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SFB 1512:  Intervening Arts

Subject Area Humanities
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Term since 2022
Website Homepage
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451897170
 
Today, perhaps more than ever, the arts claim to have an impact on society. Globally, they aim to alter social processes, to interfere in political conflicts, and to create public spheres. Artistic movements such as Participatory Art, Artivism, Climate-Change Art, and Nature Writing bear witness to the presence of global crises and social conflicts: The arts involve themselves in struggles for democracy, human rights, and fair global power structures; they address various crises, from climate change to the COVID-19-pandemic; they outline new ways of living and working. In order to describe this political involvement of artistic poiesis, the Collaborative Research Centre proposes the term intervening arts. This guiding concept supports the exploration of new forms of artistic sociality and artistic creation of society. In this context, the historicality of contemporary arts as reflected in references to forms and procedures of the avant-garde movements and their variations in the 20th and 21st century is of particular importance.The CRC unites arts-related disciplines with philosophy, history, sociology, and cultural anthropology. It is particularly interested in the generative or activating dimensions of the arts and examines their potential to bring about social relations and to instigate political discord by establishing artistic practices and modes of perception.Disparity and heterogeneity are characteristic of both contemporary art and society and shape the intervening potential of arts. Postcolonial, intersectional, and queer theories help to understand how the arts and their practices are entangled in current social crises and struggles and how they engender new concepts of the political. The CRC strives, however, to maintain a broader theoretical approach that considers artistic intervention not only as obvious interventions in social or political contexts. Therefore, the CRC investigates both programmes of manifest artistic interventions and those artistic poetics and practices, by virtue of their specific construction or form, material defiance, and performative dynamics, develop their intervening potential rather hidden, subcutaneously and micrologically. To provide a new concept of the social position of the arts in relation to their intervening practices and to develop a new theoretical framework for contemporary arts constitute the main goals of the Collaborative Research Centre. To achieve these goals, the CRC explores basic poetics of intervention, divided into three areas: (A.) participating and separating; (B.) moving and disrupting; (C.) drafting and rejecting.
DFG Programme Collaborative Research Centres

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Applicant Institution Freie Universität Berlin
 
 

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