A groundbreaking exhibition at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt brings together more than 50 international artists to examine fascism as a contemporary global phenomenon rather than a historical relic. "Global Fascisms," running through December 7, 2025, features works spanning multiple media including painting, film, performance, publications, and digital formats to explore how authoritarian politics and fascist ideologies are resurging worldwide.
American artist Josh Kline's 2016 series "Unemployment" takes on new relevance in the current exhibition context. His work "Unemployed Journalist (Dave)," which greets visitors at the entrance, depicts a figure in fetal position encased in a recycling bag, symbolizing job loss and human disposability. The 3D-printed sculpture represents an American journalist who lost his job when his publication's staff attempted to unionize. "I often think about this phrase 'human capital' and what that means when you turn people into resources," Kline told ARTnews. "If people become resources, then that capital can be spent, used up, and discarded like other forms of waste."
The context surrounding Kline's work has evolved significantly since its creation. Originally focused on mass joblessness caused by technology and automation, the pieces now resonate with contemporary concerns about artificial intelligence displacing creative workers in Hollywood and other industries through AI generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Curator Cosmin Costinas writes that AI has become "the ultimate tool of nostalgia, as it draws entirely on the past to perpetuate itself."
Kline's installation "Desperation Dilation" features a shopping cart overflowing with silicone and plastic sculptures in trash bags, echoing scenes he witnessed in New York and Hong Kong where impoverished individuals collect recyclables for minimal income. "I was thinking about what it means for society to reduce people to scavengers in this way," he explained. "What kind of society forces its elderly to collect recycling goods for pennies?"
Turkish artist Gülsün Karamustafa, 78, serves as a cornerstone of the exhibition with her firsthand testimony of surviving fascism. Her photograph "Stage" shows her and her husband in court awaiting prison sentences after being arrested during Turkey's 1971 military coup. Their crime was hiding someone the police were seeking. She spent six months in prison while her husband served two and a half years. The work features a rotating projection overlaying the photo with words like "stage," "control," "regime," and "ideology," evoking a prison yard searchlight.
Karamustafa's earlier works, including "Soldier" and "Window," extend her reflections on Turkey's turbulent 1970s and 1980s into domestic and social spheres, depicting family tensions and separations. Her newest piece, "Reminder" (2025), commissioned specifically for the exhibition, is a 25-panel mural commemorating the first 25 years of the 21st century through protest imagery, serving as a call for history not to repeat itself.
Surveillance technology and its omnipresent role in modern society connect works throughout the exhibition. Julia Scher's installation "Danger Dirty Data, Tell Your Story" (2025) uses repurposed surveillance cameras to engage visitors at the exhibition entrance, while a closed-circuit television setup invites viewers to interact by creating their own data narratives on a keyboard. This theme bridges historical pieces like Karamustafa's with future-oriented works like Kline's.
The exhibition's Berlin location carries particular historical weight given Germany's past with fascism. Kline noted that the Weimar period heavily influenced his "Unemployment" series, as mass joblessness during the interwar years is considered by historians to have been a major factor in driving destabilized working and middle classes toward Hitler. This marks the first time these works have been displayed in Germany.
Kline drew parallels between historical and contemporary political movements, recalling his work during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. "There were already these very disturbing images of Trump rallies, very reminiscent of fascist rallies during the Second World War," he said. "And what led to the rise of Trump in the U.S., too, was the destabilization of the blue-collar middle class." With technology executives regularly projecting mass white-collar job losses due to AI, Kline questions what might happen if even larger populations face economic precariousness.
Ukrainian artist Sana Shahmuradova Tanska contributes paintings created after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, drawing from different strands of Ukrainian history, literature, and folklore. She observes that "the language of fascism is becoming less and less sophisticated" and "getting rather literal to the point of absurdity." Her work "Negotiations" depicts figures sitting at a table where no one has a head and one has already been killed but remains seated, representing what she calls "the uselessness and absurdity of negotiations with aggressors."
While not every artwork explicitly names fascism in titles or descriptions, the ideology permeates the entire exhibition. Kline emphasized the rarity of such direct engagement with contemporary fascism in American art institutions, stating he cannot think of a single U.S. exhibition dealing with fascism directly in a 21st-century context. Karamustafa echoed this sentiment, noting that all participating artists are "talking about a reality which is here and existing now" and trying to communicate "in our own languages."
