As part of the lecture series Regional Tea Party titled “The Left”, on 28 september at 12pm in the Main hall of the Institute of Social Sciences, full professor of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Irena Ristić, will talk about the relationship between revolutionaries and artists titled “The Left and Art: War of Lovers”.
The war of two sides dedicated/gazed/forever in love has been going on for a long time, ever since the first clashes between Marx and Saint-Simon, although it is worth reconsidering potential developments. The problem is not only in the preservation of class privileges, but in the relation towards imagination – in understanding this complex symbolic function that has its consequences in reality and can be the driving force of practice, as well as political changes. Nevertheless, among contemporaries who represent the ideas of the left, imagination is almost condemned, and art is seen only as a bourgeois achievement and a relict of the counter-revolution. Not by chance, unfortunately, the reasons are multiple.
The lecture will discuss this, as well as the questions of how the production of imaginary social meanings takes place and what reasons stand behind the obstruction of imaginary flows, and behind the preservation of institutional heteronomy in societies of neoliberal capitalism. What could the left today gain from collective art practices, and what could art groups learn from revolutionaries?
Irena Ristić works in the field of science and art. She is inclined to social experiments and psychological research, mostly focused on collective, activist and meta-artistic practices. She graduated at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (theater directing), did jer master’s degree in psychology at the Faculty of Philosophy and received her PhD in the field of art psychology at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. She is the author of a series of artistic and scientific works, the monograph Mala vrata. On commonality and the paths of radical imagination (2021) and Essays on friendship and possession (2019), as well as the studiy The beginning and end of the creative process (2010). Further she is the co-author of the monograph Psychology of creativity (2013) and the editor of several thematic anthologies about the results of contemporary artistic practices. She is one of the founders of the collective Hop.La!, an activist and a full-time professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade.
The Regional “Tea party” is organized together with the Academic Network for Cooperation in Southeast Europe. The moderator of the lecture is Irena Ristić (IDN).
