All over the world, we are currently witnessing a resurgence of reactionary politics rooted in authoritarianism, misogyny, racism, and nationalism. This is not limited to a few isolated regimes, but is becoming an insidious and normalized feature of the political mainstream. Populist strongmen and patriarchal demagogues are gaining ground, dismantling social safety nets while mobilizing nationalist sentiment and a nostalgia for white supremacy. The scapegoats are well known: women, queer communities, people of color, migrants, the poor – and anyone who defies the dominant narrative. In this context, the question must be asked: are the categories “left” and “right” still appropriate for understanding these shifts, or do they obscure more than they reveal?

Increasingly, this reactionary upsurge is cloaked in the aesthetics of tradition, security and control. Authoritarian governments and their ideological allies are not only rewriting laws – they are reshaping culture. Critical and diverse artistic practices are no longer funded, but denounced. Artists and curators who challenge prevailing ideologies or straightforward propaganda are branded dangerous or irrelevant or are boycotted by peers. Instead of critical engagement, the right offers sentimental, sanitized, state-approved art––art that flatters rather than questions, that soothes rather than disturbs.

This cultural suppression is not limited to galleries or funding systems. The ideological battle also rages on the internet, where manipulated images and emotionally charged misinformation fuel the reactionary imagination. These digital spaces mirror physical spaces: echo chambers where winged ideologies are cultivated, repeated, and further radicalized.

Yet in various contexts, artists, curators, and collectives are building counter-movements and creating spaces of contradiction and care, of solidarity and critique. These practices resist the flattening of discourse and homogenization of culture. They expose hegemonic mechanisms and make space for alternative futures. Some strategies are deeply rooted in specific political geographies, while others can be translated and adapted across contexts. What unites them is an insistence on the power of art to question things and imagine something different.

In this issue, we aim to create space for both critical engagement and creative resistance. Most contributions take the form of interviews conducted throughout 2024, brought together in this edition of OnCurating. In the face of history’s rapidly shifting turmoil, there never seems to be a perfect moment to publish such reflections. Yet, we hope this collection offers insight into practices of resistance—however small or localized—which imagine culture as a terrain of inclusions and of opening up discourse strategies.

In the article Scanning the Horizon in Turbulent Times: Participatory Public Art as a Counter-space, the artist Bill Balaskas and curator Or Tshuva discuss the project’s development with Stephen Walker from University of Manchester; This Sky is Your Sky is a newly commissioned public art installation by Bill Balaskas, officially launched in August 2024 by 422 Arts. Located on Manchester’s busy Stockport Road, where it is viewed by thousands of commuters and local residents everyday, the work sits in one of the city’s most diverse yet often overlooked neighborhoods, where histories of migration, economic hardship, and grassroots’ resilience shape everyday life. Commissioned through an open call and selected by an open public vote, the project was developed through a participatory curatorial model, and was actively shaped by local residents, volunteers, and students.

In the second interview, the curators Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Alya Sebti, Keyna Eleison and Thiago de Paula Souza, each describe their specific curatorial approach to the São Paolo Biennial, which they are curating together. In this exciting conversation, the background to curatorial decisions will become visible, where the biennial will only be shown in the fall 2025.

In the Interview with Apsara DiQuinzio, senior curator of contemporary art at the Nevada Museum of Art, Vivian Zavataro presents us with a compelling conversation that traces how DiQuinzio’s curatorial practice employs art as a tool of resistance by presenting exhibitions that counter right-wing ideologies, center feminist and ecological justice, and build bridges across political divides through engaged, community-
oriented projects.

Mary Lilith Fischer presents us with a layered portrait of Istanbul’s cultural scene in 2024, based on conversations with Kaya Genç, Derya Yücel, Ulas Parkan, Ayşegül Yapar and Begüm Çelik. Each offers a different perspective on how artists and curators are dealing with censorship, institutional critique, and street resistance in Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian climate.

In “Hulda Zwingli: A Feminist Ghost Haunting the Art World”, we meet Hulda Zwingli – a fictional feminist art collective and Instagram personality who has become a powerful force in the Swiss art scene. Using wit, anonymity, and sharp visual critique, she challenges institutional gender imbalances and sparks real systemic change.

The artist Olesya Drashkaba talks to the curator and designer Anastasiia Biletska. Both are from Ukraine, and are concerned with art and design as a place of resilience in the face of a terrible threat. We have chosen one of Olesya’s posters as a cover for this issue.

In “The Passion of Freemen: Towards a Nashist Aesthetics” we are introduced to a critical dialogue that examines to what extent far-right curatorial practices redefine political art through reactionary aesthetics and institutional complicity, and which reveals the emergence of a “neo-nashist” artist whose freedom is based on symbolic violence and exclusion.

In “Past is Present” the Memory Museum for Historical Justice presents us with a powerful curatorial and archival intervention that exposes the lasting effects of the 1980 coup in Turkey, transforming digital memory into physical testimony to reveal systemic violence while promoting hope, resistance, and historical justice.

In “Censorship, Community, and the Search for Identity in Contemporary Art,” Wannsee Contemporary gallery presents us with a hyperlocal yet globally-focused platform where curator Avi Feldman uses exhibitions such as aaajiao’s “I was dead on the internet” to grapple with digital fascism, censorship, and the fragmentation of identity in the age of surveillance and exile.

With the exhibition “My Past is a Foreign Country”, curator Akis Kokkinos presents us with a poetic, and politically charged dialogue between place, memory, and identity, bringing together artists from the eastern Mediterranean to reflect on shared histories of displacement, resilience, and belonging, in the spaces of Chios, which are marked by the Ottoman past.

In The Neighborhood Guilt Quilt, a powerful interview reveals how Georgia Lale’s activist textile works – which were censored by the Greek government – offer us a poignant testimony of femicide, collective memory and the struggle to ensure that women’s voices are seen and heard across national and cultural borders.

Baltensperger + Siepert present a deeply collaborative and politically engaged practice that challenges dominant narratives around migration, identity, and authorship, with projects such as No Real Body and Ways to Escape One’s Former Country, which reimagine the artist as witness, connector, and provocateur in contested global landscapes.

The Radical Daughters have split off from the Centre for Political Beauty to specialize in political education.

Rufina Bazlova presents us – especially through her politically-charged embroideries – with a practice rooted in feminist resistance, where traditional folk techniques become powerful tools for activism, memory and solidarity, in response to oppression in Belarus and beyond.

“Buried in Baden – Frauenmuseum (Women’s Museum)” tells us how Beate Jorda’s vision of a contemporary feminist museum in Austria was systematically undermined by local political resistance, and shows how the resurgence of the right and deep-rooted misogyny continue to hinder institutional recognition of women’s cultural contributions.

The Center for Political Beauty presents us with a bold, cross-platform campaign that combines satire, AI, and activist installation to demand a constitutional ban on the far-right AfD party in Germany, thus turning art into a weapon of democratic resistance, blurring the line between fiction and political reality.

Gürsoy Doğtaş presents us with a fragmented yet deeply intimate reflection on the entanglements between white gay male desire, right-wing extremism, and art, tracing how darkrooms, galleries, and public discourse have become contested spaces where aesthetics, identity, and politics collide in unsettling ways.