Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781350447226

Table of Contents

Reviews

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) * 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 *

Author Information

Denisa Tomková is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Theory of Art and Artworks at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.

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