Chrisoula Lionis: Praxes of Displacement: Contemporary Art as Method for Cultural Resilience

Monash University’s annual Margaret Plant Lecture in Art History for 2025, presented by Chrisoula Lionis.

Praxes of Displacement: Contemporary Art as Method for Cultural Resilience

This lecture will discuss the relationship between contemporary arts practice, visual evidence, and legal interventions in contexts of forced displacement. With attention focused on the key sites of Palestine, Greece, and Australia, it will consider the capacity for art to operate both as an instrument of cultural resilience and as a legal tool for forcibly displaced populations.

About the speaker

Chrisoula Lionis is a writer, cultural producer and curator based in Athens. She is co-director of the pedagogical platform Artists for Artists and author of books Laughter in Occupied Palestine: Comedy and Identity in Art and Film (I.B. Tauris, 2016, 2022), (ed) Comedy in Crises: The Weaponisation of Humour in Contemporary Art (Palgrave, 2023), and the forthcoming Displacement and the Art of Intervention: Contemporary Art and Methods for Cultural Resilience (Routledge, 2026).

This program is presented by Monash Art Lectures (MUMA and Monash Fine Art).