Art in the Philosophical Confessional. Lecture Series, October 13th – November 24th 2022, National Gallery in Prague

From October to November 2022, our team organized and participated in a popular lecture series called “Art in the Philosophical Confessional”, held at the National Gallery in Prague. The series of five lectures was based on an interdisciplinary dialogue between our team of philosophers, semioticians and anthropologists and “in-house” art historians; among the topics discussed, in which we related to specific paintings directly in the collections, were not only the motif of inhumanity, but also the relationship between abstraction and violence, expressionism and nihilism, and the contemporary inversion of the relationship between nature and technology in the context of 20th century art.

The project is a result of the Czech Science Foundation project 22-17984S Focal images: Violence and Inhumanism in contemporary art and media culture investigated at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University; University of West Bohemia and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.