The Arts of Resistance
International Exchange, Workshops, Art in Public, Exhibition | European Cooperation Project | Lead: Association HASENHERZ |
Project Partners: University of Applied Arts Vienna + Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb + Braunschweig University of Art | 2024-25
Based on Umberto Eco’s text, We Are European (2019), questions of Europe as a peace project, European identity, and resistance against fascism past and present will be discussed and then co-creatively transformed into works of art. On the intersection of international youth work, current artistic research, and political education, TAoR has set itself the goal of questioning artworks and cultural assets based on local examples as a possible means of resistance. To build a pan-European understanding of fascisms and arts-based ways to counter such tendencies, and supported by internationally acclaimed artists, young people (18-25 years) will research and co-create artworks as an expression of resistance against fascisms. Critically examining historical works and comparing their context, meaning and agency to the present is at its core. The tested learning processes are based on the thesis that learning from history for the present is only possible through curiosity, research, critical analysis, and creative application. The power of imagination inherent to works of art makes it possible to encounter the future imaginatively and with an inquiring mind. The participants’ awareness and creative agency for resistance against fascisms can become fruitful. To initiate such a process is the responsibility of political, artistic, and cultural education.
The work Modular Sculpture for Democracy and Against Fascism, created by the collaboration of students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Braunschweig and students from four local schools, represents a process of collective learning and creation. Through a conversation about the 14 characteristics of fascism from Umberto Eco's text Ur-Fascism the students created anti-fascist visual messages that were transferred to modular wooden panels, designed as a sculpture that can be rearranged and moved, like a living form of resistance that responds to space and context.
The exhibition The Arts of Resistance TAoR is the result of an international project that explores the historical, cultural and social dimensions of resistance to fascism, past and present, with the aim of creating new works of art through co-creative action and collaboration. Based on Umberto Eco's essay We Are European, the project explores Europe as a space of fragile peace and layered identity, a continent whose past is shaped by wars and migrations, and whose present is marked by new upheavals and challenges. The exhibition opened on 8 May, the day Zagreb was liberated eighty years earlier, a day that for many meant more than just the end of World War II. It was a symbol of the possibility of a new beginning and the building of a society founded on the anti-fascist values of freedom, equality and solidarity. In today's time, when the fundamental values of democracy, human rights and anti-fascism are increasingly being questioned or actively erased from public discourse and space, the exhibition highlights the vital role of cultural institutions as places of freedom of expression, critical thinking and social responsibility.
The exhibition brings together a series of newly created works resulting from a months-long process involving artists, students, researchers and pupils from several European countries, brought into correlation with artworks from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU / Muzej suvremene umjetnosti). It brings together diverse voices to remind us that memory and resistance are intertwined processes - not static, but constantly negotiated, while inviting us to be not just observers of the past, but actors in the present, and allies of the future. Ana Skegro Curator