Art and Contemporary Fascism?
Across Europe, the United States, and exile communities from Iran to Belarus, artists, students, and critics are organizing against the authoritarian turn. In precarious cultural fields and across global diasporas, they return to older languages of struggle, from forms of gathering and collective speech to Aimé Césaire’s writing on the colonial boomerang, Frantz Fanon’s reflections on counter-information, Italian feminist refusals of state reform, and Ghassan Kanafani’s call for a literature of resistance.
Fred Hampton was right: nothing is more important than to stop fascism, which sooner or later hits us all. It is as true today as it was on December 4 1969, when Hampton was murdered for his activism.
Art and culture have always been central to fascism. In 1936, Meyer Schapiro noted that “The racial theories of Fascism call constantly on the traditions of art.” For him, art history was already being mobilized for fascist ends. A year earlier, Walter Benjamin had warned of the aestheticization of politics; too narrow a focus on the fascism they confronted, however, can also prevent us from grasping that of our own time.
So we turned to Alberto Toscano (2023) and approach fascism as a historical process, not simply as a phenomenon of the 1930s or term of abuse. From this perspective, it is less an external break with the modern order than a possibility within the history of capitalism and liberal democracy. Still, what to call the authoritarian order taking shape today remains disputed–in theory, in studios, and in the streets; we are not sure at all. But one thing is clear. This global fascist turn has a cultural policy, from the rainbow-washing of genocide to the closure of archives, yet no culture of its own.
How should cultural critics, artists, and workers respond? Just as after 1968, we need new terms and categories. The struggles of that period gave rise to much of the critical language that shaped the art discourse of the 2000s, but the present crisis cannot be met by tradition alone, not even radical tradition. What remains possible is to learn from their critique, within art and beyond it, by reflecting on our own historical role in the current conjuncture.
Various attempts to formulate critical responses to the fascist tendencies of our time have already been made within the art world. The round-table discussion ‘Anti-fascist Art Theory’ in Third Text (2019), the Illiberal Arts Project by Anselm Franke and Kerstin Stakemeier (2021), Bojana Cvejić’s ongoing research project Choreographing Antifascism, and Simon Ferner’s Instagram account @Arkiv_S, which collects stories about Sweden’s darker history, of racism, violence and abuse, are just a few examples.
In Artistic Labor of the Body (2026), Rose-Anne Gush discusses Peter Weibel and Valie Export’s 1968 meta-film Instant Film, described as an instant film that seemed to unite screen, projector, and camera in one. It now reads like a striking prefiguration of the social media video, which is fitting, since so many late avant-garde methods have since been absorbed by the tech industry. But Gush’s larger point matters more. She places the work in a moment of crisis, when artists no longer believed they could represent the world or form coherent narratives from contemporary events, and instead turned towards anti-art. We are again living through such a crisis, shaped by war, repression, censorship, and precarity. What role does this refunctionalized instant film play in an age of televised genocide? And what, if anything, can artistic and intellectual work still make possible under such conditions? As Gush asks, how does fascism take hold, and what role does the media play in that process?
In this issue of Paletten, we approach the relation between art, critique, and today’s fascist tendencies through a set of essays, conversations, and montages that test the role of the art world from several angles at once. Following Rose-Anne Gush’s question, we ask not only how art, critique, and their institutions give shape to these tendencies, but also whether they can still help turn against them, open other ways of living, thinking, mourning, and organizing, or whether it is time to leave these terms and institutions behind.
In ‘Martinska – Martinique, Ljubo and Pierrot, Yugoslavia; the Non-Aligned’, Merima Dizdarević explores an unfinished anti-colonial history that speaks directly to our times. Michele Masucci, for his part, has returned to the village of Maschito, which at the collapse of fascism in Italy, opened up a temporary space for rural, anti-fascist self-organization.
What marks the fascist tendency of our time? In a conversation with Emet Brulin, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback describes it as a “fascism of ambiguity” in which meaning, community, and action erode the common space.
Can today’s art institutions accommodate conflicts and crises without simultaneously neutralizing them into manageable forms? This question is explored in Cem A’s essay ‘Consensus Aesthetics’. Is there a longing in the art world for the absolute, for purity, clarity and moral positioning? This is the view of Sinziana Ravini, who, drawing on a psycho-analytical perspective, examines the relationship between art values and fascism.
In Paletten #337, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay highlighted how the tent camps in solidarity with Palestine resisted universities’ thoughtless administrations. At the same time, conditions for humanities research are under considerable financial and bureaucratic pressure. In light of these developments, Sophie Pousette has been in contact with Peter Osborne from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) and Kim West and Gustav Strandberg from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Political Aesthetics (IAS) to discuss the organization of critical thinking outside the university.
Furthermore, Fredrik Svensk shares some notes on the dilemma of art criticism as a form of anti-fascist practice, whilst Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Frida Sandström discuss the terminology and discourses of the last two decades surrounding phenomena such as refusal, withdrawal and evasion in relation to institutions, laws and states. Drawing upon some well-known historical examples, Rasmussen and Sandström ask what remains when established political and aesthetic forms no longer carry any emancipatory content. Not as a personal retreat, but as a test of how criticism can continue once both the institutions and familiar languages of opposition have become rigid. The conversational form also becomes a way of re-examining the roles that their respective practices reproduce.
Paletten has, in several issues, explored diverse repercussions of the genocide in Gaza. In this issue, Gabriel Bogossian turns his attention to Vienna and highlights an art scene characterized by censorship, fear and historical weight. This issue is further explored in Ayreen Anastas’ and Rene Gabris’ ‘Notes Toward the Abolition of Documenta’. Here, the art institution is not only examined in the context of the controversy surrounding the 2022 exhibition, but is also situated within a longer history of the Nakba, in Palestinian terms, the ongoing catastrophe. The Nakba, marking the violent acceleration of the colonization of Palestine on 15 May 1948, also names an ongoing process of colonial expropriation with European culture as a legitimizing force in the history of genocide. If “fascization” today is not merely about parties, uniforms or street violence, but also about culturally normalized killing, displacement and inequality, then the terms for art and the role of art institutions must also be re-examined – including the institution that Paletten itself constitutes.
Is it possible to challenge the linguistic constraints that currently define trans life? In the fragmentary essay ‘Arm the Dolls. An Art History: Preliminary Materials’, Andria Nyberg Forshage makes an attempt to do so, allowing art, politics and experience to merge, and tracing a transfeminist trajectory from the avant-garde to the present day. In ‘Maroon: An Entanglement of Thoughts’, Salad Hilowle expands on his work with Gustav Badin, the Black boy brought up at court having originally been taken from St. Croix to Sweden as a slave. Through the form of montage, he examines how Badin wrote himself out of others’ images, and highlights “the fool” as a double-edged survival strategy.
The conflict over Greenland has once again brought Danish and Western colonialism to the fore. In Nina Cramer’s conversation with author Mathias Danbolt about his book Tropaganda (Strandberg Publishing, 2025), it becomes clear that colonial power has not only operated through economics, the military or legal systems, but also through idyllic visual narratives that have internalized violence.
Whilst Cramer and Danbolt draw attention to the geopolitical function of the discipline of art history in our colonial modernity, Sweden’s accession to NATO and the preoccupation with Swedishness have drawn attention to the relationship between art and the nation-state’s military-industrial complex. In Oscar Svanelid’s ‘A Brief History of Public Art in the Swedish Armed Forces’ the relationship between art, preparedness and defence becomes a historically concrete part of Swedish modernity – is the Swedish military a more important art institution than the Moderna Museet?
With this issue we also wanted to expand the conversation around art’s relationship to political change in Sweden, which has been discussed in light of the issue of fascism. We therefore sent out questions to a number of figures in the Swedish art scene to hear their thoughts on the situation. A selection of their responses is presented in this issue, and you can read all of them at Paletten.net.
We are also delighted to present new paintings created especially for this issue’s theme by Andrei Câmpan, described by Sinziana Ravini as digital exorcisms.
Enjoy reading.
Frida Sandström and Fredrik Svensk,
along with the editorial team