Jana Kukaine's book "Visceral Aesthetics: Affects and Feminist Art in Postsocialism" is an innovative and at the same time exhaustive research in feminist aesthetics. The author provides an answer to the question of how to think about feminist art in a post-socialist situation, thus also in the context of Latvia. The book was published in the "Studia humanitarianica" series of the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the LU, published by the LFMI of the LU and Riga Stradins University.
In order to approach feminist art and describe its features in the post-socialist situation, Jana Kukaine develops guidelines for visceral aesthetics: "It is an innovative theoretical approach that offers to register the feminist sensibility of artistic and cultural processes, emphasizing the importance of lived experience, intimacy and the embodied subject. The view of visceral aesthetics allows to be included in the agenda set by the "other feminism" of Eastern Europe, while at the same time cultivating its place in today's current feminist and art theories." In the book, the author uses the frameworks of feminist aesthetics, philosophy of art and the theory of affects, which focus on everyday life, the monotonous, the obscured and the scary, as well as the body and affectivity.
In the research, the author focuses on the analysis of Latvian contemporary art, including the works of Katrīna Neiburga, Ingrīda Pičukāne, Rasa Jansone, Vivianna Stanislavska, Mētra Saberova and Vikas Eksta.
The reviewer of the book, literary scholar and Daugavpils University associate professor Sandra Meškova states: "Jana Kukaine's monograph covers several perspectives - feminist art, post-socialism and visceral aesthetics. Each of them is interesting and relevant in the current cultural situation both with the offered opportunity to look at art processes from a precisely defined and exhaustively described point of view in the monograph, and with the issues of historical succession, heritability, actualization of past processes and future orientation important in research, and with the erudition of the author in the context of the issues to be solved, which intrigues from the very beginning and promises an exciting journey through the range of thoughts, findings, explanations, arguments contained in modern scientific language. In the course of reading the research, what was promised is not only fulfilled, but fulfilled with a twist".
The LU LFMI series "Studia humanitarianica" publishes the latest humanities studies based on recently defended doctoral theses. The monographs of Aigars Lielbārdis, Sanita Reinsone, Zita Kārkla, Kārlis Vērdiņš and other authors have been published in the series.
In 2016, Jana Kukaine published the book "Beautiful mothers. Woman, body, subjectivity", applying a feminist direction in the study of Latvian contemporary art, 2023. In 2008, she obtained a doctorate in art theory at the Latvian Academy of Arts and is currently an assistant professor and leading researcher at Riga Stradiņš University, focusing on topics related to the environment, body and art.
Photo: The Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the LU