A compelling exhibition explores the aesthetics of resistance

Bonniers Konsthall’s new group exhibition takes on a formidable subject: what could “the aesthetics of resistance” mean today? For critic Sebastian Johans, the result is a bold and absorbing project that places contemporary artists in conversation with Peter Weiss’s legacy.

The exhibition, “The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026,” coincides with the 120th anniversary of Weiss’s birth. It runs at the Stockholm gallery through November 8. Weiss’s trilogy, whose final volume appeared in 1981, begins with antifascist struggle in the first half of the 20th century and expands into a sweeping cultural history stretching from antiquity to the author’s own time.

Weiss, who lived from 1916 to 1982, became known as one of the major exile writers of the 20th century. He was also a visual artist, filmmaker, playwright and peace activist. The exhibition presents his work as newly relevant amid the spread of fascist and authoritarian tendencies in global politics, and in light of the historical reappraisals that have occupied art institutions in recent decades.

One interpretation of the trilogy is that justice requires culture’s history to be reconsidered. Redistributing power and the means of production is not enough, because interpreting history remains an ongoing struggle over power. Curators Kim West, François Piron and Joanna Nordin Asp do not try to mirror the novel’s monumental totality. Instead, they use it as a launch point for roughly 20 artists from different parts of the world whose work engages with Weiss or with the resistance he examined.

The show opens with a concentrated presentation of Weiss’s early visual art, including experimental films, collages, book illustrations and the 1937 work “The Great World Theater.” Influenced strongly by Bruegel and Bosch, the piece depicts a crowded landscape filled with scenes of humanity seemingly heading toward a great darkness. A similarly exploratory montage already defines Weiss’s method. A substantial book of texts by and about Weiss is being published alongside the exhibition.