Incorporating War: Gustatory Aesthetics, Embodiment, and TraumaticExperience in Contemporary Ukrainian Art
Incorporating War Gustatory Aesthetics, Embodiment, and TraumaticExperience in Contemporary Ukrainian Art

Summary/Abstract: Contemporary debates in aesthetics are increasingly challenging the traditional marginalisation of taste as an ‘inferior’ bodily sense, drawing attention to its cognitive, affective and ethical significance. Building on this reassessment, the authors consider the gustatory aesthetics as a critical model for analysing context-dependent forms of proximity, incorporation, and embodied implication. This model is applied to contemporary Ukrainian artistic practices that engage with wartime artefacts, sound, darkness, debris, traces of violence and traumatic experiences. Drawing on the critique of the hierarchy of the senses in the works of Carolyn Korsmeyer and on Nicola Perullo’s understanding of taste as a situational experience, the authors demonstrate how certain Ukrainian artistic practices transform military objects - fragments of missiles, bullet casings, weapons and other remnants of war - into media for aesthetic reflection and memory with an ethical underpinning. Gustatory aesthetics makes it possible to analyse how war-related art can create conditions for bodily intimacy without reducing trauma to a spectacle or transforming violence into an aesthetically consumed object.

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