Art and the F Word: Reflections on the Browning of Europe

From 2012 to 2014 a series of contemporary art exhibitions, events, and participatory forums organized by Galerija Nova, Tensta konsthall, and Grazer Kunstverein comprised the project “Beginning as Well as We Can (How Do We Talk about Fascism?)”. Focusing on the startling increase of nationalism across Europe--made palpable in manifestations of fascist tendencies and the cult of heritage--the project points to the possibility and power of art to imagine futures that are not irrevocably determined by the present, but are invested with struggles fought here and now. Art and the F Word: Reflections on the Browning of Europe, edited by curator Maria Lind and the collective What, How & for Whom/WHW, continues the debate with contributions by cultural critics, curators, and artists, which articulate resistant and constructive possibilities of social and artistic production--investigating the language of politics and philosophy and also popular vocabularies, social contexts, media, science, and aesthetics. The exhibitions featured here, which form an essential part of the overall project, test the potential of aesthetic experience to question reality and upset the ideological complacency and political resignation that lead to a loss of control over the direction of social transformation.