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Politiskt framträdande i några konstverk från den ukrainska revolutionen 2013–2014

Resumé

This essay analyzes how artworks express the Ukrainian revolution 2013–2014 as an experience of democracy. Three questions are foregrounded. How do aesthetic expressions capture and accumulate social energy? How do they help convert such energy into political action? How do they preserve it, for future use? These questions concern the ways in which aesthetic works express what I call political emergence: people who have no say in political institutions come together as a collective that changes the political order. Analyzing selected examples from the Maidan uprising, the essay demonstrates a contradiction between how democratic protests generate aesthetic forms with a strong universal and utopian thrust and how these democratic utopias are subsequently contained by cultural representations and political traditions, in Ukraine’s case a particular form of militant and self-sacrificing nationalism, which, however, cannot do without projections of utopian solidarity.