Vortragsreihe "Kunst - Forschung - Geschlecht"
Johanna Braun
Mittwoch, 11. Mai 2022 | 18h | Auditorium
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© Johanna Braun, Spelling it like it is, 2018
© Johanna Braun, Working Hard Hardly Working, 2018
We seem to be living in bewitched times. Witches have been summoned in countless cultural, societal, and political discussion
in recent years. Artistic practices have been enchanted by this phenomenon, as witchcraft and magic are increasingly mobilized
in contemporary (performance) art and activism. Johanna Braun’s artistic-academic research investigates these current tendencies
that are often summarized under the umbrella term “witchcraft activism”. Her focus lies on “performing witchcraft” in a contemporary
context, and how these activities stem from various artistic practices that used concepts and aesthetics of witchcraft to
raise important questions around care, healing practices, and health care politics. Witchcraft activism in this context demands
(through artistic interventions) political change and addresses important questions such as: Who has the freedom to care,
to be cared for, and to protest unjust health care practices? To understand witchcraft activism’s agency, Braun proposes to
locate it’s specific (re-)emergence within a broader cultural context, allowing to imagine an artistic reflection on witchcraft,
healing, and activism as an expression of doing artistic research.
Johanna Braun is an artist-researcher, current lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and researcher at the Austrian Academy of
Sciences, Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History. She has internationally performed, exhibited, published, and has
given lectures on various aspects of mass hysteria and witchcraft activism.