W@TC - The Coloniality of Counter-Aesthetics: Afghan Women Artists and German Cultural and Feminist Foreign Policy

Join Wednesdays at the Center on April 17 with Paniz Musawi Natanzi for her talk "The Coloniality of Counter-Aesthetics: Afghan Women Artists and German Cultural and Feminist Foreign Policy" Paniz Musawi Natanzi is a political theorist and Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University Middle East StudiesCenter (DUMESC) in 2023/2024. In this role, she provides oversight, assistance and guidance on relevantprogramming as well as develops events at both DUMESC and Duke Islamic Studies Center (DISC). Paniz was a Postdoctoral Associate in the 2022-2023 theme year programming in "Feminist Theory and Imperialism" in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Currently, she is completing her book manuscript The War Mode of Art Production: Masculinities, Labour and Race in Afghanistan. For her doctoral dissertation she did research in urban Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. After her Ph.D. (SOAS, University of London) Paniz worked as a consultant in the fields of gender, migration and labor, mental health and prison politics in Afghanistan. In the academic year 2024/2025 Paniz will be one of five Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. The Goethe Institute, along with partnering German institutions, including the Foreign Office and political foundations, suggests to offer a "safe space" for artists and cultural workers, particularly those from Afghanistan and Iran, who cannot work in their countries of origins due to war and censorship. In this talk, she discusses how German cultural and feminist foreign policy relates to artists interpellated as Afghan, including diasporic artists and those who were evacuated from Afghanistan to Germany, the European Union and other NATO member states as a result of the military withdrawal in 2021. She examines the artwork of two evacuated cis women and suggest that the notion of resistance in their conceptual and photographic work operates within what she terms the coloniality of counter-aesthetics. She argues that such counter-aesthetics obscure the interface between manifestations of censorship, war and carceral capitalist systems in Germany. Against this backdrop, she explores the liberatory potentiality of visual arts related to Afghanistan in Germany This event will be hybrid. Registration is required to join via Zoom. Light refreshments will be provided.