Maruška Svašek
Maruška Svašek
I am an anthropologist who works at the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). My main research interests include art, creativity, migration, politics and emotions, and in the last fifteen years, my work has brought these strands together, exploring the affective relationality of humans, artefacts and spaces in an era of globalization, transnational connectivity and environmental change. In the past 30 years, I have conducted fieldwork in Ghana, Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Britain, and India. At present, I am working on a monograph on Czech art and the politics of visibility. As a large part of my research explores the cultural dimensions of conflict in various historical contexts I am also Fellow of the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice.
In 2017, I began experimenting with non-textual forms of representation. So far this has resulted in the installation 12 Hours (2018, Museum of Cultural History, Oslo), the play Under the Skin (performed at the 2019 PACSI Conference at QUB), and the film and installation Finding Objects, Finding Sounds (shown at the 2019 ASA conference, University of Norwich). In 2020, I participated in the online exhibition Illustrating Anthropology, organised in 2020 by the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I turned to visual art and poetry to explore the destabilising situation and started developing creative methods of research and teaching.
I co-Direct the Centre for Creative Ethnography (CFCE) with Ioannis Tsioulakis.
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Works
Books
Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space: Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland 2018, with Milena Komarova), Creativity in Transition: Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe (2016, with Birgit Meyer), (2012), Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions (2012), Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production: Histories, Themes, Perspectives (2007), Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe (2006) and Mixed Emotions | Anthropological Studies of Feeling (2005, with Kay Milton).
Book Series Material Mediations, Berghahn, with Birgit Meyer
Ethnopoetry
Svašek, Maruška. 2023. Pandemic times: Nine acts Anthropology and Humanism 48(2). DOI: 10.1111/anhu.12442
Plays2022 Under the Skin: A Theatrical Exploration of Art, Politics, and Fieldwork Dynamics Urban People 24(2): 269-293.
Short stories
2020 Encounters in Lockdown, posted on the Website A Changing World: Reflections from the HAPP community and beyond.
Blog posts on art-related issues
2020 ‘Lockdown Fever: Painting across Distance’, 02/06/2020, https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/happ/?s=svasek
Podcast
‘Lockdown: Time, Space and Sociality’ (Immigration and Covid) In this podcast, I examine the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of immigrants in Northern/Ireland
- Publications that develop creative methods
2023 ‘Ethnography as creative improvisation: Exploring methods in (post) pandemic times’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 13(1).
2021 ‘”Invasive” Writing: Exploring Subjectivity, Performativity and Politics in the Art of Jiří Kovanda’, Liminalities, 17(3), special issue Performance and Politics, Power and Protest, editors Kayla Rush and Sonja Kleij.
2019 ‘The Art of the Game: Photography, Ethnography and Spatial Engagement’, Journal of Irish Anthropology 22(1): 205-223.
2022 Lockdown Routines: Im/mobility, materiality and mediated support at the time of the pandemic. In Material Culture and Forced Migration: Materializing the Transient (eds Friedemann Yi-Neumann, Andrea Lauser, Antonie Fuhse and Peter Bräunlein), London: University College London.
- Publications that explore art production and the politics of creativity
Svašek, Maruška. 2020 ‘Affective Arrangements: Managing Czech Art, Marginality and Cultural Difference’ in: Durrer, Victoria and Henze, Raphaela Managing Culture: Reflecting on Exchange in Global Times. Palgrave Macmillan, Pp 99-125.
2020 “(Memories of) Monuments in the Czech Landscape: Creation, Destruction, and the Affective Stirrings of People and Things.” In Negotiating Memories from the Romans to the Twenty-first Century: Damnatio Memoriae, edited by Øivind Fuglerud, Kjersti Larsen and Marina Prusac-Lindhagen. New York: Routledge.
2018 ‘Museum Encounters: People, Things, Affective Spaces’, in States of Mind / Beyond the Image, ed by Richard Drury. Kutna Hora: GASK.
2018 ‘Destroying Krishna Imagery: The Limits of Academic and Artistic freedom? Christiane Kruse and Birgit Meyer (eds) Offensive Pictures: Religion and Art in Global Cultures. Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press.
2017 ’Aestheticisation and the Production of (Religious) Space in Chennai’, in Aesthetics of Religion. A Connective Concept. Grieser, A. & Johnston, J. (eds.). Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
2016 Introduction. Creativity and Innovation in a World of Movement. In: Creativity in Transition. Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production across the Globe. Svašek, M. and Meyer (eds) forthcoming in 2016 Oxford: Berghahn.
2016 Undoing Absence through Things: Creative Appropriation and Affective Engagement in an Indian Transnational Setting. In: Meyer, B. and Svašek, M. and (eds) forthcoming in 2013 Creativity in Transition. Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production across the Globe.. Oxford: Berghahn.
2014 (with Amit Desai) Transvisionary imaginations: artistic subjectivity and creativity in South India.. In: Fuglerud, Ø. and Wainwright, L. (eds) forthcoming Objects and imagination; perspectives on materialization and meaning. Oxford: Berghahn.
2014 ‘Forced Displacement, Suffering and the Aesthetics of Loss’, in Open Arts Journal, Issue 3, Summer 2014.
2012 What You Perceive Is What You Conceive: Evaluating Subjects and Objects through Emotion. In: Moving Subjects, Moving Objects. Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions. (ed. M. Svašek).Oxford: Berghahn. Pp 245-68. Pp 182-200.
2009 ‘Improvising in a World of Movement: Transit, Transition and Transformation’ in: Cultural Expression, Creativity and Innovation (volume in The Cultures and Globalization Series, Helmut K. Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar (eds.), Sage. Pp 62-77.
2007 ‘Moving Corpses: Emotions and Subject-Object Ambiguity’, in: The Emotions: A Cultural Reader (ed. Helena Wulff), Oxford: Berg. Pp 229-248.
2002 ‘Contacts. Social Dynamics in the Czech State-Socialist Art World’. Contemporary European History. Theme issue on Artistic and Academic Patronage in State Socialist Societies (ed. Gyorgy Péteri).
2001 ‘The Politics of Artistic Identity. The Czech Art World in the 1950s and 1960s’, Intellectual Life and the First Crisis of State Socialism in East Central Europe, 1953-1956 (ed. Gyorgy Péteri), Trondheim: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, pp. 133-153.
2000 ‘Les monuments à la glorie de l’Armee Rouge en Tschéquie’, Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine 85. Paris: Ministre de l’Equipement, pp 111-8.
1998 ‘From the Zoo into the Jungle. Social Hierarchies in the Czech Art World before and after 1989’, in Transformation Processes in Eastern Europe, Amsterdam: NWO (ed. H. Ganzeboom), pp 191-210.
1998 ‘The Dialectics of Materiality and Interpretability. The Case of the Stalin Monument’, in Language and Beyond, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp 37-57.
1997 ‘Identity and Style in Ghanaian Artistic Discourse’, in Contesting Art. Art, Identity and Politics in the Modern World, ed. Jeremy MacClancey, Berg Press, pp. 27-62.
1997 ‘The Politics of Artistic Identity. The Czech Art World in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Contemporary European History 6 (3) (November 1997). Theme issue on `Intellectual Life and the First Crisis of State Socialism in East Central Europe, 1953-1956' (ed. Gyorgy Péteri), pp. 383-403.
1997 ‘Visual Art, Myth and Power.Introduction’, Focaal. Journal of Anthropology 29 (May 1997). Theme issue on `Visual Art, Myth and Power' (eds. Maruška Svašek and G.van Beek), pp. 7-24
1997 ‘Gossip and Power Struggle in the Post-Communist Art World’, Focaal. Journal of Anthropology 29 (May 1997). Theme issue on `Visual Art, Myth and Power' (eds. Maruška Svašek and G.van Beek), pp. 101-122.
1996 ‘What's (the) Matter? Objects, Materiality and Interpretability’, Etnofoor 9(1). Theme issue on ‘Words and Things', pp. 49-70.
1995 ‘The Soviets Remembered: Liberators or Aggressors?’, Focaal. Journal of Anthropology (25). Theme issue on `War and Peace', pp. 103-124.
1991 ‘Orith Pinto. Amphitrite of de kracht van tolerantie’, in Contrapunten. Mythen in de kunst van vrouwen, Amsterdam: Amazone, pp. 84-89.
1991 ‘Rituelen in de muziek. Interview met Sinta Wuller’, in Contrapunten. Mythen in de kunst van vrouwen, Amsterdam: Amazone, pp. 42-47
1991 ‘Ara Gerhardt. Beelden uit het onderbewuste’, in Contrapunten. Mythen in de kunst van vrouwen, Amsterdam: Amazone, pp. 96-101.
- Non-Academic Publications
2012 ‘We Are What We Wear’… But Are We? An Anthropological Assessment. In: Kathakali. The Classical Dance Drama of Kerala, south Indian. Southampton: The Kala Chethena Kathakali Company, Pp38-39.
1991 ‘Souvenirs: Art or Kitch’, Ghana Newsletter 10 (2) Nijmegen: Dutch Ghana Committee.
1991 ‘Rikki Doesn’t Give in to the Public: The Badly Understood Pictures of Wemega-Kwawu’, Ghana Newsletter 9 (2). Nijmegen: Dutch Ghana Committee, pp. 10-16.
1991 ‘It is Not My Fault We Use Toyotas and Bedfords: Ato Delaquis Paints Everyday Life’, Ghana Newsletter 9(1), Nijmegen: Dutch Ghana Committee, pp. 10-16.
1990 ‘Back to African Roots’, Ghana Newsletter 8(6), Nijmegen: Dutch Ghana Committee, pp. 27-31.
1989 ‘Copying Urge or Own Identity?’, Ghana Newsletter 7(2), Nijmegen: Dutch Ghana Committee, pp. 26-29.
- Collaborations
2009 Kathakali: Performing Emotions
This was a five day workshop, designed and delivered by The Kala Chethena Kathakali Company in collaboration with Queen’s University Belfast. facilitated by Maruška Svašek (QUB anthropology) and Mark Phelan (QUB drama), it was aimed at undergraduate students in anthropology, ethnomusicology and drama, and at QUB
2011-2019 Kathakali Heritage projects
These projects were designed and run by The Kala Chethena Kathakali Company and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The Company was founded in 1987 by Kathakali make-up specialist, Kalamandalam Barbara Vijayakumar and Kathakali actor, Kalamandalam Vijayakumar to bring the remarkable art and culture of Kathakali to the UK. My task as ‘in-house anthropologist’ was to give workshops on migration, family history, religion, heritage and interviewing techniques in primary and secondary schools, museums and for other organisations in England.
With Kalamandalam Barbara Vijayakumar at a workshop on the Isle of Wight, 2016