The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026
26 aug → 8 nov 2026
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, Valerie Osouf, Gunilla Palmstierna Weiss, Christoffer Paues, Samuel Richter, Lenke Rothman, Lina Selander, Peter Weiss.
Publication: Magnus Bergh, Claudia Firth, Anna Hallberg, Esther Leslie, Sven Lütticken, Joanna Nordin, François Piron, Jacques Rancière, Werner Schmidt, Gustav Strandberg, Alberto Toscano, Peter Weiss, Kim West.
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 into them. In order to come to ourselves, said Heilmann, we have to re-create not only culture but also all science and scholarship by relating them to our concerns. – Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance
But who are “we”? And is this still our dream? Can the artworks of the past and the present be convoked for a resistance against the rising fascisms and inequalities of our times? Can culture be a means for community in today’s divided world? In the fall of 2026, Bonniers Konsthall presents a group exhibition that draws on the novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975–81), by the Swedish-German author, playwright, and artist Peter Weiss. The exhibition features newly produced works by an international group of artists; historical works and documents from Weiss’s circles and the novel’s world; and a program of lectures, performances, film screenings, and conferences, starting already in the Spring.
The exhibition’s title is borrowed from another novel by Weiss, The Defeated (De besegrade), published by Bonniers in 1948. That book evokes an inferno: the world of ruins that Weiss encountered when he visited his former homeland Germany after the end of the war. But his account does not register the reality that confronted him during his travels. Instead, Weiss inscribes his experience in a surrealist dream landscape. When Weiss returns to the same world in The Aesthetics of Resistance, the logic of dreams still governs the book’s documentary montage of times, places, artworks, and people. But history has regained its reality: we have been led from a dream of sleep to a waking dream, where the resistances of the past seek a new unity with the conflicts and the communities of the present.
Curators: Kim West (researcher and critic. Stockholm); François Piron (curator, Paris); and Joanna Nordin (Artistic Director Bonniers Konsthall).
Image from: Elisabeth Rohde, Pergamon, Burgberg und Altar, 1976