at art produced in Spain and abroad during the 1980s and 1990s. Minimal Resistance centres on the search by artists for new spaces of resistance in a globalised world, and examines a series of dualities that polarized the period dealt with, from the global economic crisis to financial capitalism.