ABSTRACT
Resilience has become a buzzword that is used in different social fields and academic disciplines. This chapter unpacks shared elements and differences between the concept's various uses, and explores the broader permeation of resilience thinking in visual culture and artistic practices. It offers close readings of recent resilience-themed films, Dirty God (2019) and Dreamaway (2018), to ask how resilience thinking relates art to the political and if it may be used to engage viewers’ political imagination. In the chapter a distinction between masculine and feminine forms of resilience is sketched out. It argues that in order to understand how a tactics of aesthetic resilience is utilized for political effect in contemporary art and activist film, one needs to pay attention to the development and production of the stories as well as their contents and textual form.
