Russia's military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 caused the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Most of the approximately 7.5 million refugees fled to Poland, Romania or Germany. At the intersection of political, economic and humanitarian issues, one of the key topics emerging in public discourse has become the multidimensional role of culture and art.
Street art became one of the most visible, lively and widely discussed manifestations of the war-related creative expression in the public sphere. The presented paper concerns the cross-cutting issues of visual culture, sociology of migration and affect studies in Poland and Germany. Referring to the theory on politics of aesthetics (Rancière), public forum (Kalven) and emotions as cultural practices (Scheer), we will try to analyze the anti-war discourse and the emotionality of language at the intersection of street art, politics and social activism. We will present preliminary considerations regarding the study planned for 2024, covering cities in Poland (Warsaw, Gdansk) and Germany (Berlin, Munich) and selected forms of street art: murals, posters and stickers. The study is based on the triangulation of visual discourse analysis, participant online observations, and qualitative data analysis of press articles, websites and social networks dealing with the subject of war-related street art.
