Participating
artists: Zbyněk Baladrán, Chiara Bugatti, Ali Cherri, Öyvind Fahlström, Harun
Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, Ane Hjort Guttu, Hamedine Kane, Kateryna Lysovenko,
Asier Mendizabal, Peter Nestler, Daniela Ortiz, Valerie Osouf, Gunilla
Palmstierna Weiss, Christoffer Paues, Samuel Richter, Lenke Rothman, Lina
Selander, Peter Weiss.
What could
an aesthetics of resistance be today? This exhibition borrows its title from
two books by the Swedish-German author, artist, filmmaker and playwright Peter
Weiss (1916–1982): The Defeated (De besegrade), written in Swedish and
published by the Bonniers publishing house in 1948, and The Aesthetics of
Resistance, written in German and published in three volumes between 1975 and
1981.
The
monumental novel The Aesthetics of Resistance depicts the struggle against
fascism in some European countries in the years leading up to and during the
Second World War. In its vast waking dream, historical characters coexist with
mythological beings, artistic hallucinations confront documents of barbarism,
clandestine resistance networks associate with exiled cultural leagues. The
book argues that it is by “taking on” art and culture that an effective
resistance to the forces of fascism – and to the forces that produce fascism –
can take shape, that a new we can be created, capable of constructing a future
beyond the devastations wrought by fascism.
From its
own perspective, its own time, the book insists that the history of resistance
to fascism – the history of these gatherings, efforts, and struggles – must
also still be our history, in the present of reading. The exhibition asks: what
could this idea mean today, in the autumn of 2026? How might the vision of a
resistance to fascism, and of an experimentation with new forms of community,
which would also take the form of a critical appropriation of the histories of
art and culture – how could such a vision be translated into practice in the
contemporary situation, in which a new far right and new fascisms are gathering
force? What shapes might such an endeavor assume under present conditions,
facing the constraints and the possibilities of our time?
The
Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026 is a group exhibition. Artists from
different parts of the world have been invited to create new works, responding
in different ways to the novel’s challenge. Some address it directly or evoke
other works by Peter Weiss and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss (1928–2022), others
relate to it in more indirect ways, by working with forms, techniques,
histories, or problems that can be clearly associated with The Aesthetics of
Resistance. The exhibition also has a retrospective dimension. Alongside the
newly commissioned works there is a selection of artworks and documents by
Peter Weiss and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, as well as by people in their
circles. The historical works create new conditions for approaching the contemporary
ones and for situating them in a critical, historical space; the contemporary
works cast new light on the historical ones, and on the struggles, projects and
ideals that they leave as their legacy. In this way the composition of the
exhibition reflects the novel’s multiplicity of voices, its polyphonous history
and its kaleidoscopic world image.
Here, the
novel The Defeated is an important reference. It provides a site-specific
starting point for the exhibition’s questions and composition of parts. It
opens a path to approaching The Aesthetics of Resistance in its social,
cultural and institutional reality: how did Weiss arrive at the specific
artistic form and aesthetico-political position of The Aesthetics of
Resistance, from the position of The Defeated? The exhibition traces this
development in several steps, in relation to Peter Weiss and Gunilla
Palmstierna-Weiss’s artistic productions and political commitments.
The
Defeated evoked an inferno, the world of ruins that Weiss encountered when he
visited his former homeland Germany after the end of the Second World War. And
yet Germany’s social and cultural reality remains largely absent from the 1948
novel. Instead, it is written in a style drawing on surrealism, where the
historically specific is abstracted in favour of what Weiss would later call a
“magically evasive” language, with archetypal figures, mythical shadow worlds
and symbol-heavy dream beings. It is with the documentary montage of The
Aesthetics of Resistance that this period in German history is first given a
literary account, that the “names of the evil spirits” are first spoken, in
Weiss’s work. The distance between The Defeated and The Aesthetics of
Resistance indicates the difference between a dream of sleep and a waking
dream.
Between
these two books, Peter Weiss made his way as an artist shifting between
artforms and media. He was a painter, a collagist, a filmmaker with social
concerns and a taste for the experimental, before finally gaining success as a
playwright in the early 1960s. His early years were marked by the rise of
fascism and the experience of exile. His paintings depicted apocalyptic world
landscapes while he saw the artist as a melancholic, detached observer. A
transformative visit to Auschwitz in 1964 contributed to his decision to “come
out of his hiding place” and devote his work – now mainly theatre – to promote
peace and condemn the intricate financial and political relationships that kept
the world under imperialist oppression.
During the
1960s, he envisioned that his different plays – about the trials against the
Nazis and the anticolonial liberation movements in countries such as Vietnam,
Cuba and Angola – would be the parts of a gigantic mega-play titled Theatrum
Mundi, a world theatre that would represent the totality of all liberation
struggles of his time. In a sense, he pursued that impossible project with The
Aesthetics of Resistance, where the multitude of historical details and the
great montage of artistic and cultural references coexist in an ever-present
continuum, in which the resistances of the past seek a new unity with the
conflicts and the communities of today.
Curators:
Kim West (researcher and critic. Stockholm); François Piron (curator, Paris);
and Joanna Nordin Asp (Artistic Director Bonniers Konsthall).
https://bonnierskonsthall.se/en/utstallning/the-defeated-the-aesthetics-of-resistance-2026/
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