On Weakness, Solidarity, and Non-Heroic Resistance. The Weak Avant-garde – A Feminist Analysis
Lecture by Ewa Majewska

This lecture offers an analysis of how in the time of a feminist reconfiguration of the art field (its practices, theories, and history), as well as intense precarization, the definition of the avant-garde is undergoing fundamental changes.

These changes can be described as the creation of a “weak avant-garde,” or at least an “avant-garde of the weak”: aware of its own paradoxes, while also seeing its internal contradictions as a reflection of the more general contradictions of its time.

Ewa Majewska’s lecture, while referring to the work of artists like Ewa Patrum, Teresa Murak, Antje Majewski or Zorka Wollny, proposes a theory of a “weak avant-garde” not only as a conceptual intervention, but also as a key to understanding a large portion of both Polish and international contemporary works of art.