In this master's thesis, our research is focused on protest art in its potential for social change. We understand protest art as a specific political practice and for this reason, we first turn to the reconceptualisation of politics and political activity through the notion of infrapolitics. At the same time, we also reconceptualise the perception of political activity through praxis-philosophy. Protest art as praxis – as a free and creative activity – opens up a space of conceptualising the political capabilities of protest art. Art affirmed as praxis becomes the medium of human’s affirmation as a free individual in a free society. The notion of praxis leads to the prefigurative potential of art and offers an entry point to the conceptions of protest art and to its political capabilities, which we research through the potential of imagination and through politics of aesthetics. The political capabilities of protest art therefore reside in the moment of dissensus, ergo, in the ability to reconfigure the existing distribution of what is perceptible, whilst challenging the sensible, imaginable and possible. With the new sensibility of art’s political capabilities, we then focus on the intersection of everyday life and anarchism, in the context of which we conceptualise protest art as a prefigurative praxis that can form an alternative life within the shell of the old, thus prompting the realisation of social transformation. The main goal of this thesis is a political rethinking of protest art and its potential with corresponding implications in the local context. With it, the thesis addresses the question of how to think about protest art and what is its potential for the transformation of social reality.
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