Art & Crisis: Aesthetics Against Autonomy
An Art, Technology, & Culture Colloquium lecture
with Adam HajYahia
Scholar, Writer, and Curator
-
Monday, March 29, 2027
5:00 — 6:30 PM
Eugene Jarvis Auditorium,
Grimes Engineering Center
RSVP here! Save the event to your bCal here!
-
Scholar, writer, and arts curator Adam HajYahia examines how historical debates about aesthetics and politics re-emerge, transform, and regress in moments of capitalist crisis. Drawing on anti-colonial and anti-imperial traditions that have challenged the social functions, political possibilities, and limits of art and culture, the lecture traces how ideas about aesthetic experience have been shaped by struggles for and against power, colonialism, and racial-capitalist exploitation.
Beginning with Enlightenment conceptions of the autonomous artwork and the supposedly universal aesthetic subject, HajYahia asks how these categories were formed, under what historical and material conditions, and which figures were implicitly or explicitly disavowed in order to make them possible. Moving between historical debates, militant praxis, and contemporary artistic practices, the lecture considers how artists and cultural movements have produced, contested, and reconfigured ideological distinctions between art and politics, the autonomous object and social practice, and aesthetic experience and collective struggle.
About Adam HajYahia
Adam HajYahia is a scholar, writer, and curator. His work engages labor struggles and capitalist economic formations, psychoanalytic theory and colonialism, aesthetic philosophy, and anti-imperial histories. He has recently served on the selection committee for the Biennale of Moving Images in Geneva (2026) and published with Bilnaes, An Echo in Search of its Shadow: Aesthetics of the Repressed (2024). His curatorial projects and writing have been presented and featured in various museums and cultural institutions, amongst which are the Center for Human Rights & the Arts (2022-26), Nguyen Art Foundation (2025), Sharjah Biennial 16 (2025), The Vera List Center at The New School (2024), The Mosaic Rooms (2023), The James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center (2023), Brookfield Place (2023), MoMA PS1 (2022), The Berlin Biennale 12 (2022), and Mophradat (2022-24). He has given lectures at Harvard Law School, Yale History of Art, and the University of Oxford, and teaches regularly in para-academic contexts.
About Art, Technology, & Culture Colloquium
Founded by Professor Ken Goldberg in 1997, the Arts, Technology & Culture lecture series at BCNM is an internationally respected forum for creative ideas. Always free of charge and open to the public, the series has presented over 200 leading artists, writers, and critical thinkers who question assumptions and push boundaries at the forefront of art, technology, and culture.
Accessibility
BCNM events are free and open to the public. This event will be held in-person, on the UC Berkeley campus. We strive to meet all access and accommodation needs. Please contact (raphaelcohen [at] berkeley.edu) with requests or questions.
BCNM is proud to make conversations with leading scholars, artists, and technologists freely available to the public. Please help us continue this tradition by making a tax-deductible donation today. If you are in the position to support the program, we suggest $5 per event, or $100 a year.