STOCKHOLM.- Bonniers Konsthall is proud to open its landmark autumn exhibition, The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026 (26 August – 8 November 2026). Against a global backdrop of shifting political landscapes, this major international group show explores what resistance to fascism and experimentation with community mean in the contemporary climate of a rising far-right.
The exhibition coincides with the lead-up to Sweden’s 13 September general elections, inviting a broader reflection on the role of culture and art in navigating today's complex democratic landscape.
The exhibition is deeply rooted in the life and work of the Swedish-German writer and visual artist Peter Weiss (1916–1982). Taking its title from his 1948 post-war reflection The Defeated and his seminal three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975–1981), the exhibition weaves together new contemporary works with historical documents to explore how art can serve as a vital instrument for navigating the complexities of the present.
Art as Resistance
“If we want to take on art, literature, we have to treat them against the grain, that is, we have to eliminate all the concomitant privileges and project our own demands onto them.” Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance
Peter Weiss’s three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975–1981) follows a group of young, working-class antifascists in 1930s Europe who use art and literature as intellectual weapons to resist Nazi rule. Weiss argues that reclaiming culture is not a passive luxury but a radical act of resistance, fostering the collective solidarity necessary to envision a world beyond fascism.
Bonniers Konsthall’s exhibition brings together a group of artists whose practice resonates with Weiss’s enduring legacy. The exhibition presents new works alongside historical pieces, documents, and artifacts by Peter Weiss (1916, Germany–1982, Sweden), his wife Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss (1928, Switzerland–2022, Sweden), and their circle, exploring how art can hold space for the 'defeated' and effectively resist dominant forces.
Joanna Nordin Asp, Artistic Director of Bonniers Konsthall and co-curator of the exhibition, says: "Our founder, Jeanette Bonnier, urged us to ‘dare to believe in the not yet formulated.’ This has been Bonniers Konsthall’s guiding principle for the past 20 years, and this exhibition at this time in history epitomises that call to action more than any other.”
“Against a backdrop of war, historical disorientation, and fractured public spheres, cultural institutions are an important frontline in the conflict over democracy, justice, and national identity. In this context, Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance emerges not as a static historical novel, but as a vital instrument for navigating the complexities of the present and the future. With this exhibition, we invite you to explore how art can illuminate these struggles and help us envision new possibilities for the future.”
Curatorial Concept & Highlights
“And now we became truly aware of this architecture of contradictions, which was overloaded and bare, fragmentary but with perfected details, which sought its way from the hard to the soft, from the rough to the smooth, which emerged from ancient times and hinted at things to come.” Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance
Curated as a 'waking dream,' the exhibition mirrors Weiss's literary technique and his transition from the surrealist 'dream of sleep' found in The Defeated to the active political engagement of The Aesthetics of Resistance. Eschewing linear chronology, the show utilises a spatial montage to place historical artifacts alongside new works by contemporary international artists who engage with Weiss's legacy through direct address or thematic resonance.
The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026 is curated by Kim West, Franois Piron, and Joanna Nordin Asp, and is a cornerstone of Bonniers Konsthall’s 20th anniversary programme.
Kim West, co-curator of the exhibition, says: "We want visitors to navigate the exhibition autonomously, making edits that uncover connections - even those unintended or unforeseen. The space is designed as a 'place of associations,' where boundaries are removed to allow for constant interplay. Through the deliberate use of transparencies, screens, and bleeding audio, we dissolve the divide between individual works, fostering a unified environment where every element is in conversation with the next."
In a contemporary world marked by the resurgence of the far-right and new forms of fascism, what does an 'aesthetics of resistance' mean today?
Participating artists
Hamedine Kane & Valrie Osouf (b. 1983, Senegalese-Mauritanian; lives in Dakar and Brussels; b. 1972, France; lives in Paris): Present Where the Seams Hold Against the Fixed Narrative (2026) as part of the School of Mutants collective. The work is a large textile assemblage configured like a boat sail that evokes Gricault's painting Raft of the Medusa. It utilizes a documentary editing technique, sewing together images of historical and recent liberation movements, Pan-Africanism, and portraits of heroes to revive internationalist networks.
Chiara Bugatti (b. 1991, Italy; lives in Stockholm): Explores memory, power, and permanence through sculpture and installation. Her installation Poses and Postures (2026) draws on her grandfather's silent drawing sessions and past as an Italian partisan/Nazi prisoner, fusing his drawings with cast stone sculptures made from leftover marble and granite—materials heavily tied to fascist architecture and power.
Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Lebanon; lives in Paris): Presents The Summoner (Grafting) (2026), a hybrid sculpture combining an Italian stone fountain head with a headless Thai statuette torso to challenge canonical representations of power. His slideshow, A Monument to Subtle Rot (2024), pairs images of toppled statues with a poetic essay by Palestinian writer Karim Kattan regarding collective memory and undetermined belonging.
Zbyněk Baladrn (b. 1973, Czech Republic; lives in Prague): In Oracles / Protocols (2023–2025), the artist uses geomancy to repeatedly ask when and where the next bombing of the Gaza strip will happen. By utilising an ancient irrational system to address the conflict in Gaza, he forces a confrontation with the irrational when ethical systems fail. The work features abstract reliefs, scribbled representations of ruined Palestinian landscapes, and diagrams of international companies supplying weapons to Israel.
yvind Fahlstrm (1928–1976, Brazilian-Swedish; lived in Sweden and USA): Focuses on historical ties with Peter Weiss, who filmed Fahlstrm's abstract explosion drawings in 1961. Fahlstrm evolved in the late 1960s from surrealism toward critical, figurative history paintings and diagrammatic world models/maps of the 1970s that confronted global capitalism and imperialism.
Harun Farocki (1944, Czechia–2014, Germany): Highlights Farocki's connection to Weiss, including a recorded 1979 German television interview focused on The Aesthetics of Resistance, where Weiss stated his fiction was built entirely on a realistic, uninvented basis. Farocki’s own documentary films utilize deep archive research to critique media and commit to historical and political struggles.
Jean-Luc Godard (1930, France–2022, Switzerland): Features a short film festival trailer that serves as a dazzling poem and tribute to the closing lines of Weiss's novel, summarizing a shared persistence of hope despite failed struggles. Like Weiss, Godard used documentary montage to throw "blocks of past into the present" to rupture dominant historical narratives.
Ane Hjort Guttu (b. 1971, Norway; lives in Oslo): Contributes the multi-screen installation On the Ground (2026), which plays with the concept of horizontality. One screen shows non-taking-off planes at Schiphol airport overlaid with a monologue describing dreams as horizontal and vulnerable, but fascism as vertical. Other screens show historical Dutch landscape paintings of the same airport area and bouncing Suprematist elements.
Kateryna Lysovenko (b. 1989, Ukraine; lives in Vienna): Features the painting Madness of Fascism (2026), which explores the asymmetrical relationship between victim and perpetrator during war. It depicts a fascist family in front of a theatrical backdrop of human organs, questioning systemic violence, ideology, and whether perpetrators act with conscious direction or total indifference.
Asier Mendizabal (b. 1973, Spain; lives in Bilbao and Stockholm): Presents Hiru's covers I (La esttica de la resistencia) (2026), a tribute to Eva Forest, the anti-Franco activist who founded the Hiru publishing house and printed the Spanish translation of Weiss's novel. The work consists of coarse fabric draped over wood to mimic an open book, utilizing Hiru’s signature diagonal graphic line to evoke the history of collective book-reading groups.
Peter Nestler (b. 1937, Germany; lives in Sweden): Showcases his 10-minute film Sightseeing (1968), which juxtaposes scenic, peaceful summer images of Stockholm with a narrated German text detailing the devastating US napalm bombings in North Vietnam. The stark montage underscores how Western prosperity is paid for by destruction elsewhere, while occasionally drawing dreamlike, unexpected visual correspondences between the two landscapes.
Daniela Ortiz (b. 1985, Peru; lives in Cuzco): Looks to popular and agitprop puppet theater for her Swedish-translated audio play, Luka and the Magic Beans (2025), which critiques agro-industries that exploit the working class while using fascism to scapegoat immigrants. She also showcases painted sculptures detailing the history of the German weapons manufacturer Krupp and its collaboration with the Nazi regime.
Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss (1928, Switzerland–2022, Sweden): Summarizes her eight-decade career as a core collaborator and co-creator of many of Peter Weiss's works. The section outlines her extensive archival research for stage sets and costumes—such as the metal junk "Bogey" sculpture from 1966—alongside her deep anti-colonial commitments in Cuba and Vietnam, and her work shaping Sweden’s New Cultural Policy.
Christoffer Paues (b. 1975, Sweden; lives in Stockholm): Features Sketches for Six Antifascist Flags (2026), a mixed-media assemblage of large banners responding to the six parts of Weiss's novel by integrating historical icons (Pergamon frieze fragments, Spanish republican stars, ship propellers) with quotes from artists like Sonia Delaunay. It includes four videos showing streams of images and a public performance around Stockholm.
Samuel Richter (b. 1993, Sweden; lives in Berlin and Norrkping): Documents the film Die Reise des Reichskommissars... (2026), which weaves together two parallel late-19th-century German colonial efforts: the excavation and transport of the Pergamon Altar to Berlin, and Ernst Heinrich Gring’s negotiations in Namibia that led to the century's first genocide. The film cross-references historical diaries and paintings to critique how classical European imagery was used to justify brutal colonial empires.
Lenke Rothman (1929, Hungary–2008, Sweden): Focuses on the Swedish-Hungarian artist's habit of stitching everyday debris into artwork. As a Holocaust survivor, her featured piece The Family (1984) commemorates her original family lost to concentration camps, while a separate portrait series on folded bedsheets depicts historical role models like the murdered socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg.
Lina Selander (b. 1973, Sweden; lives in Stockholm): Focuses on the multi-channel film installation Binding the Dream (2026), created with Oscar Mangione, which investigates how art can remain politically useful by mastering its own media and form. The piece blends archival leftovers from Peter and Gunilla Weiss with imagery of sculptural models from Swedish sculptor Carl Eldh, focusing on a concrete, historical concept of resistance.
Beyond the Gallery Walls
The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026 is a centerpiece of Bonniers Konsthall’s 20th-anniversary year, extending its reach through a series of collaborative projects. These include a public education course developed with the Institute for Advanced Studies of Political Aesthetics (IAS), which has hosted a year-long evening programme exploring The Aesthetics of Resistance. The project also features an international academic conference, The Theater of Divided Worlds: Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance and the Challenge of Critical Universality in the Twenty-First Century, organised by the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linkping University, taking place 29–30 October 2026, with Thursday’s sessions hosted at Bonniers Konsthall. Rounding out the initiative is an ambitious forthcoming book featuring, alongside Peter Weiss’s writings, newly commissioned essays by leading intellectuals and curators, including Magnus Bergh, Claudia Firth, Anna Hallberg, Esther Leslie, Sven Ltticken, Joanna Nordin, Franois Piron, Jacques Rancire, Werner Schmidt, Gustav Strandberg, Alberto Toscano, and Kim West.
