Nikita Dhawan and Maria do Mar Castro Varela with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Register In times of multiple crises, it is imperative to (re)examine the mandate of art. What role should art play in the face of rising social injustices? Could critical artistic practices facilitate transnational justice and democracy, protecting and promoting human rights? Or should art remain non-purposive (or, unzweckmäßig, as phrased by Kant and Adorno)? Given that art functions within structures of capitalism and coloniality, the role of art and art institutions is ambivalent. Can the political labor of training the imagination mitigate unjust structures and practices? To find answers to this pressing question we (a) look into artivism, whose origins lie in the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s in Los Angeles and Berlin and (b) examine if and how an aesthetic education can help us imagine a planetary future.

In this event, Nikita Dhawan, María do Mar Castro Varela, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak will discuss methodologies to understand and further decoloniality-informed art practices and their transformative ramifications in society at large. 


Nikita Dhawan is professor of political science at the Leopold-Franzen University Innsbruck and Director of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’, Goethe University Frankfurt. Her publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007), Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed., 2014), and Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung (2014; with Maria do Mar Castro Varela).

María do Mar Castro Varela is a Professor of Pedagogy and Social Work at the Alice Salomon University in Berlin. She holds a double degree in Psychology and Pedagogy from the University of Cologne and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen. Her publications include: Untimely Utopias. Migrant Women between Learned Hope and Self-Invention; Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung (with Nikita Dhawan), and The Demonization of Others (ed. with Paul Mecheril).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.