‘We don't think it should be controversial to talk about these subjects’: Bonniers Konsthall opens exhibition on art as antifascist resistance ahead of Swedish election

A new exhibition in Sweden explores antifascist art and the role of culture and art in navigating today's fraught politics, before the country goes to the polls later this month. Bonniers Konsthall, a contemporary art institution in Stockholm, presents the timely show The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026 (until 8 November) featuring works by 19 international artists.

This exhibition borrows its title from two books by the Swedish-German artist, filmmaker and playwright Peter Weiss (1916–82): 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 Aesthetics of Resistance, which depicts the struggle against fascism in several European countries in the years before the Second World War, is the starting point. According to Duke University Press, which published the English translation in 2005, Weiss suggests that “meaning lies in embracing resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding.”

The selected artists respond in different ways to the themes and issues raised in the novel, incorporating eight newly commissioned works. The exhibition is curated by Joanna Nordin, the artistic director at Bonniers Konsthall, along with the Stockholm-based researcher Kim West and the French curator François Piron.

“We have invited a large group of artists from around the world to engage with the novel and with us, and to reply in their own artistic medium and within their own context, asking—what could an aesthetics of resistance mean today?” Nordin tells The Art Newspaper.

The exhibition is timely, opening two weeks before Sweden’s parliamentary election is scheduled to take place (13 September). Since taking power in 2022, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson's centre-right minority government has been backed by the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats party, which could become an official coalition partner if the right triumphs.

“Responding to the global rise of far-right movements and the emergence of new forms of fascism taking shape around the world, the exhibition provides a timely platform for public reflection and debate,” says Nordin. “This exhibition is a response in a world that seems to have lost its footing in relation to democracy and basic human rights. We don't think it should be controversial to talk about these subjects. In fact it is needed very much.”

Kateryna Lysovenko of Ukraine presents Madness of Fascism (2026), a new painting showing a “fascist” family against a backdrop of human organs. “I searched on social media for family photos of [people] supporting Russian imperialism but it could be any white family with adult members holding fascist views,” Lysovenko tells The Art Newspaper. The Lebanese artist Ali Cherri shows The Summoner, Grafting (2026), a hybrid sculpture melding an Italian stone fountain head with a headless Thai statuette torso.

A large textile piece by Hamedine Kane and Valérie Osouf looks to Théodore Géricault's famed 19th-century painting Raft of the Medusa for inspiration; Where the Seams Hold Against the Fixed Narrative (2026) incorporates images of 20th-century liberation movements. The exhibition also includes historical works by Peter Weiss and his wife and artistic collaborator Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss (1928-2022), including her junk metal effigy Bogey (1967) made for Weiss's 1966 play Song from the Lusitanian Bogey.

Nordin says: “In the vein of Weiss’ writing, it is an exhibition that works with the idea of the montage—an exhibition that goes between times, places, experiences and voices. It is an exhibition built on associations weaving together the historical, the political, the philosophical and the existential. This has also been a great way of working as a group of curators, all bringing our perspectives and questions to the table.”

An accompanying series of essays by leading philosophers and writers, such as Esther Leslie of Birkbeck College, University of London, is integral also to the project. “In that sense you could say that the exhibition also extends to the format of the book,” Nordin says. Meanwhile a key avant-garde film by Weiss—a documentary about the late Swedish textile artist Anna Casparsson—is currently being screened at Stockholm's Moderna Museet (The Isle of Bliss, until 27 September).

• The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026, until 8 November, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm