Resistant Aesthetics | Lea Maria Wittich & Arijit Bhattacharyya

Lea Maria Wittich and Arijit Bhattacharyya will discuss their collaborative artistic, curatorial, and pedagogic work.

They got to know each other in the international master programme “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” at the Bauhaus University Weimar and started collaborating due to their mutual interest in the global wave of protests in 2019. The epicentres of civil resistance at that time were spanning from Chile to Hong Kong, where young people took to the streets for democratic, social and environmental rights. The lurch to the right that we had to experience in Germany with right-wing groups claiming to be “the people" were contradicting the fight for basic human rights from protesters around the world. These situations motivated them to work for solidarity with cultural practitioners from the affected communities around the world. Their main interest lies in what they term as the “Aesthetics of Civil Resistance”– which mainly looks at the intersectional methods of cultural production, the symbolic languages that artists, as well as protesting collectives and individuals, are developing to object to the oppressive authorities or social pressure.

Lea Maria Wittich (1994) is an artist based in Weimar. She is an artistic associate and lecturer in the master’s program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. As she graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design from the University of Arts Berlin her practice roots from material processes and hand craft labour. Her individual and collective work investigates empathy and solidarity on a global scope that expands its humane limitations. With the absurdity of relocated and embodied acts, she situates her practice in public space.

Arijit Bhattacharyya (1994, India) is an artist and independent curator currently living and working in Weimar, Germany. His practice revolves around contentious narratives of resistance through social engagements, design interventions and lecture-performances. His artistic discourse is deeply rooted in the dissecting trajectories of socio-political history and its implications in cultural practices. As a curator, he is invested in artistic negotiations that investigate methods of social disobedience. He holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the Bauhaus Universität Weimar and a Masters in Visual Art from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He is currently a PhD student at the Bauhaus University Weimar.

Eine Zusammenarbeit des MFA-Studiengangs «Public Art and New Artistic Strategies» der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Fakultät Kunst und Gestaltung mit der ACC Galerie Weimar. Vortrag in englischer Sprache.

Montag, 13.Dezember 2021