Name: Why Does Performance Matter for Politics? A Lecture by Goran Petrović Lotina
Start: 2026-05-28T11:30:00+02:00
Location: ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, 00-927 Warsaw, Poland

$Why Does Performance Matter for Politics? A Lecture by Goran Petrovi\u0107 Lotina$

Please join us for a lecture by Goran Petrović Lotina (PhD, teaches and researches at the intersection of performance and politics at Sciences Po: The Paris Institute of Political Studies, the Université catholique de Louvain):
A Lecture on Discourse Theory, Aesthetics, and the Embodiment of Democratic Life
This lecture explores performance not simply as an artistic form or cultural expression, but as a practice through which democratic forms of collectivity are constructed. Drawing on discourse theory, it examines how everyday, civic, and artistic performances shape subjectivities, organise collective life, and make conflict, belonging, and exclusion visible. Moving beyond theories of pure presence and rupture alone, it proposes engagement as a way of understanding the political dimension of performance through articulation, tension, affect, identification, and representation. Particular attention will be given to aesthetics as a practice of articulation through which gestures, bodies, affects, and symbols are organised into contingent forms that structure collective meaning while remaining open to contestation and reconfiguration.
Goran Petrović Lotina, PhD, teaches and researches at the intersection of performance and politics at Sciences Po: The Paris Institute of Political Studies, the Université catholique de Louvain, and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Grounded in discourse theory, his research examines how everyday, civic, and artistic performances contest dominant politics and reinvigorate democracy. He has held two MSCA-funded research fellowships, at the University of Warwick and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is the author of Choreographing Agonism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), co-editor of Performing Left Populism(Bloomsbury, 2023), and principal editor of the special issue “Identification as Embodied Practice” in Aisthesis (2026). He has also worked internationally as a curator and is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).
Institute of Polish Culture
University of Warsaw
Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28
Room 5