August 28–November 8, 2026
This conflicted exhibition brackets the buildup to and persistent non-resolution of the general elections in Sweden in September 2026. This political cycle was marked by the threat of a sweeping victory for the Sweden Democrats, a far-right party with historical links to Nazism. As in the 2022 elections, the far right did not win most votes but placed second with 20 percent of the seats. Their success forces other parties to collaborate with them, resulting in a deadlock. At time of writing, no party has succeeded in forming a government.
Co-curated by Kim West, François Piron, and Joanna Nordin, “The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026” extenuates a rupture in the sociocultural narrative of postwar Sweden. To give an admittedly simplistic version of this breach, there are two Swedens: one lingers in a fantasy of a tolerant society with broad rights granted to the working classes, to women, and to immigrants. The other is darker: a Sweden that is xenophobic, acutely individualistic, increasingly militaristic, and committed to the continued privatization of state infrastructure. Centered on the work of Peter Weiss, an exiled German Jewish author and artist who has had a profound impact on the Swedish left, “The Aesthetics of Resistance” is an exhibition for artists and thinkers mired in the contradictions of a state rigidly structured by binary politics—unable to relinquish the radical possibility of resistance modeled in the mid-twentieth century but aware of these strategies’ structural inadequacy in the present.
The exhibition is, in its most vivid aspect, an archival homage to the life and work of Weiss and his wife, designer and ceramicist Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss. A long shelf lined with editions of Weiss’s published work ushers the viewer into the show, past a small, dark adjacent room where Weiss’s early paintings are displayed with long contextual captions alongside drawings and ephemera under vitrines. An enormous stele by Palmstierna-Weiss made of scrap metal, Bogey (1967), dominates the first gallery. There is also fascinating documentation of the pair’s involvement in the Russell Tribunal, an unofficial people’s court organized by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1966–67. The tribunal tasked itself with hearing evidence of war crimes perpetrated by the United States in Vietnam, reaching an unequivocal verdict that the United States was guilty of genocide.
“What could an aesthetics of resistance be today?” asks the first line of the curatorial essay. New commissions are joined to artworks by the Weisses’ friends and associates. The 16mm film Sightseeing (1968), by fellow German exile to Sweden Peter Nestler and the achingly poignant set of wooden rods entitled Family (1984) by Hungarian-born Auschwitz survivor and political refugee to Sweden, artist Lenke Rothman provide a framework for the Weisses’ artistic development. The new work includes a pair of monumental sculptures by the Bilbao-based artist Asier Mendizabal entitled Hiru’s covers I and II (2026) that reproduce the cover designs of the Basque publishing house as canvases held taut over a bare wooden column and mounted to the wall. Hiru (three in Basque) was founded in 1989 by anti-Francoist activist Eva Forest; it published the Spanish translation of Wiess’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, a thousand-page tome about European resistance against Nazi Germany.
In the novel, Théodore Géricault’s 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa is symbol of antiracism. For the exhibition, Senegalese artist Hamedine Kane and French filmmaker Valérie Osouf’s textile installation, Where the Seams Hold Against the Fixed Narrative (2026), is meant to evoke the sail of the raft with a patchwork of images from the Civil Rights and the Black Lives Matter movements, liberation struggles in South Africa and Vietnam, and other uncaptioned imagery of manifestations of political unrest. More like a makeshift privacy barrier or a tent than a sail, the work is intentionally overwhelming in scale and presentation, submerging the individual contexts of each reproduced documentary image in a lightly shifting fabric surface.
In between the canonization of Weiss and Palmstierna-Weiss’s work and the new commissions attempting to trace its relevance today to other artists, several other artworks are lodged, unexplained but potent. Zbyněk Baladrán, born in Czechoslovakia, lines two walls with paintings set directly on the floor and overlapping, as though hastily drawn out of storage for consultation in an installation entitled Oracles / Protocols (2023–25). They are satellite photographs of nondescript Palestinian land and the ruins of settlements transferred to canvas. Each bears the same set of large labels covering the bottom left corner, in English: “Disclaimer: This canvas has no other purpose than to be a useful oracle…” set adjacent to a label with recommendations for placement in waiting rooms, and to another: “Warning: It is not intended for artistic contemplation nor any forms of aesthetic sentiment…” The paintings are explicit in requiring that they be used as instruments of geomancy. But their function as art objects cannot be avoided in this context, and it is hard to measure how this mystical-sardonic gesture relates to the materials about the Russel Tribunal, installed adjacently.
The exhibition, a disorienting mix of rigorous and sincere engagement with Weiss and Palmstierna-Weiss and a bevy of international perspectives that are proximate, is chaotic, and not only in the negative sense. I think this has less to do with the specific artists included and more to do with some unresolved tension in the curatorial framework about who “the defeated” are in a local formulation of an aesthetics of resistance. “The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance” exemplifies an extremely awkward response to the rise of fascism in Sweden; a turn inward, toward themselves and their own history, coupled with a partial acknowledgement that international solidarity is nevertheless important. I want to ask of the project as a whole: Do you need Others in formulating an aesthetics of resistance, or not? This is the time to decide.
