Panel Announced: How Do We Make Art in Times of Violence: Between Positionality and Solidarity

We’re delighted to announce the second featured panel of the RUTA Conference: How Do We Make Art in Times of Violence: Between Positionality and Solidarity.

Art is often celebrated as a force for challenging dominant narratives and amplifying marginalized voices. Yet cultural production does not exist outside the structures it seeks to critique. Art institutions, curatorial practices, and cultural discourse frequently reproduce the same epistemic injustices found in academia, politics, and media — from imperial ways of seeing and extractive engagements with communities to the aestheticization of suffering and the appropriation of excluded voices.

Bringing together Nastya Kosodii, Michał Murawski, Maithu Bùi, and Furqat Palvan-Zade, and moderated by Lia Dostlieva, this panel asks how art might move beyond these limitations. What would it mean for cultural production to actively disrupt imperial knowledge systems, foster meaningful solidarities, and repair fractured relationships between communities, histories, and ways of knowing? How do we avoid performative solidarities and geopolitical abstractions while remaining accountable to those living through war, displacement, authoritarianism, and ongoing colonial violence?