Seminar of Accidental Wisdom: Denisa Tomková, Empowering Aesthetics
seminar of accidental wisdom: Denisa Tomková, Empowering Aesthetics
7.11.2024
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 lecture 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 in question are made with the artist and the wider community or family in mind, and are created in intersubjective connection with others. The talk links 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. Empowering aesthetics are not only urgent and critical, but also vitally personal. These practices are a response to the rise of nationalism, homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia in the region. Empowering aesthetics perform an important function in challenging these narratives while contributing to the construction of an inclusive collective memory that emancipates systematically marginalized individuals and communities.
The talk presents research that is part of Denisa Tomkova's forthcoming book Empowering Aesthetics. Contemporary Art from Post-Socialist Central Europe (Bloomsbury, 2025). https://www.bloomsbury.com/.../empowering-aesthetics.../
Denisa Tomková is an assistant professor at the Department of Theory of Art and Artworks at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. Her monograph Empowering Aesthetics: Contemporary Art from Post-socialist Central Europe is forthcoming from Bloomsbury press (2025). She has lectured on the history of modern and contemporary art at the Centre for Audiovisual Studies at FAMU in Prague. She was the curator of the editorial programming at Kunsthalle Bratislava in Slovakia (2022-23). As curator of editorial programming at Kunsthalle Bratislava, she curated the Critical Thinking Series project and edited the anthology Wandering Concepts/Putujúce koncepty (2023). In 2023, Tomková curated (together with Kvet Nguyen) the first group exhibition of art of the Vietnamese diaspora in Slovakia entitled Nhớ: The Space Between One End and the Other at the Bratislava Kunsthalle. Between 2021-2022, Tomková was a curatorial and publications research fellow at SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen. Between 2019 to 2021 she worked for the European Roma Institute for Art and Culture (ERIAC) in Berlin as a researcher, curator and project coordinator. As a researcher at ERIAC, she conducted a comprehensive mapping of Roma tangible heritage in museums and galleries in Europe and beyond. As a curator she worked on the Secondary Archive project, an online platform dedicated to the work of women artists from Central Eastern Europe. Between 2015 and 2018 she was a member of the international research project "Comparing WE's. Cosmopolitanism. Emancipation. Postcoloniality" based at the University of Lisbon.