Politics of Care at the Crossroad of Art and Life

Participants: Bojana Kunst, Elke Krasny, Gerald Raunig, Valeria Graziano, Stefan Nowotny
Moderators: Pia Brezavšček, Alja Lobnik

Summary: In the discussion, activists, philosophers, artists, and curators will discuss different dimensions of the relationship between art and care.

Description: Care has become one of the central categories in artistic production and curating practice. However, care is a notion with many contradictions. On the one side, care in art does not escape capitalist value creation. In a way, artistic environments today are thus often just as unsustainable and destructive as other capitalist environments, no matter how politically engaged and diverse they may be. But on the other side, care has consequences: it brings art to the limits of its social and political role. Care changes how art happens, how it is valued, and how it reaches us, and it also unsettles the relationships between art and life. In this panel discussion those paradoxes and difficulties which arise when art cares will be examined. In the discussion, activists, philosophers, artists, and curators will discuss different dimensions of the relationship between art and care. The talk is organised in the frame of the German publication of Bojana Kunst’s book The Life of Art: Transversal Lines of Care, in which the author discusses how care unsettles the very life of art, it demands a very different life of art from the one we know it.

Co-organisers: Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Maska Ljubljana

Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, dramaturge and performance theorist. She has lectured and taught seminars, workshops and laboratories in various academic institutions, theaters and artistic organizations across Europe, and has continuously worked with independent artistic initiatives and groups of artists. Her research interests are contemporary performance and dance, art theory and philosophy of contemporary art. Among her books are: Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism 2015 (in Slovenian, English, Polish and Danish language) and The Life of Art. Transversal Lines of Care, Ljubljana, 2021 (in Slovenian and German).

Elke Krasny

Elke Krasny, PhD, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Krasny focuses on concerns of care, reproductive labor, social and environmental justice, commemorative practices and transnational feminisms in art, architecture, infrastructures and urbanism. Together with Angelika Fitz she edited Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (MIT Press, 2019). Together with Lara Perry, she edited Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2023) and Curating with Care (Routledge, 2023). Her book Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19 Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care (transcript publishers, 2023) focuses on militarized care essentialism and feminist recovery plans in pandemic times.

Gerald Raunig

Gerald Raunig works at the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies as one of the editors of the multilingual publishing platform transversal texts, and at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste as professor for philosophy. His books have been translated into English, Serbian, Spanish, Slovenian, Russian, Italian, Dutch, and Turkish. Recent books in English: Art and Revolution. Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, translated by Aileen Derieg, New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press 2007; Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution, Vol. 2, Minor Compositions 2022; upcoming: Making Multiplicity, Polity Press 2024.

Valeria Graziano

Valeria Graziano is a visiting lecturer at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, Justus Liebig University Giessen and associate researcher at the Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Rijeka. Over the years, she has been involved in a number of participatory research initiatives across social movements and the cultural sector, focusing on the relation between technopolitics, institutional analysis and popular pedagogy; repair and refusal of work; recreation and politics of pleasure. She is one of the convenors of the Pirate Care Syllabus project (a book is forthcoming for Vagabond series, Pluto Press, in 2024) and part of the Management Committee of the COST Action "Toolkit of Care", as well as a member of the Transversal Institutional Analysis Network.

Stefan Nowotny

Stefan Nowotny is a philosopher based in Málaga and Vienna. He received his PhD from the University of Leuven (Louvain-la-Neuve) in Belgium and has taught at various European universities, including Goldsmiths, University of London (2011–2022). He has also collaborated in various research projects of the eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, such as Transform: The Future of Institutional Critique (2005–2008) or Europe as a Translational Space (2010–2012). Besides scattered teaching commitments he currently works as a free author and translator, with focuses pertaining to the philosophy and politics of translation as well as an institutional analysis of contemporary modes of affectivity, perception and subjectivation.

Pia Brezavšček

Pia Brezavšček is a PhD student and self-employed in culture. She was a long-time collaborator of Radio Študent. She was the President of the Association for Contemporary Dance and a critic at the newspaper Dnevnik. In 2019, she became co-editor of Maska magazine and co-editor of the web portal Neodvisni – teritorij sodobnih scenskih umetnosti. She has worked as dramaturg or co-author on performance projects, most recently on a sound play about the maternal myth Ideal.

Alja Lobnik

Alja Lobnik is a PhD student at the University of Ljubljana. In the past years she has established herself as a publicist and critic in the field of performance arts. She has been the President of the Association of Theatre Critics and Theatrologists of Slovenia, is a member of the Committee of the City of Women and a member of the Advisory Group for the Performing or Time-Based Arts at Cukrarna. She has participated as dramaturg or co-author in performance projects. She was co-editor of Maska journal and the web portal Neodvisni – teritorij sodobnih scenskih umetnosti (Independent – the territory of contemporary performing arts), and in 2021 she became the director and artistic director of Maska.