Empowering Aesthetics: Contemporary collaborative arts from Central-Eastern Europe

(Hardback)

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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. This volume highlights that empowering aesthetics perform an important function in challenging these narratives while contributing to building an inclusive collective memory that empowers[KC1] systematically marginalized individuals and communities. Engaging with contemporary philosophy and art theory, this book highlights a shift in the understanding of the artwork and aesthetic experience that is enduring rather than immediate and that has implications for social equity and can emancipate precarious communities. [KC1]I would recommend using a different word here, just to avoid repetition

Author Bio

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