The series of lectures Performative Power and Failure of Dissent: Aesthetics of Intervention in Eastern Europe and Beyond explores performative and aesthetical aspects of dissent activities and their effects on the public sphere in various cultural and geopolitical contexts of the 2010s and 2020s. Under (semi-)authoritarian and populist regimes, aesthetical interventions ‒ performances, happenings, rap and pop songs or poetry slams ‒ have become an important part of public utterance and grassroot agency. Often enough they embody alternative spaces of ersatz-politics when political debates are lacking, social minorities are excluded and state propaganda prevails. However, despite different political regimes and power constellations, what we call “performative interventions” seem to be flourishing not only in countries such as Russia, Belarus or Poland, where populism or autocratic political order prevent „direct“ forms of political engagement, but also in so called democratic countries, i.e. France, Germany or the USA. Focusing on social problems and political disasters, activists and artists strive to constitute spaces of emotional and cognitive participation which remain otherwise invisible.
The lectures analyse and problematize the phenomenon of aesthetical intervention by raising the following questions: In what way and in which public spaces dissent performances become (im)perceptible? What affects do they create and what impact can they exert? What have been the key terms of their political agendas in 2010s-2020s and in which countries and social niches: war? ecology? feminism? democracy? Have there been any shifts in the culture of performative politics of dissent in recent years (for example from shocking protest art to less spectacular micropractices)?