Book Launch: Denisa Tomková on her book Empowering Aesthetics: Contemporary Art from Post-Socialist Central Europe, in conversation with Tereza Stejskalová
21. 06. 2025 at 5pm
Art theorist and assistant professor at the Department of Art Theory and Artworks at the Faculty of Humanities Denisa Tomková will discuss her new book Empowering Aesthetics: Contemporary Art from Post-Socialist Central Europe with Tereza Stejskalová, art critic, curator and director of tranzit.cz.
The artistic strategies explored in this book are essential tools in fostering emancipatory consciousness in marginalized communities. Empowering Aesthetics weaves together case studies from the post-socialist Central European region (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) to show how art can provide critical support to gender, sexual and racialized groups. The empowering aesthetics employed by the artists in this book are not only urgent and critical, but also vitally personal, each chapter building a clear understanding of what social equality looks like in these specific political and geographic contexts. These practices are a response to the rise of nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia in the region. This volume highlights that empowering aesthetics perform an important function in challenging these narratives while contributing to building an inclusive collective memory that emancipates systematically marginalized individuals and communities.
Tereza Stejskalová said about the book: ‘This remarkable study delves into the diverse artistic practices emerging from post-socialist Central Europe (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland), a region that has frequently been neglected in the discourse of contemporary art criticism. A comprehensive analysis of how contemporary art actually empowers marginalized communities, it is an essential read for anyone interested in socially engaged practices in semi-peripheral, non-western societies. It is a hopeful and very much needed book. It encourages readers to appreciate the profound impact that art can have in fostering understanding across differences, and ultimately, social justice.’
Tereza Stejskalová is a curator based in Prague. She is the director of tranzit.cz and co-founder of the Ve věci umění biennial. From 2018 to 2022, she worked as a researcher and teacher at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She has collaborated on numerous exhibitions and projects across Europe. She publishes texts in academic and non-academic journals and is the editor of several publications. She is the author of the book Smrt umělce. Ať žijí pomocnice! (tranzit 2024).
Denisa Tomková is an art theorist and assistant professor at the Department of Theory of Art and Artworks and Gender Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. She received her PhD in Visual Culture from the University of Aberdeen in the UK (2019). She was the curator of editorial programming at Kunsthalle Bratislava. She was a member of the international research project “Comparing WE's. Cosmopolitanism. Emancipation. Postcoloniality” at the University of Lisbon. She worked for the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) in Berlin as a researcher, curator and project coordinator. She is the editor of the anthology Wandering Concepts (Kunsthalle Bratislava 2023) and the author of Empowering Aesthetics. Contemporary Art from Post-Socialist Central Europe(Bloomsbury 2025).
https://www.denisatomkova.com/
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