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Katarzyna Ferworn-Horawa is a performative artist and philosopher. She completed doctoral studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, and doctoral studies at the Faculty of Media Arts, Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw. She also has an MA in Interior Design. She specializes in non-anthropocentric studies in aesthetics and has submitted her doctoral thesis proposal, under the supervision of Prof. Iwona Lorenc. E-mail: katarzyna.horawa@hotmail.com

Abstract: The subject of this presentation is the category of aisthesis, in the Aristotelian meaning of the faculty of embodied, sensual perception, from a non-anthropocentric perspective. The presentation explores posthuman aesthetic standpoints in the non-binary continuum of natureculture, human and nonhuman. It shows the benefits of affirmative posthuman knowledge strategies which include situated methodologies (Haraway, 1988), often inspired by art (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018; Braidotti, 2019, 2022). As an artist and philosopher, the author entangles aesthetic questions with her own situated experience, which includes memories of childhood years spent in Southeast Asia. Using as a case study her own artistic practice of painting with her body on large format canvases, she discusses the ethico-epistem-ontology of opposing realist approaches in an aesthetical context. The philosophical analysis is based on the speculative realism of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO) and the relational ontologies of Rosi Braidotti (posthuman subject) and Karen Barad (agential realism). Although these philosophers tend to oppose each other, it is possible to “meet halfway” as in Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). This paper stresses the importance of critical and creative intersectional research in the posthumanities (Braidotti, Jones, Klumbytė, 2022).

Keywords: aisthesis, posthuman, non-anthropocentric, relational, art