Talks
Marie Rosenkranz
Artistic Participation in Political Debates – The Cases of Post-Brexit London and Contemporary Berlin
16 January 2026
By loading the video, you agree to Vimeos's privacy policy.
Learn more
Today, forms of activist artistic engagement are everywhere: in exhibitions, at art auctions in public space. They are no longer seen as „provocative“, but belong to the mainstream of the arts and are highly institutionalized. This talk explores the activist turn in contemporary art by looking at artistic reactions to the Brexit referendum as well as a number of recent art activist initiatives in Berlin. Drawing from art and political theory, the talk analyzes how artists engage with and shape political realities today.
Dr. Marie Rosenkranz is a postdoc lecturer and researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin, specializing in Cultural Sociology, Social Theory and Sociology of Arts, and at Zürich University of the Arts. She earned her PhD in May 2024 with the monograph Contested Art: Artistic Activist Practices in the Context of Brexit, published by Springer VS. Since June 2020, she has been a research associate with the sociologist Prof. Andreas Reckwitz. She is co-chair of the Working Group Sociology of the Arts within the German Sociological Association.