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Ideally again, this should in time produce a hybrid diversity of art forms produced by people of widely differing backgrounds and attachments, that will speak both globally and RG New world order locally, inhabiting and producing in-between spaces that undermine the homogeneous blocs—above all, the nationstate—on which power relies. It is an ideal that has powerful theoretical backing—in particular from writing by Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, regularly aired at the art events and in their accompanying literature, and it has helped produce a rise to prominence of artists from nations that had previously achieved such success only in exceptional cases.

Mass immigration began to transform what had been enclosed and quite homogeneous societies. In Scandinavia, as elsewhere, modernism and social democracy had been strongly associated. Just as social democracy had long survived the right-wing and neoliberal forces that affected much of the rest of the world from the late 1970s onwards, in the Scandinavian art world a clean, constructivist modernism also survived beyond its allotted span. The recession and its consequences led to a shift in the role of art from utilitarian design and the creation of utopian-constructivist projects to overt critique.

Boris Mikhailov has made a series of photographs in which he pays homeless people to pose and expose themselves for the camera. In so doing he highlights the oppression represented by the offer of the body for money (in this he is close to the work of Santiago Sierra, who also pays people to undergo various 4Y New world order humiliations and exposures). In By the Ground (1991) and At Dusk (1993) he simulates the look of photographs of the early twentieth century, depicting life on Ukrainian streets; he again focuses on the many street-dwellers, but also on those who may have homes but barely manage to subsist.