The politics of aesthetics

The 2021 EARN/NWO Smart Culture Conference took place January 26 – 30, 2021. It was organized in collaboration with HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, NWO (Dutch Research Council), and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. How to challenge the investment in the relationship between power and knowledge, the ferocity of epistemic violence, or the spectacle of the pain of others? In this workshop we claim that it is precisely the opacity of artistic practices, their refusal to be reduced to meaning and the radical indeterminacy of form, relation, and artistic matter, which has the potential to support (artistic) research's striving for decolonizing, destraightening and adjacency. How can we unfold this potential and translate these means from the realm of aesthetics into that of the social and the political? Can an encounter with alterity in the aesthetic realm prepare for an encounter with alterity in the social field? This workshop starts off with a performance by the artist Ruth Jenrbekova, playfully setting the terms for the following experimentation with different ways of engaging with objects (of artistic research). After a general introduction into the interests of this workshop, the group then is divided into two workshop strands, one organized by Azadeh Fatehrad, and one by Renate Lorenz and Anette Baldauf