Museum open at 12:00pm
Cinema is closed now
Museum open at 12:00pm
Cinema is closed now
Meeting
Empowering Aesthetics. Meeting with Denisa Tomková
An event accompanying the exhibition Nadia Markiewicz. Misterioso
LOCATION
Workshop space C (entrance via the cinema tower)
LANGUAGE
English
ADMISSION
Free thanks to the cooperation with Audi Polska
Nadia Markiewicz, Misterioso, 2025
During the meeting with Denisa Tomková, we will take a look at Nadia Markiewicz's artistic practice and the artworks presented at the Misterioso exhibition. In the first part of the event, the researcher will talk about the theory of empowering aesthetics, which she develops in her recently published book Empowering Aesthetics: Contemporary Art from Post-Socialist Central Europe. Tomková will then invite the audience to take a walk through the exhibition together to discuss Nadia Markiewicz's works in the context of the key ideas contained in the publication.
The presentation at MSN will focus on the sensitive situation and experiences of people whose bodies are treated as atypical in post-socialist countries of Central Europe, especially in the context of heteronormativity and ableism dominant in the region. Nadia Markiewicz's artistic practice challenges these dominant narratives by making non-normative bodies visible, empowering and subjectifying them. The aesthetics of empowerment is a subtle form of resistance that can take the form of showing oneself on one's own terms, with an unusual body, which in itself is a political, radical act (Markiewicz, 2024). In this way, the aesthetics of empowerment is not limited to a work of art as a finished object exhibited in an institution, but encompasses Markiewicz's entire project, which is intertwined with her life and everyday strategies undertaken to empower the community of people with disabilities.
Denisa Tomková, Empowering Aesthetics: Contemporary Art from Post-Socialist Central Europe, 2025
Empowering Aesthetics: Contemporary Art from Post-Socialist Central Europe
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. Engaging with contemporary philosophy and feminist, queer and decolonial (art) theory, this book highlights a shift in the understanding of the artwork and aesthetic experience that is durational rather than immediate, drawing attention to a given community. Empowering aesthetics follows the lineage of conceptualization of weak resistance (Majewska 2021), queer art of failure (Halberstam 2010), and the politics of vulnerability (Butler 2020). Moreover, drawing on the thinking of feminist writers and theorists, the conceptualisation takes into account material demands and social, economic and educational opportunities in artistic production. Empowering Aesthetics also highlights that the exclusion of particular artistic production is ever-present as a consequence of aesthetic discrimination in which some art is perceived as naive, ethnic, primitive, unschooled or folkloric (Baker 2011; Brooks 2015; Tlostanova 2017), and therefore offers a decolonial reading of these practices. This volume highlights that empowering aesthetics perform an important function in combating the rise of nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia in the region, while contributing to building an inclusive collective memory that emancipates systematically marginalized individuals.