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, research, data, insights and evaluation 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)