Paper short abstract:

My presentation will be devoted to ethnographic examination of how art can create new social encounters. In this paper I will focus on participatory art projects conducted by contemporary Polish artists (Lukasz Murzyn, Daniel Rycharski) who are interested in creating spaces for dialogue.

Paper long abstract:

My presentation will be devoted to ethnographic examination of how art can create new social encounters. In recent years political situation in Poland has changed as the new, conservative, non-liberal political order started to emerge. The process of transition caused great political divisions affecting Polish society in many dramatic ways.

In this paper I will focus on participatory art projects conducted by contemporary Polish artists (Lukasz Murzyn, Daniel Rycharski) who are interested in creating spaces for dialogue. Over the years, anthropologists of art focused primarily on studying the so-called indigenous art created by the Other or associated with the otherness. Following the footsteps of British social anthropologist Alfred Gell, I consider art mostly as a technique for transformation of social relations. For Gell, what defines an art work is neither its aesthetic qualities nor the meaning that it represents, but the fact that art objects are relational.

Drawing from the argument of Gell, I will focus on the ephemeral collective of human and non-human agents gathered in the vicinity of an art object. The aim of my presentation will be to explore how the collective and the person are animated through relationships generated by an artwork.