“Global Fascisms”

Historian Ian Kershaw once quipped that “trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”1 Nevertheless, one has to try. With this exhibition, curators Cosmin Costinaș and Paz Guevara take a pluralized, global approach in which common threads and interrelations emerge between the various mutations of fascism, as observed by more than fifty artists. After entering the smaller of the show’s two halls, a beautiful constellation groups Hannah Höch with Maria Lassnig and Martin Kippenberger. In Höch’s 1933 painting Wilder Aufbruch [Savage Outbreak], a demonically glaring imp spawns from a bald head. The figure appears to return in 1945, made that year, as a zombie limping towards a grimly staring man. Half a century later, such a duo has mutated into a monster’s cranium-as-guillotine, in Lassnig’s Schafott der Eliten/Die Elite ist immer in Gefahr (Scaffold of the Elites/The Elite is Always in Danger, 1995), with a severed head between its wide-open jaws.

Kippenberger offers the punchline to that grim story: a plaster-cast arm in a hospital bed is stretched diagonally upward for healing purposes, the titular initials smeared across it in silicone paste: H.H.I.F. – Heil Hitler Ihr Fetischisten (Heil Hitler You Fetishists, 1984). The mockery may have been directed at German contemporaries such as Anselm Kiefer, who fed off the solemn pathos of fascism in the midst of their supposed critiques, and more generally those parts of society—academic pundits and political opportunists among them—whose supposed awareness of history was sanctimonious and shallow.

Further into the hall, it becomes unclear whether the exhibition provides enough background and analysis for a more sincere awareness of events. Unless the artworks have tasked themselves with doing that job already: as in the case of The Iași Trains 1941–images and testimonies (2025), a video by Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflâncă. Based on testimonies and images of deportation trains, the duo reconstruct the horrors inflicted by the Nazi-allied Romanian regime in the town of Iași, where more than 13,000 Jews were killed in a 1941 pogrom and its aftermath. Though focused on Romania, the work is a harrowing glimpse of where Germany’s version of fascism ultimately led and provides a forensic documentary counterbalance to Höch, Lassnig, and Martin Kippenberger’s more allegorical paintings.

As the exhibition unfolds through the second, bigger hall, such counterbalances often feel lacking. Maree Sheehan’s installation Ōtairongo: The sound of identity: Interpreting the multi-dimensionality of wāhine Māori through audio portraiture (2020), placed in a separated space on two headphones behind black curtains, portrays three Māori women through recorded speech and singing, suggesting resilience and grace against a long history of colonial violence and destruction in New Zealand. While connections could certainly be drawn between colonialism and fascism, these are left implied. So too, in the context of new fascisms in the country, is the terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, in which a white supremacist murdered fifty-one people and streamed the attacks on Facebook, “inspiring” similar attacks in Norway, America, and Germany. Such acts are best understood in their disturbing short-circuiting of neo-fascist ideology, jihadist-terrorist livestreaming, and online gamer cynicism.

In that sense, “Global Fascisms” could suggest globally connected and interacting fascisms. For example, the brilliantly Dadaist comedy of the (post-)Yugoslavian television program “The Top List of Surrealists,” presented here as video clips of spoofs and pranks, registered the collapse of a socialist state and the rise of ethnicist, fascist-scented nationalisms. Yet the show’s lack of contextual information leaves you speculating where, for example, these nationalisms headed in the ensuing years and how they related to one another.

It seems obvious to say, but a combination of carefully chosen documentary material and concisely worded wall texts could have helped. Instead, we get short explanations in a guidebook, provided one manages to locate the respective work on a minuscule map, and identify the corresponding number leading to the page in question. That said, the puzzle of how to piece together the fragments of this picture mirrors our own confusion at the absurdities of fascism as it unfolds across the globe. Indeed, one might need art to understand the strange logics of these unfoldings.

With the video Ornament is Crime (2025), Romanian artists Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor follow Romanian actress Ilinca Manolache’s alter ego Bobitza, an Andrew Tate–like loudmouth played with darkly hilarious panache. Roaming around Budapest, Bobitza delivers a monologue on Victor Orbán’s renovation of Buda Castle, citing Walter Benjamin’s aphorism that “origin is a whirlpool in the stream of becoming” and turning it into a reference to bro culture. This deadly serious spoof of manosphere brain rot gets to the heart of what unites global, algorithmically enhanced fascisms. Having long since abandoned the pretense of credible argumentation, there emerges a triumphant willingness to garnish a collective longing for narcissistic self-conjuration with an absurd hodgepodge of hate messages.

Set to the relentless ticking of a digital clock, Yoonsuk Jung’s video STEAL (2025), newly commissioned for the show, carefully collages footage from the December 2024 night when South Korea was on the brink of falling back into dictatorship. As we see police and military in heavy gear, roadblocks, and smashed windows, an elderly Korean politician delivers an uncannily calm nighttime speech into his phone, asking his colleagues and the public to come to parliament and peacefully halt the coup. Not all coup attempts, military regimes, and authoritarian forms of repression automatically qualify as fully fledged examples of fascism. Indeed, one weaknesses of this exhibition is that it doesn’t make more effort to extrapolate the particularly fascist aspects of repressive politics.

In Roee Rosen’s three contributions, however, it’s spelled out in exemplary fashion. In his 2010 video Out (‘TSE’), a lesbian BDSM whipping scene turns into a kind of exorcism as the hoarse-voiced sub utters quoted hate speech by Avigdor Lieberman, the right-wing extremist who at the time was Israel’s foreign minister. The Gaza War Tattoos (2024–25) underscores a tragic irony: the annihilationist fantasies of the far-right zealots currently in government in Israel, and compared to whom Liebermann now almost seems moderate, are not least expressed in newspeak phrases (“total victory,” “safe zone”) that Rosen turns into tattoos and then documents with photographs. The artist’s final work in the show, Vladimir’s Night (2013/25), a series of intricate drawings shown as video, uses fictional elements to tell the very real story of how Vladimir Putin’s regime combines old-style Tsarism-cum-Stalinism and new-style oligarchic kleptocracy, with fascist elements sprinkled throughout.

Contemporary fascist thought is less a defined set of parameters—beyond shared misogynist masculinism and scapegoating enmity—than a disturbing pastiche of us-versus-them rhetorics and deeds, ones that increasingly tend towards a nihilist-erotic embrace of death and destruction. This points to the most glaring omission of the show: religious fundamentalisms as they mutate into fascism. We might think here of Iranian clerics and their acolytes clinging violently to power while taking a twisted pleasure in systemic sexual violence against women, or MAGA evangelicals applauding the disappearing of immigrants by masked paramilitaries while rambling about the coming Antichrist.

Speaking of which, Eli Cortiñas’s video installation Surrender, Dorothy! (2025) captures the surreal connection between unhinged doomsday ideology and accelerationist techno-fetishism exemplified by figures like Peter Thiel. Mixing found, often AI-generated online footage with the artist’s own Snapchat-filtered appearances, her avatar-protagonists offer lifestyle commentary by turns unhinged and deadpan. “The gym of hope remains open, with hardly any members,” one character says Another quips, “Here’s a riddle for you: if it walks like a fascist, talks like a fascist and votes like a fascist, it is a fascist—I guess it wasn’t a riddle after all!”

Granted, we all kind of know fascism when we see it, whether it comes up in this show or is missing from it. But seeing fascism doesn’t always equal understanding its machinations, which is a precondition of fighting it. From the Frankfurt School to Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco, and Klaus Theweleit, fascism emerges as a spectrum of traits that recombine in often blatantly illogical ways (“a beehive of contradictions,” as Eco put it).2 This is not simply a design flaw. Rather, it is precisely its political strategy—a dangerous disruption of reason and reliability itself, a shock-and-terror tactic characteristic of all fascisms.

As such, it’s only worth describing fascism by way of its contradictions: ultra-ethnicist and ultra-nationalist (i.e., ultimately undermining any idea of nation as an entity unifying across ethnicities); personality cult and group-mob mentality (you’re the leader only as long as you’re not torn to pieces, or enshrined in wax and replaced by the next asshole); fetishistic masculinity and violent homophobia; racketeering as totalized state-economic principle (rendering absurd notions of neo-liberal “free market” economy versus state capitalism, not to speak of state socialism); dreams of eternal supremacy and a desire for immediate nihilistic annihilation; images of purity and enshittification of the mind. If anyone is well placed to analyze this mess, it might be artists.

“Global Fascisms” could be dismissed as a singular but flawed attempt to shine a spotlight on the threatening global move to the far right. Yet despite its shortcomings, the show should rather be understood as an extremely important proposal to move beyond the logic of absolutist-but-narcissistic moralism, on the one hand, and nihilist whataboutism on the other. Its approach instead suggests not relativization but meaningful comparison, understood as precondition for meaningful resistance. In that sense, the omissions of the exhibition indicate the necessity to fill the gaps—to create two, three, many more attempts of its kind.