Tijen Tunali

This book explores what art and artists can do to create democratic spaces, forms, and languages in a world devastated by multiple crises. It uses case studies from Australia, India, Mexico, the USA, Turkey, Palestine, Israel, the Balkans, Russia, Italy, and Ukraine to discuss the possibility or impossibility of building avenues for the collective creation of a culture of dialogue across political divides. These examples share a common thread of interest in fostering the potential for "possibilizing"—the concept of fostering equitable interactions that facilitate the creation of complex imaginaries and the envisagement of agonistic coexistence through artistic processes of observation, collaboration, participation and , dissemination. Contributors to this volume encompass different roles in the art world, including museum professionals, art historians, and practitioners of collaborative art. Their collective objective revolves around outlining strategies for engaging with art within regions marked by pronounced political divisions. Timely inquiries are posed concerning the capacity of art to orchestrate challenging conversations, establish connections, and devise methodologies conducive to urgent political retorts. Can contemporary art effectively transcend political schisms and progress toward fostering democratic social interaction, openness, and contingency? How might artists contribute to the comprehension of agonistic encounters within urban public spaces? Amidst the escalating influence of regressive forces such as nationalism, racism, and misogyny worldwide, can artworks reciprocate and counterbalance these trends?  This collective book tries to answer these questions and delves into the potential for artists and artistic communities to recontextualize their work through difficult conversations, thereby establishing platforms wherein an agonistic aesthetic can flourish and contribute to democratic discourse.

Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape brings together various disciplinary perspectives and diverse theories on art’s dialectical and evolving relationship with urban regeneration processes. It engages in the accumulated discussions on art’s role in gentrification, yet changes the focus to the growing phenomenon of artistic protests and resistance in the gentrified neighborhoods.

Since the 1980s, art and artists’ role​s in gentrification ha​ve been at the forefront of urban geography research in the subjects of housing, regeneration, displacement and new urban planning. In these accounts the artists have been noted to contribute at all stages of gentrification, from triggering it to eventually being displaced by it themselves. The current presence of art in our neoliberal urban space​s illustrates the constant negotiation between power and resistance​. And there is a growing need to recognize art’s shifting and conflicting relationship with gentrification. The chapters presented here share a common thesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city does not only allow uneven and exclusionary urban redevelopment strategies but also facilitates the growth of anti-gentrification resistance.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history,  visual studies, urban cultures, cultural geography and urban studies as well as contemporary art practitioners and policymakers.

This special issue delves into the profound and transformative influence of a variety of artworks within urban environments characterized by political contention, with a particular emphasis on their capacity to facilitate activist engagement and dialogue. By challenging prevailing power structures, advocating for inclusivity, and reshaping the dynamics of public spaces, street art emerges as a potent political force in the process of democratizing public spheres. These unconventional modes of artistic expression, when situated in the public domain, serve as influential platforms for amplifying the voices of marginalized communities, thereby promoting civic engagement and reimagining the contours of the public sphere. Through an in-depth exploration of the communicative, participatory and political potential of street art this thematic issue entitled Street Art and Political Aesthetics in the Contested Urban Contexts seeks to shed light on the intricate interplay among. art, urban culture and civic rebellion. This exploration delves into the unique capacity of art to thrive within urban spaces that are perpetually fraught with uncertainty, challenges, and political instabilities. It encompasses discussions pertaining to the critical domains of freedom of expression, public protests, social critique, political engagement, aesthetic tactics, and urban commons in the realm of street art. These discussions underscore the remarkable ability of street art to nurture the aesthetic foundations of political and social actions within the public sphere.

The discussions of urban commons involve us in breaking up the totalizing notion of those dominated by power as passive consumers and reconsidering how urban life is made as creative production, constantly appropriating and reappropriating the products, messages, and spaces for expression. The common acts of engagement and reorganization are based on re-appropriations and redeployments of the dominant image economy and hierarchical distribution of space experienced in the city.  Hence, they are also a part of the struggle for the reclamation of public space wherein wrongly privatized space is returned to its rightful owners.  The special issue “Art, Urban Commons and Social Change” discusses how art in the urban space creates unmediated spaces and instances of emancipated subjects. It takes urban commons not only as objects and social relations in the urban space but as a social practice that allows the creation of alternative citizenry.

The authors analyze various forms of art within economic, cultural, and social urban contexts to shed light on the complexity of modern urban life and struggles for urban commons. They delve into the issue of urban commons and social change both in the role of urban social struggles and creating urban communities. Some questions that the contributors seek answers are: Under what conditions could art become effective in reclaiming democratic citizenship? What kind of public should artistic creativity in the urban space try to constitute and what kind of public spaces are needed to that effect?

Art is a defining element of urban culture through creative dynamics that reflect territorially embedded mechanisms but also particular social and cultural processes. Public art presents us with the possibility of unmediated social interaction that leads to greater access to the production and use of urban public space. Public art’s presence in the urban space is dynamic and interactive that communicates the complex forms of globalization, cultural hybridity, and plurality in contemporary daily life—where we experience politics. Through a multi-disciplinary lens, that combines urban studies, visual studies, sociology, artistic research, art history and political philosophy, this issue maps the contemporary landscape of public art to capture art’s critical place in the reified politics of the urban space. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive description of the politics of arts in public spaces but rather to provisionally reconcile the lack of a dialectical perspective in the critical discursive tools of the scholarship on urban public arts.

Rebellious artists have always engaged with issues of oppression and exploitation–by-products of colonialist and capitalist systems–throughout history from slavery and resource extraction; to exploitative labor practices and the environmental consequences of industrialization; and human rights movements and climate change anxieties of the past century. Arts that take place in urban struggles are not about igniting a change but are about creating unmediated spaces and instances
of emancipated subjects. The authors in this issue analyze various forms of art within economic, cultural and social urban contexts to shed light on the complexity of modern urban life and struggles for more just cities.
Perhaps now it is more pressing than ever to acknowledge, examine, and reect upon both historic and perpetuating inequalities in urban social life. It is imperative to talk about art and its involvement with urban struggles as pertaining to the re-creation rather than the consumption of the city. Therefore, this special issue’s contributors engage in key areas of the socio-political relationships with new urban poetry--what the reconfiguration of dierence, equality, and equity entails at present moment in the urban space for art and artists. . This issue further aims to construct bridges between the contemporary practices of art for the urban public and the critiques of the city generated in disciplines such as urban sociology and human geography, informed by critical theories of urbanism, society, and culture.
The issue opens with Philipp Shadner’s discussion of the 1970s punk movement, which not only questioned and provoked aesthetic values but also has had a major influence on the multitude of styles of urban art until the present. Shadner gives us insights into the history of the punk movement, the symbols and slogans punks used and still use not only for tagging urban spaces, but also put temporarily or permanently on their skins and/or their clothes to create a visual struggle against the conformist mainstream society. Arthur Crucq’s article analyses the social and political role of collaboratory art in an urban community in The Hague, Netherlands. Using examples of textile installations, Crucq’s discussion centers on recognizing community art projects as autonomous platforms for the development of political agency in the urban space.  Jeni Peake looks at street art activism from the perspective of linguistics.  Peake explores English graffiti found in urban spaces in the city of Bordeaux, France. With a large number of graffiti examples adhering to many themes of social struggle, Peake’s article seeks to establish to what extent the use of English could be understood as a political or at least rebellious and creative act. Angelos Evangelidis examines the political posters on the walls of the streets in Athens that worked as both a visual and political platform for the anti-austerity movement in Greece (2010-2015). Furthermore, Evangelinidis’ literature review shows that the dialectical relationship between urban space and visual practice is the key to map the process of art’s role in social struggles.

Street art, with its subcultural character and sociability, has been looked upon for its anti-cultural potential. While some accounts have diverted attention to street art's utopia with its creative dissidence and regenerative potential, others have insisted that street art has already been coopted by the aesthetic and institutional order of the neoliberal economy. This special issue aims to contribute to the critical perspectives of cultural geography, urban sociology, art history, visual studies and critical theory through analyses of the urban space and street art. The prolific significance of this issue is in its multi-perspective approach to bring together social, political and aesthetic dimensions in the intersection of art and the changing urban environment. Recently, activist art, social practice and socially engaged art are just a few terms that have been popular for describing art that attempts to attract public attention to the current social and political landscape. This thematic journal issue explores the potential theoretical and empirical inputs that a spatial and urban approach of art can bring to the understanding of both arts and the urban space. It offers a multi-geographical, multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary perspective to analyze how street art, as an aesthetic dispositive, functions as an integral part in the socio-political space of the urban landscape. Street art contests two main regimes of visibility-legal and governmental on one side, and artworld or social aesthetic on the other-which creates the conditions within which it must compete for visibility. How can we interpret the politics of street art from the perspective of subcultures, freedom of expression, and limits of criminality? Are street artists obliged to be a part of the urban resistance against neoliberalism? How does street art reveal, delimit or question the complexity of neoliberal urbanization? How is street art activism perceived by the authorities, politicians, businesses, and the wider public? What prompts street artists to communicate with urban dwellers with their marks on the city's surface? How does street art partake in social movements? This special issue hopes to continue academics' and artists' conversations on street art's relationship with the urban space and the public as a defining element of urban culture, but also offers a critical look at the spatial and political dynamics that reflect territorially embedded mechanisms that generate particular social and cultural processes.

This paper considers the ways in which changes and experimentations in the realm of aesthetics ,as well as in the new forms of political participation and representation in an era of global revolt, have resulted in a deep connection between the aesthetics and politics of civil disobedience, political activism and artistic representation. Specifically, the discussion is based on a comparative analysis of the urban activism of the Carnival Against Capital protests in London and Seattle, the Occupy Movement in New York, and the Gezi Park Movement in Turkey where the aesthetics of active participation represents a new kind of politicization—collective memory and language, sensual festivity and the forming of communitas—that goes beyond the conventional understanding of the convergence of politics and art. The author focuses on the notable carnivalesque character in those protests—the costumes, the masks, the performances, the interventional tactics, and the aesthetics of community building. Based on the theories of aesthetics and rebellion, the paper proposes the concept of carnival aesthetics as the study of the sensuous and subversive experience of the multitude when marching, throwing slogans, battling with police forces behind the barricades, performing and dancing together on the streets. Here, carnivalesque aesthetics are employed as a means to create diversity, creativity, decentralization, horizontality, egalitarianism and direct action—the political principles that are at the heart of the recent protests. The discussion demonstrates that while thriving authoritarianism depends on disciplined individuals and the crisis in democracy, carnival aesthetics during protests present radicalized social relations that are increasingly becoming the core of the current social, cultural and environmental struggles around the world.

This article lays out the claim that every open space is not a democratic space and the plurality of voices does not mean a plurality of discourses and democratic political existence.  It discusses why it is important to always take into account the dialectical dimension of the urban space and public art and points to the perils of the ‘democratization’ of the public space. The author alerts us that some public arts are directly commissioned by the government for a more ‘democratic city’ and there are also those artistic projects that confront government-supported public artworks for the ‘democratization’ of the urban space, but display even more autocratic or exclusionary tendencies. She argues that, despite their radical potential, contemporary public art as the consolidator of political publics, does not simply concede the democratization of the public space. These publics can as well be constituted by neoliberal agendas, and even worse, authoritarianism. In the light of this critical perspective, the article asks: What kind of public art can then be appropriate for a democratic public?

In the last three decades, across the world, there have emerged mass movements, uprisings and revolts targeting neo-liberal global capitalism and its radical reorganization of urban hierarchies. As a result, cities have become the central stage for sociopolitical struggles. While the scholarship on new social movements has recognized the aesthetic potential of political organizing since the beginning of the anti-globalization movement in 1999, new approaches are needed to understand the aesthetic dissensus of contemporary activism within the urban space. This article theorizes aesthetics as a potentially radicalizing force in proposing a democratic citizenship in the city. Indebted to the theories of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, James Holston, Mark Purcell and Jacques Rancière, it discusses the new synthesis of political and aesthetic forms, action and experience in urban social movement praxis.

Since their insurrection on January 1st, 1994, the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [“Zapatista Army of National Liberation] has promulgated an incisive critique of the colonial character of capitalist accumulation and violent dispossession led by globalized finance capital and enabled by state force. With their grassroots organization, Zapatistas have transmitted an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial worldview to urban and rural communities around the world, demonstrating us an-other globalization. This was possible not only with the strategic use of communication technologies and alternative media networks but with an understanding and production of aesthetics that uses language, visual symbols, humor and stories with an indigenous sensibility. It is thus a very poignant observation by Maria Saldaña-Portillo who argues that the Zapatistas fill in the empty content of the signifier ‘Indian’ with ‘Indian specificity (Saldaña-Portillo2003).

The unification of the ‘subjective philosophy of rage’ with Mayan cosmology and worldview makes neo-Zapatismo both aesthetic and political. Zapatistas strategically build their vision of the ‘other politics’ by constructing a visual and aural world, which is hard to articulate in the traditional vocabulary and imagination of revolution as it is a unique encounter between libertarian Marxism and historical indigenous resistance. This has constituted 'a powerful disruption on the original plan, and the opening of unprecedented possibilities around which a new subjectivity started taking shape ' as Deleuze articulated (Deleuze 1994:190). It is thus essential to examine the art of the Zapatista movement that can present an important political conjuncture from which to sustain other sensorial worlds here and now.

Analyzing their community murals and other visual production with a dialectical materialist perspective, this paper theorizes and historicizes the Zapatista aesthetics and shows how the Zapatista movement in Chiapas has creatively articulated new forms of social politicity with their unique aesthetic engagements.. Zapatista aesthetics is not only important to recognize that 'another aesthetics' is possible but also enables us to map the visible but disregarded ground of aesthetics in recent social movements.

Street art has been both a product of and a response to the unequal distribution of resources and visibility in the city. A dialectical study that investigates both sides of the coin showing art’s aesthetic, spatial, social and political situation in the changing neo-liberal urban landscape is needed. Analyzing simultaneously the hegemonic restructuring of the urban environment and the growth of counter-hegemonic resistance on the streets requires taking into account the plurality and complexity of the links between the urban environment, society and arts. This article discusses how street art, as an aesthetic dispositive, functions dialectically as both resource and resistance in the sociopolitical make-up of the urban landscape.

This article analyses humour as a part of carnival aesthetics in urban social movements. It regards humour's place in street protests as an aesthetic experience that brings forth an interplay of joy, imagination and freedom. Drawing from social movement theory regarding collective identity and collectivism, aesthetic theory and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnivalesque, the article examines the link between humour and carnival aesthetics in recent social movements. It argues that carnival laughter initiates a process of symbiosis that opens relationships with others and allows recognition of democratic diversity, aesthetic sensibility and political dignity--essential for the reconstruction of a new space that is resistant to the politically imposed world crisis. It asks: could humour be one of the social catalysts we need during the authoritarian turn in a political Ice Age instigated by conservative populism? It argues that humour is not just a tool to consolidate solidarities but a definitive aesthetic experience which, in the context of the street protests, becomes the antidote to hegemonic-sense-making mechanisms and the greyness of our collective thinking.

In the 1990s, hybridism, border cultures, cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, and cross-cultural networks were popular themes in academia as well as in large-scale art exhibitions. Globalization was often used as an abstract term that projected an awareness of larger cultural horizon and plurality in culture and society, whilst hiding the economic disparities and unevenness of development under neoliberal capitalism in the so-called "globalized" societies. In explaining the globalization of culture, the indebtedness to abstract theories of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism, in many cases, have pushed the artist and the curator for the bleak representation of the Other embedded in “difference”—a dissociated and ahistorical quality—which held little relevance to the actual histories and day-to-day realities of those constructed as racially, sexually or economically different. While the hybrid, the diasporic, the immigrant have become tropes to be carried around in the exhibition space, the geopolitical borders and borderlands have continued to generate disenfranchised, oppressed, and traumatized flesh-and-blood people. Talking about the representation system of the art biennials, Brian Holmes aptly states: “This is a relation between the global and the local, or more precisely, between computerized abstraction and the intimacy of the experience.” How can art history adequately capture this relation?

Do contemporary art discourses on globalization and immigration, in fact, conceal the harsher realities of the neoliberal world order by upholding an impasse on the agency of the immigrant?  Do the proliferation of exhibitions on immigration and immigrants refer to a particular tendency in the art world’s new fetishization of the Other? Terry Smith proposes the word “worldly” and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak “planetary” to erase the ontological tension  in the terms“global”  'local" and “glocal” but could there be an adequate representation of the psychic, social, economic and political worlds‐within‐the world from the perspective of the art? This paper asks these questions while comparing the recent theoretical and practical developments in the art history discipline and the art world regarding immigration to that of the discourses and exhibitions in the 1990s.

Art activism has been a key element in current social movements and uprisings, even as the relation of art and activism appears to have changed significantly during recent decades. In the aftermath of the alter-globalization movements, Arab Spring, Occupy movements around the world, the Gezi Resistance in Turkey, and the ongoing Black Lives Matter Movement in the United States, discussing and theorizing about art has inevitably involved taking resistance, occupation, protest, and activism into consideration. Artists engage in making political intervention, and activists use artistic strategies as a part of political action. Political communities and artistic communities are more and more constitutive of one another in the counterhegemonic struggle. Drawing on photographic and artistic evidence from the 2013 Gezi Park resistance in Turkey, in tandem with theoretical work by Mikhail Bakhtin and Chantal Mouffe, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, this essay examines the changing relationship between art and activism to the extent that protest today references and embodies street carnival and carnival aesthetics. I contend that carnival aesthetics brings about displacements within modes of perception, thus stimulating new forms of subjectification and sociability through which the communities of social movements are constituted.

Drawing inspiration from Jacques Rancière's and Chantal Mouffe's framework concerning aesthetics and politics Tijen Tunali examines instances of artistic expression during and post occupation of public spaces within the context of the Teachers' Uprising in Mexico in 2006 and Turkey's Gezi Park Protests in 2013 comparatively. The chapter delves into how political aesthetics within the domain of urban protests could engender dialogues that might seem implausible amongst protestors who harbored conflicting political allegiances. The fundamental argument of this chapter is that in both scenarios, the aesthetic attributes of art operated as joint endeavors, fostering dialogic exchanges. These spontaneous conversational exchanges gave rise to collisions of disparate political identities and standpoints. It's important to note, however, that these exchanges did not culminate in a rational consensus or the reconciliation of disparities among protestors with divergent political outlooks. Instead, they catalyzed a dynamic political milieu characterized by agonistic coexistence throughout the course of the protests and occupations. This dynamic perpetuated both unity and divergence. In the context of Mexico, artistic partnerships with the local populace in Oaxaca facilitated diverse strata of society, each characterized by distinct ethnic and class affiliations, to acknowledge and encounter the evocative and dialogic potential of art. On the other hand, in Turkey, the focus rested on anonymous artistic creation and aesthetic engagement, nurturing dialogic capabilities among societal factions that conventionally identified themselves as adversaries or adversaries.

This volume presents an extensive array of examples drawn from diverse disciplines and regions worldwide. These examples share a common thread of interest in fostering participation, agonism, and the potential for "possibilizing" – the concept of fostering equitable interactions that facilitate the creation of complex imaginaries and the envisagement of agonistic coexistence through artistic processes, dissemination, and observation. The discourse within centers on the dialogical attributes of art, prioritizing them over the establishment of a predetermined aesthetic-political praxis.

Contributors to this volume encompass a spectrum of roles, including social activists, museum professionals, art historians, and practitioners of collaborative art. Their collective objective revolves around outlining strategies for engaging with art within regions marked by pronounced political divisions. Timely inquiries are posed concerning the capacity of art to orchestrate challenging conversations, establish connections, and devise methodologies conducive to urgent political retorts. Can contemporary art effectively transcend political schisms and progress toward fostering democratic social interaction, openness, and contingency? How might artists contribute to the comprehension of agonistic encounters within urban public spaces? Amidst the escalating influence of regressive forces such as nationalism, racism, and misogyny worldwide, can artworks reciprocate and counterbalance these trends?

As the self-contained realm of art steadily diminishes, artists face the task of crafting new frameworks that enable the articulation of a political aesthetic through democratic dialogue. This  collective book delves into the potential for artists to recontextualize their work, thereby establishing platforms wherein a political aesthetic can flourish and contribute to democratic discourse.

This book examines gentrification as an ongoing manifestation of neoliberal urban planning, amalgamating contemporary discussions in art history, philosophy, geography, and urban studies. The objective is to scrutinize the evolving function of art within the broader socio-economic framework of neoliberal urbanism. The chapters endeavor to comprehend how art both encapsulates and, at times, challenges the dynamics of gentrified urban spaces. Furthermore, they elucidate the hegemonic and counterhegemonic interplays between municipal authorities, urban developers, and activists, thereby shedding light on the empowerment of communities residing in gentrified neighborhoods.

Jean-Luc Nancy appropriates the term "communovirus" to describe how isolation paradoxically creates a way of experiencing community-as the pithy #alonetogether reductively proclaims. In contrast, there are alarming developments amidst the COVID-19 crisis: the turbulence of state apparatus in managing the crisis and questionable assertions of states' authority, an increase in domestic violence and the rising vulnerability of refugees in camps and the incarcerated. Sheltering in place is a secure option only for the reasonably affluent-divisions are starkly laid bare in such times as our lowest-paid workers are deemed "essential". Such volatile conditions make many of us question: what roles and responsibilities do the visual arts shoulder as society undergoes such sudden and profound change? As educators, practitioners and curators of art and its social history, how can we contribute to the emergent forms shaping humanity's understanding of community, both at local and global levels? Does art have the power to unite and connect in times of crisis, as Audrey Azoulay, the head of the UNESCO, proclaims? Papers in this session analyze art produced during periods of extreme societal rupture (such as war, famine, drought and illness) to reveal the necessity of creative expression in defiance of overwhelming hopelessness. Through a Marxist lens, presenters seek to understand parallels between art's response to today's pandemic and its precedent during prior episodes of collapse, both epidemiologically and economically.

This paper analyzes the collective aesthetic experiences of the masses during marches, protests, and occupations. Based on the theories of aesthetics and rebellion, the paper proposes the concept of carnival aesthetics as the study of the sensuous and subversive experience of the multitude when marching, throwing slogans, battling with police forces behind the barricades, performing and dancing together on the streets. Inspired by Bakhtin's study of carnival in the work of the sixteenth-century century writer François Rabelais, carnival aesthetics define the aesthetic dimension of social and sensual encounters among fellow protesters, which allows transcending the immediate reality of existing social relations in daily life. Bakhtin's theory argues that carnival is a process of regeneration in an exultation of sensory encounters that lead to an experience of freedom, equality, and brotherhood. With the case-study of the 2013 Gezi uprising in Turkey, this paper argues that the aesthetic elements of the carnival—such as the satire, the laughter, the dance and the performance— connect the subject to the other subjects in ways that the individual subject would not experience during the capitalist relations extant in the current social order. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in the added section titled Carnival and Movement " in their book Multitude, propose the notion of carnival as the model for the protest movement of the multitude " not only in their atmosphere [but] also in their organization (2005) " Hardt and Negri join Bakhtin in his discussion that during carnivals, bodies are de-individualized and belong to a collective force. Those collective bodies represent an altogether a different social structure, where the emphasis is shifted from the life of the individual to the life of " the people. " Elsewhere Hardt and Negri noted that " participants experienced the power of creating new political effects through being together (2012). " This has also been paraphrased as unexpected relations of support and solidarity that allow communalism and democratic participation by the academics John Holloway, David Graeber, Gavin Grindon and Ken Hirschkop to name a few. This paper discusses the carnivalesque aesthetics as a means to create diversity, creativity, decentralization, horizontality, egalitarianism and direct action–the same principles that are in the heart of the contemporary anti-capitalist movements. Whilst thriving authoritarianism and the regeneration of neoliberal fascist domination depend on the disciplined individuals and the crisis in democracy, carnival aesthetics of the multitude, during marches, protests and occupations, presents radicalized social relations that is increasingly becoming the core of the current environmental, political and cultural struggles around the world for creating a new society.

In the current stage of neuroaesthetics as an interdisciplinary field, it is merely embraced by the neurobiologists, the computer scientists, and a few artists producing computer-generated art. On the other hand, art historians and others in the humanities and social sciences have remained distant and some have even fiercely criticized it. One of the main pitfalls of neuroaesthetics—in its search for understanding how the brain responds to beauty—is its approach to aesthetics as simply " the experience of beauty. " This approach not only discounts that aesthetics is fundamentally a philosophical field (and definitely beyond the question of beauty) but it disregards its meaning loaded with cultural and political uses of it. In so doing, neuroscientists are heavily criticized for making questionable framing assumptions about art and aesthetics. Thus, the general conclusion in the philosophy discipline is that neuroscience is the wrong kind of empirical science for understanding art. On the other hand, since the emergence of transdisciplinarity in the artistic field, the visual art realizes its potential as a diverse and complex system of becoming. Thus, the theory of art is conferred to the philosophers who have not yet paid attention to the workings of the culture and the brain in forming complex systems of influence, control, and resistance. The possibility of art for realizing itself as one of the forces of social emancipation needs an essential shift in thinking, research, and methodology. Some pressing issues are: How can we translate the findings of neuroaesthetics to the humanities perspective for understanding the importance of neuroplasticity in the contemporary visual culture? And how can we merge the humanities perspective with the clinical evidence of neuroscience to form an aesthetic theory that strengthens both neuroaesthetics and the artistic field? This paper examines these issues and discusses why bridging of neuroaesthetics and art theory is important for rediscovering the true emancipating power of art in its neuromodulating capacity in the age of cognitive capitalism and the machines.

Conference Paper Abstract for the 14th Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association

"Policing" and "Politics": Clarifying the Rhetoric Surrounding the Relationship of Popular Culture and Art with Activism

The recent controversy surrounding Beyonce’s Super Bowl half-time performance heightened the contradictory and multifaceted relationships among art, popular culture, and activism. Beyonce’s spectacular intervention, with visual tropes such as Black Panther berets and giving the black power salute, was deemed racist and have been attacked by white supremacists leading to protests and boycotts all over the country. On the other hand, it was embraced quickly by mainstream black population (especially women) and some progressive media. Guardian announced the event with the headline “The Superstar Who Brought Black Power to Super Bowl” while New York Times asked “Beyonce in Formation: Entertainer, Activist, Both?” Others pointed out that she was a product of the music industry and was acting as instructed. As a surprise to mainstream analysts, some academics and activists of Black Lives Matter movement voiced their fierce criticism and called the performance “capitalism masked as radical change.” Starting with this popular example, I propose to engage in the discussions that would analyze the paradoxical relationship of art and popular culture to activism and radical critique.

Arguments on Beyoncé’s controversial act are very timely because recently art’s social function as a political activity is also under attack by both the traditional art world professionals and the traditional activists. With what has been described as a “social turn of art,” we have witnessed a shift in art’s engagement with politics, ranging from igniting critical awakening in society to creating communal and egalitarian relations in the public spaces. Hence, the never-ending tension between political activism and artistic representation still persists in the century-old paradox: aestheticization of politics that leads to spectacularization of art to make political ideologies attractive, and politicization of aesthetics that strips art of its autonomy, thus its power to operate as a creative process.

In this paper, with various examples from the art world and popular culture, I will discuss art’s contemporary role in the activist sphere. Deriving from Ranciere’s analysis on the dialectics between “police” and “politics,” between the oppressive forces and oppositional forces, I will analyze different views and perspectives on the social value of art and focus on the question: does art activism tone down the social critique and sanitize political expression by spectacularizing it for popular appeal or does it open up necessary avenues for a radical social critique in the society?

Key Words: Art, Popular Culture, Activism, Social Movements, Social Engagement, Representational Strategies

Bosawas Reserve is home to Mayagna and Miskito peoples and is the last surviving primary tropical rainforest in Central America with an area of 750,000 hectares. It has more biodiversity than the US, Canada, and Mexico combined. In 1991 Bosawas was declared a National Reserve of Natural Resources by the Nicaraguan government without taking consent of the indigenous people that inhabit the area. The Indigenous cultures of the region are inseparably linked to the natural environment and their sustainable lifestyle is intrinsically linked to the ecology of the Biospheric Reserve. The legal protections for Native people and the rain forest are being flagrantly violated by increasingly violent mestizo colonists (colonos). Government at all levels has proven to be ineffectual in the face of the crisis. There has been no media coverage of this crisis, the unprecedented ecological destruction, the escalation of violence, or the plight of refugees fleeing the areas of conflict. Our documentary project aimes at recording Mayagna's unique music with their unique instruments. Mayangna's music is not only important as a symbolical cultural value but it also serves as a historical record of their oral tradition and cosmology. This centuries old knowledge is essential to understand that the existence of these communities depends on the Bosawas Rainforest and the preservation of this natural heritage depends on the survival of Mayagnas. Thus our main objective is not only to record Mayangna's music but to form permanent bonds between the mainstream Nicaraguan musicians and Mayagna musicians. This will enable Mayagnas to have a true dialogue with the larger society as equal subjects. There is an urgent need for the ecological-minded people of Nicaragua to build a collaborative force with the Mayangnas with a strong vision and bold, practical and realistic steps for achieving the preservation and protection of one of the world's most complex and rich ecosystem and its inhabitants. We believe that this project for building a bridge between the Mayangnas and the mainstream Nicaraguan society through music will inspire and facilitate a much-needed ecological and social consciousness in young generations.

The annual international conference series Art and the City was initiated in 2019 and has been held in different cities every year. The primary purpose of this conference is to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues and collaborations among scholars with a specific focus on the intersections of art, urban spaces, the "right to the city," aesthetics, and the politics of the urban environment. It aims to shed light on various aspects related to these themes, such as artistic rebellion on the streets, the aesthetics of urban social movements, and art activism in urban spaces. The conference serves as a platform for bringing together an international team of scholars, fostering a diversity of disciplines and perspectives on the intricate relationships between urban space, art, and social change. This diversity allows for a multifaceted understanding of the ideologies, relationships, meanings, and practices that emerge from the interactions between art and the urban environment. The conference strives to offer insights and promote a better understanding of how these interactions play out in different regions, ultimately contributing to the broader discourse on urban life, art, and social transformation.

Gentrification arguably forms a key component of neoliberal urban growth strategies inspired by the so-called promises of the creative city and other marketing strategies including aestheticization of the urban space. Gentrification's hegemonic effects on urban sensorium have an essential role in producing and reinforcing socio-spatial divides and creating displacements. Regarding gentrification as a continuous process of the neoliberal urban planning, this panel aims to bring together current debates in art, art history, philosophy, sociology, geography, and urban studies to explore art's changing role in the larger socioeconomic context of contemporary urbanism. This panel will discuss how art takes part in the new urban renewal, and displacement but also captures and, in some instances, subverts the experience of the gentrified urban space, reveals the hegemonic and counterhegemonic interactions among city authorities, urban developers, and citadins and empowers the communities in the gentrified neighborhoods. Although the social science evaluations of artists' role in gentrification vary, the research is more centered in North America, and the dialectical perspective that both acknowledges art as a positive force for gentrification and analyzes its resistance to gentrification has been lacking. This panel aims to de-center research on gentrification through the territorial, linguistic and artistic lens of Améfrica Ladina and reinserts art's role in grassroots anti-gentrification activism. Therefore, the papers looking at the examples across the Americas from a multidimensional perspective and that consider both aspects of art's relationship to gentrification are welcome. Please send your paper proposals (max.300 words) by August 30, 2019 to tijentunali9@gmail.com.