KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Debate with Vasyl Cherepanyn, Kinga Dunin, Oleksiy Radynski, and Artur Zmijewski
Debate in english with Vasyl Cherepanyn, Kinga Dunin, Oleksiy Radynski, and Artur Zmijewski. In recent years, the debate on new forms of interaction between art, knowledge and politics has intensified. In the context of Eastern Europe, this resulted in the simultaneous emergence of several independent initiatives that aim at merging the fields of art, scientific discourse and political activism. In the context of highly atomized and anti-solidary post-Socialist societies these fields are regarded as distinct but related forms of engagement and collective action. In Poland, Artur Zmijewski's text Applied Social Arts manifested the need for politically engaged art in the context marked by a negative legacy of Socialist Realism. In Russia and Ukraine, activities of numerous artistic and political initiatives aim at introducing a new order into a public sphere marked by a lack of democratic procedures. The discussion will focus on the activities of those initiatives in the context of the withering away of the democratic public sphere in both Eastern and Western Europe.