tranzit.sk/

13 May 2021, 6 p.m.

Event will be held in English. It will be accessible via Zoom or as a live stream on Facebook page tranzit.sk.

In this lecture I discuss the notion of precarity in the art field from a feminist perspective and with the help of two very different but interconnected films, Helke Sander Redupers, The all-around reduced personality (1978) and Marwa Arsanios Who is afraid of Ideology (2020). With this analysis I would like to show how the glamour of engaged projects and productivity of the artists especially in the global north, not only continuously address current political and social issues of our time, but also often hides and repress the existing differences between artistic worlds, communities and surroundings. Art often addresses political and social issues and produces commentaries and criticality all the time, but very rarely institutionally and structurally makes these differences an intrinsic part of its contexts, economies and conditions; the ways in which art is made, produced and shared are mostly staying the same. What I mean by example is that we have to differentiate when we speak about production of art inside the various precarious conditions. Generalization of precarity can namely easily overlook the differences in the particular art contexts; it is as if the art world depends only from one mode of production. We should approach the art worlds as contradictory, disproportionate and often deeply unequal worlds, with different living and working conditions, political anxieties and embodied traces of vulnerability.

Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, dramaturg and performance theoretician. She works as a professor at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Justus Liebig University Giessen, where she is leading an international master program Choreography and Performance. She is a member of the editorial board of Maska Magazine, Amfiteater and Performance Research. Her last book is Artist at Work. Proximity of Art and Capitalism, Zero Books, Winchester, London, 2015.

Lecture is part of a What a Body Can Do series initiated by Juraj Mydla in cooperation with tranzit.sk.

ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit. Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.