Anti-Authoritarian Aesthetics: Frontline Art and Performance in the Age of Autocracy
Description
Our session invites seminar participants to engage in critical dialogue on how contemporary art and performance can be used to oppose the global surge of far-right movements and authoritarian regimes. In the face of rapacious wars and threats to bodily autonomy spawned by strongmen and their supporters, leftist progressive citizens have banded together to create collectives that provide mutual aid and spaces to voice their collective traumas and imagine democratic alternatives to the present. We are particularly interested in the work of artist and activist collectives that use aesthetic strategies to critique and combat fascism in their communities and broader geographic region. Our own research has chronicled choreographic assemblies performed by demonstrators in the streets of Chile; DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) that redistribute cryptocurrency earnings to Planned Parenthood in the US; and “anti-totalitarian” art book libraries in the heart of Lviv curated by a Ukrainian art collective. (See, for example, the feminist performances of Chile’s Colectivo Lastesis, the interventions of Unicorn DAO, and the catalogues and critical art texts of Ukraine’s ist publishing). In the face of authoritarian regimes, war and threats to bodily autonomy, these groups have formed their own (often transnational) artistic commons that signal meaningful counterpoints to authoritarian power. Their countering manifestations of resistance point to the range of textual and embodied forms that collective resistance can take in the age of autocracy. We are keen to use the ACLA seminar to dialogue about how these and many other groups persist and find the courage (and bandwidth) to reckon with imperial histories and patriarchal violence and re-imagine democratic futures, sovereign and free.
We invite examinations of a range of groups and movements--from commons that are essential to their communities to those collectives that are transnational and globally networked. Questions as part of our critical examination include:
- How are artists, activists, and other creatives "meeting the moment" to collaboratively critique authoritarian structures of power through their demonstrations, performances, art actions, publications, etc.?
- How might groups, collectives, or movements use aesthetic strategies to not only survive and persist in the present but imagine democratic and sovereign futures?
- What frameworks (theoretical or methodological) can be used to evaluate collaborative aesthetic strategies that resist subjugation to authoritarian power and perform democratic ways of being together?
Suggested topics include anti-authoritarian aesthetics in the domains of performance, art-activism, visual culture, media art, conceptual art, literature, public media.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Alessandra Santos associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of British Columbia. Specialization: Latin American culture, gender, postcolonial/ decolonial studies. Publications: books on Brazilian multimedia artist Arnaldo Antunes, cult film The Holy Mountain; two co-edited interdisciplinary volumes on Utopian Impulse in Latin America and Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas (co-edited with Kim Beauchesne). Her research is supported by multiple grants.
Speaker Bio
Nathalia Santos Ocasio, (Queen's University, PhD), is a Puerto Rican human geographer who draws on feminist political economy to examine the relationship between women, textile art and resistance in Latin America. She is currently based in Ottawa, where she is Latin America program manager at Inter Pares.
Speaker Bio
Elena Shtromberg is Professor of art history at the University of Utah. Her book Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s (UT Press, 2016) explores visual forms of subversion during the Brazilian dictatorship. She was co-curator of “Video Art in Latin America” (2017) accompanied by the co-edited volume, Encounters in Video Art in Latin America (Getty Pubs, 2023). Most recently, she is co-curator of Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages, 1960s-2020s (Sept 2025) at UCR Arts.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Asia Bazdyrieva is a scholar and writer with a background in art history and analytical chemistry. Bazdyrieva was a Fulbright scholar in 2015-2017 at The City University of New York, and Digital Earth fellow in 2018-2019; she was also a research fellow at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She is currently pursuing her PhD at The University of Applied Arts Vienna, and serves as an advisor in the Advisory Board of the transmediale festival in Berlin.
Speaker Bio
Anna-Mariia Kuchrenko is a curator, visual researcher, and artist whose practice foregrounds overlooked Ukrainian visual culture. She studied art history at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv and, in 2021, launched the Archive of Forms project. This ongoing initiative gathers images from books, online collections, and physical archives, emphasising Ukraine’s peripheral representation with both European and Russian-centric art histories.
Speaker Bio
Alina Senchenko is a Ukrainian artist and curator based in Vancouver. Her practice is rooted in photography, in recent years, she has been drawing in material and meanings from oral histories, text and textuality, historical images, and representations, archives, and mass media, exploring the relationship between these and one another. Senchenko developed a profound interest in film, video arts and curation, which she has been incorporating into her practice.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jennifer M. Gully is a Teaching Professor at William & Mary. Her research interests lie at the intersection of language policy, translation theory, and literary aesthetics, and she is currently working on a project tentatively titled Territories of Language: Law, Literature, and the Nation-State. In addition, she works on the cultural production that is emerging from the 2015 “refugee crisis” and is co-authoring a volume on Biometric Realism with Lynn Mie Itagaki.
Lynn Mie Itagaki is Associate Professor of Literature and Gender Studies in Asian American Studies at Claremont McKenna College. She has been a visiting professor in American Studies at Northumbria University (UK) and the International Research Training Group-Diversity at Saarland University (Germany). With co-author Jennifer Gully, she has published on German pro-migrant literature and performance art in Modern Fiction Studies, Cultural Dynamics, philoSOPHIA, and Periscope: Social Text Online.
Speaker Bio
Dr. WhiteFeather Hunter is a feminist bioartist and SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University. Her practice merges ritual, wetlab experimentation, and speculative biotech, communicated through collaborative performance and video works. She develops bastard protocols: queer methods that rewild technoscience to assert bodily autonomy within institutional spaces. Her most recent publication, Blood Magic in Biotech, appears in the Routledge Companion to Performance and Science.
Speaker Bio
Keren Zaiontz is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Theatre & Festivals (Methuen Drama, 2018) and co-editor of Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), winner of the ATHE Award for Excellence in Editing. Her most recent article, “Spectacles of Stigma in a World Beyond Shame: Public Scenarios From the First 100 Days of War in Ukraine,” can be found in the TDR: The Drama Review (67.3).