Dr Kasia Ploskonka is a humanities and culture professional with over 15 years of experience working on the planning, implementation and delivery of time critical projects across the international cultural sector. Leading as a key enabler for the transformation and optimisation within the workplace by focusing people, process and technology.
Her research interests are in art and power which have a longstanding relationship with one another, one explored within the context of post-Soviet Central Asia. Looking at how authoritarian regimes in Central Asia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union have used art as a ‘soft’ tool for the construction of a desired or prescribed new national identity, and have sought, through the promotion of newly created state symbols to extract benefits from globalisation, whilst legitimising a soft version of authoritarianism. Agency and autonomy of contemporary artists and their art forms face pressures against continuing state efforts at control, co-option and incorporation into a legitimising nationalist narrative. Visual culture in Central Asia has continued to be a tool of the state, used to structure the present by relating an ‘authentic’ past to a desired future, so putting in question the extent to which artistic autonomy and agency exist in contemporary art.
Dr Ploskonka received her PhD in Art History & Archaeology from SOAS, University of London which was entitled Contesting Convention: Contemporary Art in the Political Landscape of Post-Soviet Central Asia.
She holds an MA Contemporary Art from Sotheby's Institute of Art, London and a BFA with an Emphasis in Art History, Theory & Criticism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Central Asia, Contemporary Art, Art & Agency, Power, Nation building, Art and Politics, Activism and visual culture
SOAS University of London, History of Art & Archaeology
Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS)
Association for Art History (AAH)