The exhibition The Defeated:The Aesthetics of Resistance has opened at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm:

The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026 is a group exhibition. Artists from different parts of the world have been invited to create new works, responding in different ways to the novel’s challenge. Some address it directly or evoke other works by Peter Weiss and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss (1928–2022), others relate to it in more indirect ways, by working with forms, techniques, histories, or problems that can be clearly associated with The Aesthetics of Resistance. The exhibition also has a retrospective dimension. Alongside the newly commissioned works there is a selection of artworks and documents by Peter Weiss and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, as well as by people in their circles. The historical works create new conditions for approaching the contemporary ones and for situating them in a critical, historical space; the contemporary works cast new light on the historical ones, and on the struggles, projects and ideals that they leave as their legacy. In this way the composition of the exhibition reflects the novel’s multiplicity of voices, its polyphonous history and its kaleidoscopic world image. 

The accompanying publication was edited by Kim West and Gustav Strandberg:

This book, which features previously unavailable texts by Peter Weiss and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, as well as newly written contributions by prominent Weiss scholars and leading international critics and intellectuals, is an extended part of the exhibition. From different positions and with different approaches, the texts in the book address the same problems as the artworks in the exhibition do. They are additional elements in the exhibition’s montage, extending its experiments in new directions. Here voices from then and now come together, describing and theorizing, reflecting and speculating on the world of The Aesthetics of Resistance, and the histories, artistic forms, and political visions that are at work in it.

There are contributions by Magnus Bergh, Claudia Firth, Anna Hallberg, Esther Leslie, Joanna Nordin Asp, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, Jacques Rancière, Werner Schmidt, Gustav Strandberg, Alberto Toscano, Peter Weiss and Kim West, as well as my own essay “Contradiction as Form.” I am unfortunately unable to take part in the symposium that will take place in late October, but I’m very happy to have contributed to this incredible volume.

Last week, I was in Stockholm for a panel organized by Kim West ahead of a major exhibition on Peter Weiss and the Aesthetics of Resistance, which will open at Bonniers Konsthall on August 26th. The panel focused on questions of cultural organizing, and I presented a “walkthrough” of the essay I wrote for the catalog, titled “Contradiction as Form.” I also got to have a rummage through the treasure trove of Weissian archival materials that has been gathered at the Konsthall ahead of the exhibition—which will include such documents as well as a number of artworks, many of them newly commissioned.

My fellowship at the Centro de Estudios of the Reina Sofia has been extremely rewarding. The major component has been a seminar on legal form and legal personhood, with an incredible group of participants (artists, activists, curators, scholars), some of whom have also presented their practice or project in one of the sessions. The third and last chapter is on May 11, 13 and 14, and it is still possible to apply here until April 30 at 14:00 CEST. It’s a hybrid seminar, so online attendance is possible.

In the context of the Reina fellowship, I am working towards Personafications, which will be the second volume of my loose series “Forms of Abstraction” (now with a different publisher). The focus of this volume is on juridical and organizational form. As part of this research strand, I recently wrote an essay titled “Legal Abstraction on Trial” for the volume Bildformen des Rechts in the series Bildwelten des Wissens, which will likewise be published in May. These days, it is a rare occasion for me to find a German context in which I can work, and write what I think needs to be written; many thanks to Tom Holert, Katja Müller-Helle and Claudia Blümble for making this possible.

Top image: presentation by Mirjam Kroker in the Reina Sofia seminar.

In late 2019, I curated a small exhibition at Rongwrong in Amsterdam, Sean Snyder’s The Rembrandt and Ravachol Appreciation Society. Since Covid hit during the show’s runtime, it got rather buried, and I don’t have the best and most complete documentation either. It is a project that is very much worth revisiting, and I finally managed to add it to the “Curatorial Projects” page of this site.

Two days ago, we lost Alexander Kluge at the age of 94. Even in his final years, his intellectual alacrity and curiosity were marvelous to witness. I wrote about his work on several occasions, including in Objections and States of Divergence, and I was lucky to have the occasional exchange with him. His enthusiasm for Objections meant a lot. At the moment, I find it difficult to synthesize my thoughts on Kluge’s achievements and importance—especially soon after the passing  Habermas, a figure so emblematic of the blind spots and delusions of post-war and post-reunification German intellectual culture. I cannot bear to study the necrologies churned out by the German Feuilleton, of which Kluge was such a lodestar. Better to engage with this or that aspect of this endlessly generative body of work. Recently, I have again been drawn to Kluge and Negt’s Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung, that crucial counterpoint to Habermas’s liberal conception of the public sphere.

One thing that sustained me through the dark winter of 2023-24 was writing about Kluge’s recent filmic experiments with generative AI for Sabine Folie’s exhibition History Tales. These short pieces are very much about potential history, though not exactly in the Azoulayan sense. Although there would be more to say about Kluge’s particular use of AI image generators, and while his conception of historical potentialities (roads not taken) certainly has its limits, what remains suggestive and productive is his insistence on reading, imagining and imaging history against the grain, being attentive to what is unfinished business. One great Klugean phrase from our conversations has burrowed its way into my brain. Speaking of wresting history from sovereigns and warlords, he exclaimed: “Wir könnten dann durchaus gut manövrieren, und zwar nicht auf Schlachtfeldern,” which one might translate as “Then we would be able to maneuver quite well—and I’m not talking about battlefields.”

I need to update the “article” and “books” sections of this site at some point, but for now here is a PDF of my essay.

Image: my Kluge seminar at Maumaus, Lisbon, fall of 2023.

The amazing Wendy’s Subway in New York has announced the release of Tyler Coburn’s Some Monologues. In this volume, scripts by the artist are accompanied by short texts on the pieces in question. I contributed a text on the performance Richard Roe and on Tyler’s particular take on legal personhood. This is an exemplary publication—documenting, articulating and expanding upon the scripts. Much more than a traditional and generic monograph or catalogue could, Some Monologues presents, rather than represents, Tyler’s practice. This is primary information.

The latest installment of e-flux journal (no. 157, October 2025) contains my essay “Propositional Politics,” which looks into the politics and the poetics of various propositional practices in contemporary art. Other authors in this issue include a certain Walter Benjamin, with his essay on Max Kommerell’s book the German writer Jean Paul. I am happy to learn that Jean Paul is finally being translated into English; check out the Logbook of Giannozzo the Balloonist for starters.

Image: Lidwien van de Ven, Paris, 15/06/2024 (Léon Blum). This work is not discussed in “Propositional Politics,” but was on my mind when writing the passage on the Nouveau Front Populaire. It should be considered part of the constellation of images accompanying the text, rather than the public domain photo of a 1930s rally.

The destruction of cultural infrastructure in the Low Countries continues with the Flemish government’s decision to downgrade the M HKA (the museum of contemporary art in Antwerp) as a museum, integrating its collections into the S.M.A.K. in Ghent, and turning the M HKA into some kind of art centre. The L’Internationale Confederation has issued a support statement, and the by now sadly familiar petition can be found here.

The conversation Ana Teixera Pinto and I had for Springerin, “Surviving Fascist Solidarity,” has now been published in English by Eurozine.

I’m thrilled and honoured to be the 2025-26 “Studies Constellation” fellow at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. Few museums accord such a constitutive role to research and critical study, and I look forward to generative exchanges. In the context of my fellowship project “Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction,” I’m also working toward the second volume of Forms of Abstraction, which revolves around legal and organizational form. One component will be a seminar on personhood. This seminar is hybrid, i.e. participants don’t have to be in Madrid.

Image: Francesc Abad, Procés transformació (Transformation Process), 1972.