August 26–November 8, 2026
Stockholm 113 90
Sweden
T +46 8 736 42 48
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, Valérie 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 novels by the Swedish-German author, artist, filmmaker and playwright Peter Weiss (1916–1982): The Defeated, 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 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 that produce fascism can take shape. From its own perspective, its own time, the book insists that the history of that struggle 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?
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—paintings, sculptures, performances, video installations, documentary assemblages, theater plays—that in different ways respond 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 major selection of artworks and documents by Peter Weiss and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, as well as by artists, writers, activists, and directors in their circles. There are collages, photos, paintings, and films from the period between the 1930s and 1950s; there are set designs for Weiss’s documentary theater in the 1960s and 1970s; there are films, documents, and artifacts relating to the Russell Tribunal and to the anti-imperialist liberation struggles of the same decades; there are artworks and photo montages from the 1970s and 1980s.
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.
Curators: Kim West (researcher and critic. Stockholm); François Piron (curator, Paris); and Joanna Nordin Asp (Artistic Director Bonniers Konsthall).
Publication
The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026
An extended part of the exhibition, this reader features previously unavailable texts by Peter Weiss and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, as well as newly written contributions by prominent Weiss scholars and leading international critics and intellectuals.
Texts by Magnus Bergh, Claudia Firth, Anna Hallberg, Esther Leslie, Sven Lütticken, Joanna Nordin Asp, Gunilla Palmstierna- Weiss, Jacques Rancière, Werner Schmidt, Gustav Strandberg, Alberto Toscano, Peter Weiss, Kim West
Editors: Kim West and Gustav Strandberg
Graphic design: Rikard Heberling
Published by Bonniers Konsthall in collaboration with Faethon
