(Cultural Industry; Aesthetics & Ethics)

This strands focuses on the understanding of art in both its aesthetic and political dimension. It focuses on cross-cultural productions and borrowings that emphasise the uneasy relationship with canons, national traditions, and other operations of inclusion and exclusion. Art and diversity are made central through the study of a myriad of different media and genres which range from literature and cinema to the visual arts, from digital media to photography, from theater to music, and so forth. Art is addressed for its transformative power and as a vehicle for intercultural communication and planetary solidarity.

To understand the medium of art in its specificity is as essential as the understanding of its context of operation in order to account for both the aesthetic and ethical dimensions. Art is also understood as part of the market and it is explored in relation to its entanglement with globalization and the issues of production, distribution, reception and canonization (i.e. institutions such as publishing houses, prizes, festivals and competitions are taken into account). The research group has a strong expertise in ‘doing gender’ in the arts as new forms of appropriation and transformation of gendered identity which are not purely visual but multimodal and multicultural. Projects undertaken with artists and curators are thus part of the work undertaken.