Looking at art from this attitude does not entail applying art-historical theory to the work, which puts the act of looking itself under erasure, but rather looking at art in the sense of looking to art for an understanding of what art is and does.
 
Miecke Bal, Louise Bourgeios’ “Spider”: the Architecture of Art-Writing, Chicago and Londond, University of Chicago Press, 2001, 5. Quoted in Jay Johnston, Angels of Desire: Esoteric Bodies, Aesthetics and Ethics, Sydney, Equinox Publishers, 2009, 219.
 
 
How can art bring identities unstuck?

We call for analyses and explorations of creative works (visual arts, performance art) related to the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe, where sexual/gender and national identities are challenged. How do literature, performance and visual arts provoke and engage individuals and new communities? We imagine a queer aesthetics that facilitates a messy engagement with creative works. Where the critic does not apply a narrative of queerness to the works (such as the assumed queerness of the creator), but allows themselves (and us as readers) to have a queer encounter with the work. We invite contributors to engage in a critical analysis that is queer and queering. Queer may be generally understood as unstable and slippery, and pertinent to the work of queer scholars is how queer epistemologies are performed and constituted in the practice of a queer critical engagement.
 
We are not looking for translations of what works speak, but unsettling engagements of how art speaks, or doesn’t, as the case may be. We seek critical explorations of the nether worlds between speech and silence, the affective gaps, the silent roars, throbs and groans. Where bodies of viewers, auditors, readers and witnesses enter into the unspoken possibilities of the works, what new constellations and strategic identifications occur?
 
Some of the subjects contributors are invited to discuss include the queer nature of the visual arts in societies hedging their peripheral European identities closer and further from Western politics, the role of explicitly ‘queer’ artists of the region and its Diaspora, such as Anri Sala, Sisley Xhafa, Marina Abramovic and their reception or place in broader contexts. How does queer grassroots activism rely on an aesthetics familiar or jarring to hegemonic Western LGBT identity politics, and where are the inverse aesthetics of the anti-movement found?  How does the violence used to police queerness empower and generate new creative gestures in ‘art’? What effects do galleries and spaces of display and performance have on how the powers of creative representation are corralled or channelled?