CFP: INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM "POSTHUMANISM AND CONTEMPORARY ARTISTIC PRACTICES" 7-8 May

POSTHUMANISM AND CONTEMPORARY ARTISTIC PRACTICES

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM 7-8 May 2026

Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre

Gedimino Ave. 42, 01110 Vilnius, Lithuania

The symposium is dedicated to the entanglements between posthuman forms of knowledge and contemporary artistic practices. Posthumanism, as defined by Rosi Braidotti, is a critical methodology aiming to question both humanism and anthropocentrism (Braidotti 2013, 2018; Braidotti and Bignall 2019). First, posthumanism can be seen as a critique of the humanist model of ‘Man’, which is based on the project of the Enlightenment and expresses ‘the Eurocentric, masculinist universalism that is still operative in the most knowledge production scientific systems’ (Braidotti and Bignall 2019: 2). By contrast, posthumanism offers partial and perspectival ‘situated knowledges’, which take into account feminism, gender theory, postcolonialism, decolonial theory and emerging indigenous philosophies. Second, posthumanism can be seen as a critique of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, based on species hierarchy and the subjection and exclusion of nonhuman others. Posthumanism raises ‘the question of the animal’ and asks what place animals take in our all-too-human ontology (Derrida 2008; Despret 2016). It challenges the rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman animals, demonstrating that they share capacities such as sentience, affectivity, inventiveness, memory, and cognition. In this respect, posthumanism can be seen as an inclusive way of thinking that attempts to conceptualise what is ‘more-than-human'.

Such a conceptualisation is not an easy task. As Cary Wolfe suggests, ‘when we talk about posthumanism, we are not just talking about a thematics of the decentering of the human […]; rather  […] we are talking about how thinking confronts that thematics, what thought has to become in the face of those challenges’ (Wolfe 2010: xvi). This implies the need to rethink our research methodologies and the necessity to redefine human subjectivity in such a way that it would include multiple modes of existence. As Wolfe explains, “the ‘human’ can no longer be considered either the origin or the end of thought, and in at least two senses. First, the ‘human’ is not an explanans but an explanandum, not an explanation but that which needs to be explained. (…) Moreover – and more radically – not only is the line between human and nonhuman impossible to definitively draw with regard to the binding together of neurophysiology, cognitive states and symbolic behaviours, the line between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘brain’ and ‘mind’, is also impossible to draw definitively” (Wolfe 2018: 357–8). 

In other words, posthumanism is a new way of thinking, oriented towards the multiplicity of connections between inorganic and organic, human and nonhuman, human and technological beings. Besides the conventional forms of knowledge, posthuman knowledge takes into account affect and affectivity (Brian Massumi, Patricia Clough), nonconscious cognition (Antonio Damasio, N. Katherine Hayles), relationality (Bruno Latour, Karen Barad), materialism (Jane Bennett), speculative fabulation (Donna Haraway), and perspectivism (Déborah Danowski, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro). These different approaches create a kind of “patchy posthumanism” which is heterogeneous, discontinuous, and provisional. It leaves us in a permanent discontent because it does not provide a unified vision of the world, and is not comforting or reassuring. 

However, this “patchy posthumanism” opens the way not only for new fields of knowledge but also initiates new, non-representational ways of artistic expression. The symposium encourages examining those artistic practices which are based on experimentation, research, and collaboration. As Justyna Stępień points out, contemporary artists “apply non-representational methods that move towards relations, actions, and events (…) to apprehend the structures of change and dynamism of socio-material entities, reinventing human practices of care and concern. These artistic expressions are embodied and embedded, experimental in their nature, unsettling, rupturing, rather than reporting or representing” (Stępień 2022: 6). In other words, to entangle with posthuman or more-than-human entities, artists and theoreticians have to invent new modes of artistic practices, which would destabilise human subjectivity through hybrid, experimental, performative, or biomediated encounters.

References:

Braidotti, Rosi (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Braidotti, Rosi (2018) ‘A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities’, Theory, Culture & Society, Special Issue: Transversal Posthumanities, pp. 1–31. 

Braidotti, Rosi and Simone Bignall (eds) (2019), Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process After Deleuze, New York, London: Rowman and Littlefield.

Derrida Jacques (2008), The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, New York: Fordham University Press. 

Despret, Vinciane (2016), What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, trans. Brett Buchanan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Stępień, Justyna. (2022). Posthuman and Nonhuman Entanglements in Contemporary Art and the Body. New York and London: Routledge.

Wolfe, Carey (2010), What Is Posthumanism?, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wolfe, Carey (2018), ‘Posthumanism’, in Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (eds), Posthuman Glossary, New York, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 356–9.

We invite submissions (20 min presentation plus 10 min Q&A) that discuss posthumanism in relation to contemporary artistic practices, including but not limited to: 

Nonhuman Cognition: Performing with Nonhuman Others;

Affect theory between human and more-than-human;

Exploring agency in new materialism and agential realism;

Poshumanist anthropology and artistic practices

Feminist speculative science studies and artistic practices;

Indigenous cosmologies and artistic practices;

Multispecies ethnography and artistic practices.

Proposals of up to 300 words should be sent to Denis Petrina, email: [email protected] by 31 March 2026. Please include the speaker’s name and institutional affiliation. Accepted presenters will be notified by 10 April 2026. 

The symposium is free of charge. 

Organizing committee: Julija Bagdonavičiūtė, Vytis Jankauskas, Denis Petrina, Rūta Stanevičiūtė, Audronė Žukauskaitė.

Contact for general enquiries: Denis Petrina, [email protected]