Language: English.
Venue: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 4th floor.

Free admission. Registration online.

In the 20th century, many writers and artists referred to the metaphor of the bird that is unable to land and is destined to be endlessly in a state of flight. Most often, this trope was used as an expression of nonconformity to conventional societal norms and as an existential dislocation rather than the drama of the real displacement and rejection stemming from geopolitical conflicts, ethic cleansings, neocolonial wars, and Anthropocene-induced migrations, which are rapidly becoming a mundane everyday reality in the present century. The restless bird then takes on the shape of a quite real exile, a refugee fleeing from war, climate cataclysms, or economic collapse, which is especially true in the conditions of semi-periphery in the so-called “Middle-East-Europe”. The rapidly growing global transversal community of restless birds is a crucial agent in the worlding of a future that is already dawning, while their/our fate should be perceived not only as the tragedy of non-belonging but also as a gift of adaptation and relationality, of unsettlement as a generative condition.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Vasyl Cherepanyn, Kyiv Biennial.

Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial feminist thinker, fiction writer, and professor of gender studies at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research interests include epistemic and aesthetic aspects of decoloniality; the postsocialist human condition, fiction, and art; critical future inquiries and critical interventions into complexity, crisis, and change. Tlostanova’s most recent books include: A New Political Imagination, Making the Case (co-authored with Tony Fry, Routledge, 2020), Decoloniality of Knowledge, Being and Sensing (Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, Kazakhstan, 2020), and Narratives of Unsettlement. Being Out-of-Joint as a Generative Human Condition (Routledge, 2023). Currently, she is working on a monograph Not by Leviathan Alone. An Exercise in Post-Nation-State Worlding.