Contemporary art, affective turn and emotions

Abstract

Due to the so-called Affective Turn, which is according to a number of scholars shaping present cross-disciplinary studies of various phenomena, art included, emotions are coming into focus of many different theoretical orientations. Among the authors concerned with issues of emotions, Sara Ahmed?s discourse on affective economies, and her understanding of emotions as practices that produce surfaces and borders that allow the collective and the individual to appear as objects proves to be particularly useful in the analysis of immaterial artworks. In regard to the leading poetic principles of contemporary art practices, starting from Bourriaud?s Relational aesthetics and the insights offered by Sara Ahmed, we will look more closely into emotions as key notions for understanding the aesthetics experience of art today.