Document Type
Book
Publication Date
2023
Abstract
This book addresses the need for a more sustained knowledge and multidisciplinary understanding of what art and artists can do to create democratic spaces, forms and languages in a world devastated by multiple crises. The book’s main inquiry is whether contemporary art can or cannot cultivate an “agonistic” way of togetherness and facilitate difficult conversations through a multitude of contradictions, diverging views and conflicting visions. With Marxist, feminist and ecologist perspectives, the contributors analyze contemporary art worlds across the globe in relation to memory, conflict, trauma, transitional justice, social engagement, social resistance and activism.
In this volume artists, activists, art historians and curators respond to the scholarly need to conduct timely and critical analyses of art across political divides in both informing and echoing the public search for agency, dialogue and self-representation. Secondly, they analyze how artists across the world transform these social relations through aesthetic means with a shared commitment to bridge political divides and conflicts. The book also investigates the attempts to articulate the counter-narratives and practices of anti-dialogism in terms of whitewashing public murals and censoring artworks.
The case studies from Australia, India, Mexico, Turkey, Palestine, Israel, Poland and Italy discuss the possibility or impossibility of building avenues for participation, equitable interaction, self-organization, the common creation of the imaginary and imagining a culture of dialogue. They discuss the possibility or impossibility of building avenues for participation, equitable interaction, self-organization, the common creation of the imaginary, and a culture of dialogue. The sophisticated discussions of aesthetic and political struggles over the meaning of democracy in both academia and the art world is very timely. The book pushes these discussions for a broader and more conflict-oriented understanding of art and politics and explores the ways in which contemporary art forms can sublimate antagonism into an agonistic way of co-existence.
Recommended Citation
Myzelev, Alla and Tunali, Tijen, "Introduction to Contemporary Art Across Political Divides" (2023). Art History. 4.
https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/art-history-faculty/4
Included in
Art Practice Commons, Contemporary Art Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Theory and Criticism Commons