Art Beyond the Nation: Reimagining Statehood in Central Asian Contemporary Art

📍 EKA, White Building, room A308, Kotzebue 10. Access to the third floor is via the external staircase.

The seminar is held in English.

Programme
October 2–3, 9:45–11:15 and 11:30–13:00
October 5–6, 9:45–11:15 and 11:30–13:00
October 7, 12:30–16:00

Target group
The seminar is intended for doctoral researchers in the Humanities and Arts branch of the Estonian Doctoral School.

General information
This seminar examines how contemporary artists from Central Asia frame the idea of the nation as both a political fiction and a material, affective, and aesthetic reality. Moving between contemporary art, political theory, philosophy, postcolonial thought, and critical studies of nationalism, we will ask how artists make nations visible—and how they expose the exclusions, violence, fantasies, and contradictions through which national identity is produced, in the process reimagining statehood and developing alternatives to the nation state as the only form of postcolonial liberation.

Rather than treating the nation primarily as a geopolitical fact, the seminar approaches it as something constructed through images, monuments, borders, archives, museums, rituals, narratives, landscapes, languages, and bodies.

The seminar combines close viewing with close reading. Doctoral researchers will be expected to move between artworks and theoretical arguments, treating neither as an illustration of the other. Each day combines three hours of discussion and art viewing.

Facilitator
Prof Sven Spieker, University of Santa Barbara. Further information: https://svenspieker.com/

Registration
➤  Register HERE. The registration is open until 28 September 2026..

Maximum number of participants is 15

Additional questions
In case of questions, please contact Irene Hütsi, irene.hutsi@artun.ee.

Estonian Doctoral School for Humanities and Arts.