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With the potential to influence substantial parts of society, both authoritarian regimes and activist groups use art and aesthetics to deliver or strengthen their message. On the one hand, authoritarian leaders may effectively use theatrics and grandeur to sway the masses and obtain public support. Art can be a powerful propaganda tool to impose certain cultural or societal norms. On the other hand, through artistic freedom people can imagine and share divergent views on what society should look like. Artists all over the world have embraced the importance of art activism and art resistance as a response to authoritarianism, to visualise what is kept in the dark or to bring together those who are kept divided. Community-building, memorialising, truth-seeking, provoking… Art has a large set of ways in which it questions the status quo in authoritarian regimes. Therefore, repression by authoritarian regimes often targets the cultural sector in an attempt to control society and artists play a pivotal role in anti-authoritarian struggles.
Invited speakers
Brigitte Herremans is a FWO postdoctoral researcher at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University and a guest lecturer at the University of Antwerp. Her research engages with Syria, (transitional) justice, artistic practices and Palestine. Her doctoral research project (2019-2023) examined the potential of literary writing to counter the erasure of injustices in the Syrian context. She holds a degree in Eastern Languages and Cultures from Ghent University and a degree in International Relations from the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Shayma Nader is a Palestinian researcher and artist born in Jerusalem. Her work looks into anticolonial and antidisciplinary imaginaries and research practices, often through walking, remembrance, and speculative fabulations. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Birzeit University and a master’s degree in Creative & Cultural Industries from SOAS, University of London. She’s currently a PhD candidate in Development Studies at IOB, University of Antwerp.
Joachim Ben Yakoub is an art worker, sometimes operating as writer, sometimes as curator or dramaturg, mostly in the Kitchen, a collective study and workspace in Brussels. He works at Sint-Lucas Antwerp, where he promotes and conducts research in the arts as part of the SLARG research group, and where he teaches aesthetic theories. Joachim Ben Yakoub also works at erg in Brussels (École de recherche graphique) where he facilitates research in the arts.
Host
Laura Fournier is a Doctoral Researcher and Teaching Assistant at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB), University of Antwerp. Her research focuses on affirmative action with regard to ethnicity in African constitutions. It centralises around African philosophies’ views on the existence of such state policies to remedy past injustices related to ethnicity.