The book accompanies the two exhibitions After Year Zero organised at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The project takes as its starting point the realignment of global relationships after the Second World War—Europe’s “hour zero.” However, After Year Zero does not recount the post-1945 confrontation of the ideological blocs of the Cold War. Rather, the project focuses on the world-historical caesura of decolonization and the associated attempt to fundamentally challenge and transform the framework conditions of the era of colonial modernity. Its central point of reference is the first Afro-African conference, held in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, at which some 600 delegates from 29 nations and liberation movements drafted a model for collaboration by the global South under the banner of an anti-colonial modernity.
