Symptomatic/Asymptomatic
Oliver Ressler - We Are the Forest Enclosed by the Wall”, 4K video, 35 min., 2025
An amazing friend from the US, the curator Nato Thompson wrote a book titled “Culture as Weapon.” It points out at how conservative institutions use art and culture to constrain dissent. I definitely believe we should also see and use culture as a weapon in political struggles against the far-right, the fascists, and climate deniers. There are numerous fantastic historical examples where culture was used as a weapon successfully, from John Heartfield to the Situationist International, from Emory Douglas (who emerged from the Black Panther movement of the 1960s) to Art Workers Coalition, from Guerrilla Girls, Act Up, Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler—to name two more recent examples—to Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination or the Argentinean collective Etcétera.
Oliver Ressler
Oliver Ressler - We Are the Forest Enclosed by the Wall”, 4K video, 35 min., 2025
An amazing friend from the US, the curator Nato Thompson wrote a book titled “Culture as Weapon.” It points out at how conservative institutions use art and culture to constrain dissent. I definitely believe we should also see and use culture as a weapon in political struggles against the far-right, the fascists, and climate deniers. There are numerous fantastic historical examples where culture was used as a weapon successfully, from John Heartfield to the Situationist International, from Emory Douglas (who emerged from the Black Panther movement of the 1960s) to Art Workers Coalition, from Guerrilla Girls, Act Up, Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler—to name two more recent examples—to Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination or the Argentinean collective Etcétera.
Oliver Ressler