Art as a tool for “worlding” and a path to refuturing

What paths to imagining a world otherwise- or ‘worlding’ -can be gleaned through art?

In the present complex crisis that we inhabit as a species- from geopolitical disorder to Anthropogenically induced climate crises- how can we relearn to imagine the world differently- away from the status quo of emergencies and towards a more just and equitable future.

This seminar offers an opportunity to think together through the most interesting and important ways of worlding offered by contemporary art, and of how the artistic imagination can potentially launch the mechanisms of social imagination that are urgent and necessary for reassembling the world on different grounds and giving it back its future dimension (refuturing).

There is an urgent need for effective and powerful instruments of worlding understood as “a blending of the material and the semiotic” removing the boundaries “between subject and environment, persona and topos” and ultimately as a “way of being in the world” (Palmer, Hunter). In this seminar, Tlostanova will explore how art can be such a worlding instrument.

Places are limited, please RSVP.

The seminar will be followed by a conversation between Taus Makhacheva and Madina Tlostanova from 6.30-8pm.

This event is programmed in the context of the exhibition ‘Taus Makhacheva: A Space of Celebration’.

The following suggested readings will be circulated prior to the seminar:

Madina Tlostanova. “Of birds and trees. Rethinking decoloniality through unsettlement as a pluriversal human condition”, ECHO 2, 2020, pp. 16-27.

Madina Tlostanova. What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial feminist verbal artist and professor of postcolonial feminisms at the Department of Thematic Studies (Gender studies) at Linköping University, Sweden. She focuses on decolonial thought, postsocialist human condition, artivism, feminisms of the Global South, critical future studies. She has authored twelve scholarly books and 287 articles translated into several languages. Her most recent publications include What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), A New Political Imagination. Making the Case (co-authored with Tony Fry Routledge, 2020), Деколониальность знания, бытия и ощущения (Decoloniality of knowledge, being and sensing). Almaty (Kazakhstan): Center of Contemporary Culture Tselinny, 2020 and a coedited volume (with Redi Koobak and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert) Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues. Intersectons, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice. Routledge, 2021.