Marina Gržinic – författare

This book articulates a contemporary, globalized world as one in which radical disparities in distribution of wealth are being reproduced as the basis for depoliticized social, institutional, and ideological discourses. At its center is a reorientation of global capitalism from the management of life towards making a surplus value from death. This change is presented as a reorientation of biopolitics (bio meaning life) to necropolitics (necro meaning death). Therefore in the book we work with processes of change, of a historicization of biopolitics and its turn into necropolitics that leads to a theoretical trajectory from M. Foucault to A. Mbembe and beyond. This book interprets the sustained perception of existence of dichotomy between these provisional extremes as a trademark of apolitical and/or post-political logics on which contemporary institutional, political, and social discourses tend to be structured upon. More, contrary to the majority of approaches that insists on a profound dichotomy between democracy and totalitarianism, between poverty and free market, and between democracy and capitalism, this book does not interpret these relations as dichotomous, but as mutually fulfilling. The book elaborates, in the context of articulation of these logics, contemporary, imperial racism (racialization) as an ideology of capitalism and states that the First World’s monopoly on definition of modernity has its basis in contemporary reorganization of colonialism.In the book, the authors trace a forensic methodology of global capitalism with which life, art, culture, economy, and the political are becoming part of a detailed system of scrutiny presented and framed in relation to criminal or civil law. Criminalization of each and every segment of our life is working hand in hand with a depoliticization of social conflicts and pacification of the relation between those who rules and those who are ruled. The outcome is a differentiation of every single concept that must from now bear the adjectives of the necropolitical or forensic; therefore we can talk about forensic images, art, projects, and necropolitical life, democracy, citizenship. This will change radically the perspectives of an emancipative project of politics (if it is any possible to be named as such) for the future.

It brings together theoretical academic texts by established and emerging scholars alike, exposing perspectives form different fields (philosophy, cultural studies, performance studies, theater studies, and dance studies) as well as from different geopolitical contexts.

The aim of this volume is to revisit theories of art, new media technology, and aesthetics under the weight of political processes of discrimination, racism, anti-Semitism and new forms of coloniality in order to propose a new dispositive of the ontology and epistemology of the image, of life and capitalism as well as labor and modes of life.

It brings together theoretical academic texts by established and emerging scholars alike, exposing perspectives form different fields (philosophy, cultural studies, performance studies, theater studies, and dance studies) as well as from different geopolitical contexts.

The aim of this volume is to revisit theories of art, new media technology, and aesthetics under the weight of political processes of discrimination, racism, anti-Semitism and new forms of coloniality in order to propose a new dispositive of the ontology and epistemology of the image, of life and capitalism as well as labor and modes of life.

Belgian colonialism in the Congo. Antisemitism in Austria. Turbo-nationalism in former Yugoslavia. Over the last two centuries, these three historic lines of violence and annihilation (re)enforced a process of oblivion that to this day prevents a processing of the genocides they caused. Today involuntary or performed amnesia again threatens to destroy what has already come to a point of possible coexistence.This catalogue goes back to these traumatic events in history and the recent past, which had such a violent impact on communities and people, states and territories, and confront them with a system of interventions. The scars that remain after atrocities, although hidden and obliterated, are recovered through artistic, scientific, and political reflections.Exhibition details:Weltmuseum WienOctober 8, 2020 – April 3, 2021