Peter Weiss Exhibition and Publication

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.