CFP ART and the CITY : Urban Space, Art, and Social Resistance
ART AND THE CITY: URBAN SPACE, ART AND SOCIAL RESISTANCE
AARHUS INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES
AARHUS UNIVERSITY
April 16-18 ,2021
ON-SITE AND ONLINE
Art and the City: Urban Space, Art, and Social Change conferences bring together a team of international scholars with an interest in art and right to the city, urban creativity, aesthetics and politics, cultural and artistic rebellion, aesthetics of social movements, and art in the urban space. The central goal of this conference series is to engage in a multifaceted, multi-disciplinary, and multi-geographic perspective to articulate and promote a richer and more integrated understanding of the ideologies, relationships, meanings, and practices that arise from the diverse interactions among the three social spheres: urban space, art, and society.
Art’s role in the urban space of social mobilizations results in a multitude of spatial dynamics and emotional, communicative, and aesthetic interactions. Such urban creativity has a broad scope of interests from a clear “right to the city” perspective with its ecological, spatial, and ideological agenda to the struggles of civil rights, and individual and collective freedoms. While, this aspect of urban creativity has opened the research into recognizing street art as a genre for “political democratization” (Bengtsen & Arvidson, 2014), the growing significance of art in social and spatial justice movements has not met with a rigorous academic undertaking.
Art had an essential part during the Egyptian and Tunisian revolution (Abaza 2012), Spanish Indignados (Ramírez Blanco 2018), the Greek Aganaktismenoi movement (Tsilimpoudini 2016), and the Gezi Uprising (Tunali 2018). It is even argued that the civil war in Syria is triggered by a graffiti work in Dara’a (Asher-Shapiro 2016). Recently, the Black Lives Matter movement leaves its mark in the urban space with street murals in nearly 550 places across the US (Shirey et. al 2020). The socio-political character of these movements has been explored extensively from the point of plural resistance against the authoritative government, a political struggle over public space, structural inequalities, and human rights issues. This material emphasis has often focused on what was done, not what was made visible, despite the popular use of the urban space for immense creativity and the increasing influence of electronic mobility and communication networks that have helped the aesthetic strategies of the movements. On the other hand, most research related to the arts in social resistance, both from a social science perspective and from a community arts perspective, tends to emphasize the therapeutic, unitary, or reconciliatory attributes of art, paying attention to how art contributes to ease tensions between communities and city authorities. Although such criticism for socially engaged art is sound, it undermines art’s capacities of struggle and agonism, of contestation and re-appropriation that emerge through the creation of common and shared spaces for socialization, mobilization, and political action.
The increasingly visible aesthetic dimension of the recent political protests, revolts, and uprisings has not only challenged what is acceptable as politics in society, but it has also problematized what is acceptable in society as art (Tunali 2017). In the recent urban social movements and protests the artistic practices, interventions, and performances, with the accompanying talks and manifestos, have further challenged the traditional political critique on the relationship of aesthetics and politics. In the current condition of the world connected through hegemonic discourses and authoritarian politics, which tend to erase the conditions that make democratic participation and grassroots mobilization possible, the political capacity of art that becomes a conditioning factor for social resistance is a fundamental and timely issue.
To push forward the dialogues and widen the debates on art’s relationship to the political, Art and the City conferences interrogate what the reconfiguration of difference, equality, and equity entails at present moment, and what it is to aesthetically and politically experience the world from the perspective of social dissensus and rebellion. The overarching theme “Urban Space, Art, and Resistance” envelops this year’s following four tracks:
1. Art and everyday resistance in the city
2. Art and aesthetics of urban social movements
3. Urban space, art, and social crisis
4. Art and rebellious urban communities
The participants are invited to analyze the relationships between art and social movements in various historical and local contexts. The proposed papers should engage in questions such as:
How do artists get involved in urban resistance, and how do social movements deploy art?
How are symbols, slogans, and visual expressions communicated in the urban space of resistance?
What kind of political and aesthetic possibilities could emerge in the intersection of the dialogical premises of art and the ideological premises of political mobilization?
Could aesthetics of occupation, communing and communality deployed in social movements be the arena and context for political transformations?
How could artistic expressions in the urban space reveal, delimit, question, and resist the complexity of the socio-political crisis?
What kind of role do art narratives play in incorporating marginalized subjects and voices as dissidence?
Under what conditions could art become effective in reclaiming the cities as sites of resistance and change?
What can we learn from street art about visual resistance in the interplay with political power structures?
How are the artistic strategies and performances in urban social movements transmitted to other local contexts ( e.g Las Thesis)?
How can we analyze the political significance of art in increasingly militarized, policed, surveilled, or otherwise controlled urban contexts?
What is the role of music in street activism?
How can art in the urban space be used as a tool of collaboration and a means of imagining alternative political communities?
How could street art be a critical tool for the visibility of a community in a time of crisis?
There is no conference fee. Interested participants are requested to submit an abstract of a maximum of 500 words and a short CV to the conference convener Tijen Tunali tijen.tunali@aias.au.dk no later than January 31, 2020.
Selected papers will be invited to contribute to an edited volume.
Scientific Committee 2021
Konstantinos Avramidis, Architecture, University of Cyprus
Susana Jimenez-Carmona, Aesthetics and Politics, University of Barcelona
Nicholas Gamso, Art History, San Francisco Art Institute
Maciej Kowalewski, Sociology, University of Szczecin
Vittorio Parisi, Aesthetics, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Caterina Preda, Political Science, University of Bucharest
Heather Shirey, Art History, University of St. Thomas, Minnesota
Tijen Tunali, Art History and Visual Sociology, Aarhus University
TIJEN TUNALI
AIAS-Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies
Aarhus University