Public Aesthetics and Political Transformation in Asia

19/06/2008 - 14:00

19 June 2008
14.00 - 17.00 hrs
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Seminar chaired by Birgit Meyer (University of Amsterdam)

Speakers:
Christopher Pinney: "The Rule of Appearance in 21st Century India"
Patricia Spyer: "About Face: Possession, Ethics, and the Neighbor in Postwar Ambon"
Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay: "Virtual Flesh: Desi Cyber Porn, 'Fat Aunties' and Vernacular Sexuality’"
Lotte Hoek: "The Aesthetics of Obscenity in Contemporary Bangladesh"

The contributions to this seminar try to imagine the relations between public aesthetics and political transformation in contemporary Asia. We try to unravel the linkages between political transformation and aesthetics by investigating how contemporary political issues are played out in visual culture, media and the arts.

Form mediates politics, providing resources to political actors to produce political solutions and allowing individuals to make given political formations their own. Similarly, aesthetic resources allow established political and social conditions to be debated and challenged. To investigate visual and aural cultures, artistic production and cultural representation thus provide a fertile field to investigate the changes underway in contemporary Asia.

The social science may do well to investigate how aesthetic regimes are part of political, economic, historical and social conditions and change. Understanding the aesthetic as a means by which the world is made sensible, the aesthetic provides the means by which subjects can apprehend the world around them, providing the external means through which subjectivity can become crafted and how subjects may be are captured by social constructions. Aesthetics is therefore not merely a system of representation but a way of knowing the world through the sensorium. Aesthetics are thus integral to the production of social relations.

For more information: Michiel.Baas@uva.nl