Annika Larsson at Lentos Art Museum Linz, Austria: Group-exhibition

In parallel with the continuity of extremist rightwing political ideas there is an afterlife of the repeated representation of fascism in art and literature and an appropriation of its aesthetic set pieces in popular culture and (transgressive) subculture. The exhibition Transformation and Recurrence, Reflections on Radical Nationalisms in Contemporary Art pulls together a great number of works and strategies that address this phenomenon, ranging from appropriation and mimetic subversion to the analytic contemplation, re-staging and deconstruction of fascistoid mechanisms.

The re-enactment of traumatic and/or threatening constellations in a fictitious form may function as an attempt to gain control of them by redefining their frame of reference. This appropriation creates a space for the negotiation of topics whose ambivalence oscillates between fascination and revulsion. Last of all, the exhibition is designed to cast light on the question of what artistic strategies are capable to visualize current totalitarian, extreme right-wing developements.

Curators: Markus Proschek, Hemma Schmutz