“Aesthetics, Care, and Action” Symposium

Nomad 2024: The Infinite Sky

18 Sep 2024,

University of Central Asia, Naryn Campus, Kyrgyzstan

The “Aesthetics, Care, and Action” Symposium is a by-invitation event, limited to a select group of participants. Participants will be asked to respond to the following provocation, exploring it in the context of aesthetics education.

Provocation

At a time of unprecedented social, environmental, and economic challenges, including catastrophic climate change, and the Faustian compact we seem to be making with AI, the symposium, held as part of Nomad 2024: The Infinite Sky Festival offers a space to reflect on the character, value, and relevance of aesthetics in the contemporary world. Aesthetics has undergone various theoretical guises in past centuries. As transcendental judgement in Baumgarten and Kant, an instrument of social change and revolution in Marxism, unconcealment in Heidegger, experience in Dewey, force in Menke, political arkhè in Rancière, everyday affairs in Saito et al, aesthetics proves an elusive concept enmeshed in a dynamic heterogeneity of outlooks and discourses. As Derrida (1981) maintains, there is as much concealed as there is revealed in every theory, and this can only be shown through deconstruction. The history of aesthetics thus entails histories of deconstruction, dismantlement, unfoldment, and yet the conclusive delineation remains distant, delayed, if not impossible. In this context, we invite scholars of aesthetics to reflect on the following questions:

Does aesthetics’ turn to the embodied, the experiential, and the everyday outside the arts, in fact conceal a lingering attachment to an ethically vacuous notion of pleasure?
Is beauty the quality and value to which aesthetics is still exclusively oriented?
Does aesthetics call for a rethinking of its fundamental character and function beyond any singular quality or class of objects?
How does aesthetics respond to people, planet, and profit in an age of anxiety, distraction, violence, and galloping consumerism?
Does an ethics of care and compassionate action require an aesthetic framework? If so, what would such a framework look like?Could it offer a key to action at a time when Kantian disinterest is an unaffordable luxury?
Could a reimagined aesthetics help us makesense of life in a post-human, post-material world?
Crucially, what would be the learning and teaching implications of a reimagined aesthetics for the discipline itself and for the broader field of education?

Symposium Schedule

Prof Paul Thomas, Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference Founder and Series Chair, closing the Nomadic Image 2022.

Artist and curator Altyn Kapalova, Research Fellow at UCA’s Cultural Heritage and Humanities Unit, delivers a keynote entitled The Feminist Nomad.

Dr Ulrike Al-Khamis, CEO and Director of the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto delivers her keynote Fostering intercultural dialogue and peace through the arts of the Muslim world.

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Conference partner institution International Ala-Too University’s panel Nomadism and Culture in Kyrgyzstan. L to R: Aida Abduldaeva, Gulzada Narmamatova, Seitbek Tilekov and Elira Turdubaeva.

Panel Role of Museums in Shaping Nomadic Memories. L to R: Anel Kulakhmetova, Altynai Kudaibergenova, Baktygul Midinova and Alexandra Filatova (speaker).

A participant engages in discussion with Prof. Olga Kisseleva, the Keynote Speaker from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Keynote topic: 'Rethinking the Ontology of Art.

Sculptor Tamila Mamatova delivers a presentation on the topic of Images and Symbols of Ancient Nomadic Culture in Kyrgyz Contemporary Art.

Dr Elmira Köchümkulova, Director of UCA’s Cultural Heritage and Humanities Unit, plays the komuz, a traditional Kyrgyz instrument, during the closing ceremony of the Conference.

At the Science Gallery Foundation in Melbourne – a Conference hub - Leon Marvell delivers presentation on Judith, Salome, the Last Girl and a Weekend Massacre.

Journalist Paulie Doyle from Dublin, Ireland, chairs the session Music, Sound and Meaning with presenters from the University of New South Wales (Conference partner) and the University of Central Florida.

Closing panel with the University of Central Asia and the Glasgow School of Arts. Topic: Nomadic Landscapes and Readings. Presenters: Gina Wall, Ross Birrell and Sue Brind from GSA, and Elmira Kochumkulova, Soheil Ashrafi and Michael Garbutt from UCA.