Empowering Aesthetics: Contemporary Collaborative Arts from Central-Eastern Europe

The artistic strategies explored in this book are essential tools in fostering emancipatory consciousness in marginalised communities. Drawn from conservative states in Central-Eastern Europe, these art practices range from short films to guerrilla performance art and community crafts projects. Empowering Aesthetics weaves together case studies from Slovakia, Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic to show how art can provide critical support to gender, sexual and racial minority groups. Exploring the nuances of intersectional layers of these groups’ identities brings with it a wealth of insights that go beyond the Western epistemic tradition.

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. Moving from artistic techniques and visual traditions to an expanded notion of understanding aesthetic experience, this book analyses contemporary collaborative artistic practices on the basis of parameters that transcend the purely visual. By decolonizing the knowledge and aesthetic vocabularies behind their art, the featured artists and activists are creating important assets through which to exercise minority cultural rights.

Denisa Tomková is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Centre for Audiovisual Studies at the Academy of Performing Arts, Czech Republic.