The heated debate around documenta fifteen in Kassel, 2022, brought to the fore questions about the function and value of aesthetics. Given that art is deeply entrenched within structures of capitalism and neo-colonialism, the political, social and economic role of art, artistic practices, and art institutions in current conditions of global inequality remains ambivalent and controversial. How do we synchronize in a globalized world the opposing and equally legitimate claims of conflicting memories? Might critical artistic practices facilitate transnational justice and democracy, protecting and promoting human rights? Can art make us political and ethical by provoking us out of our indifference and irresponsibility? Or to the contrary – should art be autonomous and non-purposive and not be placed in the service of political and ethical imperatives?

In this event, Nikita Dhawan and María do Mar Castro Varela will address the role of an aesthetic education (Schiller, Spivak) in the pursuit of postimperial global ethics and politics. Can the political labor of training the imagination mitigate imperialist, antisemitic, neo-colonist, racist, orientalist and heteronormative structures and practices?

Please RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/aesthetic-enlightenment-and-the-art-of-decolonization-tickets-705396639337?aff=oddtdtcreator

Nikita Dhawan holds the Chair in Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University Dresden. Her research and teaching focuses on global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonization. She received the Käthe Leichter Award in 2017 for outstanding achievements in the pursuit of women’s and gender studies and in support of the women’s movement and the achievement of gender equality. Selected publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed., 2014); Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities (ed., 2019); and Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization (forthcoming). In 2023, she was awarded the Gerda-Henkel-Visiting Professorship at Stanford University and the Thomas Mann Fellowship.

María do Mar Castro Varela is Professor of Pedagogy and Social Work at the Alice Salomon University in Berlin. Her research interests include Postcolonial Theory, Gender and Queer Studies, social justice, digital hate, and emancipation. Selected Publications: Untimely Utopias. Migrant Women between Learned Hope and Self-Invention; Postcolonial Theory. A Critical Introduction (co-authored); Post/Pandemic Lives. A New Theory of Fragility (co-authored) [all published in German]. In 2020 she was awarded the Sir Peter Ustinov Guest Professorship at the Institute for Contemporary History, University of Vienna, and in 2023 the Thomas Mann Fellowship. María do Mar Castro Varela is the founder of the bildungsLab* (www.bildungslab.net) and Chair of the Institute for Contrapunctual Social Analysis.

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