User account

Katharina Brandl: Rhetorics of Realism? Gaming Culture and Socially Engaged Art Practices
Rhetorics of Realism? Gaming Culture and Socially Engaged Art Practices
(p. 227 – 250)

Katharina Brandl

Rhetorics of Realism? Gaming Culture and Socially Engaged Art Practices

PDF, 24 pages

  • rhetoric / elocution
  • artistic practice
  • resistance
  • global ecology
  • contemporary art
  • politics

My language
English

Selected content
English

Katharina Brandl

Katharina Brandl is a curator, lecturer and author in the field of contemporary art. She is the artistic director of Kunstraum Niederoesterreich in Vienna and a research associate at the Schaulager Professorship for Art Theory and faculty member of the Department of Art History at the University of Basel. She studied political science and art history at the University of Vienna and critical studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. As a member of eikones graduate school, her PhD research on gaming aesthetics in contemporary art was funded with a stipend from 2016–2018 by the University of Basel, before she became affiliated with the Department of Art History at the University of Basel (since 2018). Prior to this, she worked in the field of research funding, as a researcher (for example for the Austrian contribution to the Biennale Architettura 2014 in Venice) and as project coordinator of an international studio and residency program. She recently curated the exhibition TechnoCare (Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna, in 2019, co-curated with Friederike Zenker) and Stormy Weather (Kunst­raum Niederoesterreich, Vienna and Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, in 2020, co-curated with Claire Hoffmann). Her research interests include the history and theory of contemporary art, digital media in contemporary art and feminist art histories. She founded various cultural initiatives in Vienna and Basel and lives & works between those cities.
Sara Alonso Gómez (ed.), Isabel J. Piniella Grillet (ed.), ...: NO Rhetoric(s)

This volume maps some of the territories where points of resistance can be located and where art’s resistant potential becomes relevant once again. "NO Rhetoric(s): Versions and Subversions of Resistance in Contemporary Global Art" focuses on a neuralgic issue which was intensely debated during the last three decades, but has rarely become a topic of its own. It offers an updated way which art presents itself as an agent of resistance, whether in a mere rhetorical stance or as an effective critical strategy. In the face of general discourse of revolt and insurrection that is highly fashionable today, it is necessary to ask whether the gesture of ‘negation’ still yields an emancipatory potential. Struggling between NO rhetoric and NO to rhetoric, the artistic and the political field permanently interfere with each other; sometimes they merely overlap, while at other moments they strongly insist on demarcating themselves. Nonetheless it remains to be seen more precisely of what their respective critical forces and agonality consist. In this sense, the book contributes to a deeper understanding of the different logics of resistance at play between art and the political, as expressed by Jacques Rancière in his distinction between “the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form.”

 

This volume provides a diverse array of voices and essays from the academic and artistic field that present theoretical approaches as well as study cases. By juxtaposing them, it encompasses both the complexity and diversity of artistic practices within a global instituting framework that seems to capitalize on different political streams. The reader will find contributions on sexual dissidence, ecology and the Anthropocene, geopolitics of the digital age and institutional critique. The authors, artists and scholars from different disciplines share their desire to shed some light on how art approaches these urgent issues.

 

Contributors: Sara Alonso Gómez, Mieke Bal, Zach Blas, Katharina Brandl, Nancy Garín, Kendell Geers, Ben Grosser and Geert Lovink, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Federico Luisetti, Charlotte Matter, Isabel J. Piniella Grillet, Nadia Radwan, Fiona Siegenthaler, David Tenorio, and Jaime Vindel.

Content