Empowering Aesthetics
Contemporary Art from Post-Socialist Central Europe
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:24th Apr '25
£85.00
This title is due to be published on 24th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Explores how contemporary collaborative art practices in Central-Eastern Europe foster an emancipatory consciousness in precarious communities.
The artistic strategies explored in this book are essential tools in fostering emancipatory consciousness in marginalized communities.Empowering Aesthetics weaves together case studies from the post-socialist Central European region (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) to show how art can provide critical support to gender, sexual and racialized groups. The empowering aesthetics employed by the artists in this book are not only urgent and critical, but also vitally personal, each chapter building a clear understanding of what social equality looks like in these specific political and geographic contexts. These practices are a response to the rise of nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia in the region.
Engaging with contemporary philosophy and feminist, queer and decolonial (art) theory (Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, Angela Dimitrakaki, Boris Groys, Jack Halberstam, Grant Kester, Ewa Majewska, Paul B. Preciado, Legacy Russell, Madina Tlostanova, etc.), this book highlights a shift in the understanding of the artwork and aesthetic experience that is enduring rather than immediate, drawing attention to a given community. The projects discussed in this book are created with the artist and the wider community or family in mind and are created in intersubjective connection with others. This volume highlights that empowering aesthetics perform an important function in challenging these narratives while contributing to building an inclusive collective memory that emancipates systematically marginalized individuals and communities.
Investigating artistic interventions from within the semiperiphery of post-socialist Central Europe, Denisa Tomková de-centers the concept of individualistic authorship by accentuating community as a key factor in marginalized artists' works. Not only does Tomková de-peripheralize Central Europe by placing local art within the context of feminist histories, she also makes a significant contribution to postsocialist decolonial thought. * Tereza Jiroutová Kynclová, Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program in Gender Studies, Charles University, Czech Republic *
Empowering Aesthetics brilliantly illuminates how art confronts surging populism across post-socialist Central Europe, powerfully demonstrating its capacity to amplify marginalized voices, catalyze social transformation, and chart a bold alternative path towards collective liberation. * Christina Schwenkel, Author of Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (2020) *
The book offers a carefully theorised account of how contemporary art addresses the everyday through a multitude of practices. Denisa Tomková’s nuanced analysis highlights tactics of empowerment without forgetting the need for resistance to what constructs and reproduces vulnerability and exclusion in the first place. Her study will be useful to all who see the potential of critical interventions against oppression in the contemporary art field. * Angela Dimitrakaki, Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Edinburgh, UK *
This remarkable study delves into the diverse artistic practices emerging from post-socialist Central Europe (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland), a region that has frequently been neglected in the discourse of contemporary art criticism. A comprehensive analysis of how contemporary art actually empowers marginalized communities, it is an essential read for anyone interested in socially engaged practices in semi-peripheral, non-western societies. It is a hopeful and very much needed book. It encourages readers to appreciate the profound impact that art can have in fostering understanding across differences, and ultimately, social justice. * Tereza Stejskalová, Director of tranzit.cz, Czech Republic *
ISBN: 9781350447226
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
200 pages