FIELD Global Reports, Winter 2026: Entering the Unpresent

Poland, Germany, South America confronting the rise of the ethno-nationalist Right

This will be my last “curated” set of Global Reports for FIELD Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, but not the end of my relationship to this important platform. It has been a true honor and pleasure to work on this series with Grant Kester and his team in San Diego, and I am certain we will continue to do so in other ways. Should any of you out there wish to continue the focus on the spread of ultra-conservative culture, authoritarian politics and the response to it by cultural workers around the globe, please get in touch. Now, here is my introduction to issue number 32:

Over eighteen months into Trump’s second presidency, with authoritarian governance entrenching itself across the globe, these final set of Global Reports I have organized arrive at a moment when the crisis documented throughout this series has entered a new phase. Previous reports last year from Italy, Austria, Portugal, Hungary, Serbia, and North Macedonia examined how both established liberal European democracies and former socialist states became laboratories for illiberal governance. The second set—from India, Turkey, and the UK—demonstrated that authoritarian cultural control was contracting around an ever-enlarging portion of the globe. This concluding trio of reports from Poland, Germany, and Latin America reveals something perhaps more disorienting: not simply the tightening of authoritarian grip, but the vertiginous instability of the ground on which cultural workers once stood. What connects these three very different dispatches—a sardonic analytical essay from Warsaw by Kuba Szreder that follows on his 2019 contribution, a structured assessment from Berlin by Karen van den Berg which also responds to her own previous report in 2019, and a multilingual torrent of questions from Latin America and across the Global South by Red Conceptualismos Del Sur in an innovative format —is a shared recognition that the old frameworks for understanding the relationship between art, politics, and democratic order have themselves become unreliable.

And there are many other excellent texts as well including Carlos Garrido Castellano’s book review of Paloma Checa-Gismero’s book on the Art Biennial Boom; Guillermo Villamizar on asbestos profiteering and high culture in Latin America, John Heon on photo-montage artist Theodore Harris; and Grant Kester’s Introduction to issue number 32. Meanwhile, my own text starts off with the assertion that we have entered what I call the “Unpresent”—a temporal condition in which the familiar markers of democratic normalcy persist as spectral forms while the material conditions that sustained them dissolve. What is striking about this final set is how deeply that condition has been internalized, not only by the authors but by the cultural fields they describe.

To read my full introductory essay, click HERE.

Kuba Szreder: Between Shitstorms (Poland)

The opening lines of UBU the King, a political satire published by Alfred Jarry in 1898, are “it happened in Poland, that is to say nowhere.” What sounds like a slightly ironic yet apt jibe at my home country, in which a feeling of political farce is seamlessly connected with the grim reality of a land ravaged by historical tragedies, was rather a factual description of political reality at the end of the 19th century. Jarry wrote his piece when Poland was indeed partitioned between surrounding countries.

Possibly because of its tongue-in-cheek yet politically grounded tone, I like to reference this quote, most recently in a comic strip Duckrabbits Unveiled. A quick peek at postartistic theory and practice (co-authored with Kacper Greń and published in 2025 together with the Institute for Network Cultures). I typically subvert it, though, saying “it happened in Poland, that is to say everywhere,” as I use it to tell a story of Poland as a UBU country that descends into a farcical yet uncanny version of authoritarianism. A representative of a tendency that unfolds everywhere.

This surrealist satire is a perfect introduction to a tale of duckrabbits, a bunch of postartistic practitioners, stray academics, interdependent curators, pataphysicians, and imaginary activists with whom we mobilized against rising authoritarianism in Poland. In fact, back in 2019, FIELD published my short text Duckrabbits against Fascism. A postartistic postcard from Warsaw in which I reported on this fledgling form of postartistic antiauthoritarianism. There, I introduced duckrabbits—an image that we used to place on our banners—as our spirit animal.

To read Kuba’s full report on Poland, click HERE

Karen van den Berg: Imagination Boosters against Hyperpolitics—Socially and Politically Engaged Art in Germany in 2025 (Germany)

Since my last report in the FIELD Journal, the world has changed. Techno-epistemic upheavals, man-made climate change, wars in Europe and Gaza, and the rise of right-wing extremist movements are reinforcing each other to create a planetary polycrisis (Adam Tooze). Hardly any cultural institution worldwide remains unaffected by this. In Germany, three aspects have changed for the politically engaged cultural sector: 1. Firstly, widespread boycotts; 2. new forms of protest; and 3. the growth of non-government infrastructures.

I. Since the beginning of the 2020s, a hardening of positions, a performative “cancel culture” and “boycottism” have dominated the climate in the German cultural sector. 17 May 2019 marked the end of a long-standing understanding of culture, because on that day, the German Bundestag passed narrowly a resolution classifying the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS), founded in 2005, as anti-Semitic and thus withdrawing state funding from individuals and institutions associated with BDS. This was followed in 2020 by the first spectacular disinvitation of postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe, who had been invited to speak at the Ruhrtriennale. Shortly afterwards, the heads of Germany’s most important cultural institutions joined forces to found the GG 5.3 Weltoffenheit initiative–including the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Goethe-Institut, the association of German stage directors and the directors of research institutions such as the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin–to oppose this in the name of the Basic Law and freedom of art. Even the plea by a group of renowned international scholars, who in 2020 drafted a paper on the definition of anti-Semitism entitled Yerusalem Declaration, which classified BDS as decidedly non-anti-Semitic, did not change the decision.

The boycott of the boycott remained in place. Event cancellations, disinvitations and closures of alternative cultural institutions were the result of a new form of soft power censorship–not to mention the documenta scandal and self-righteousness of the German government. This climate was somehow new. This was, in turn, met with third-order boycotts, such as the “Strike Germany” movement launched in 2024. In addition, activist artists who opposed the boycott demonstrated a similar self-righteous attitude. For example, Tania Bruguera invited pro-Palestinian activists to her 100-hour Hannah Arendt reading at the Hamburger Bahnhof, who shouted down the event with slogans such as “Israel is not real” and “Fuck this racist Nazi country”. One does not have to be particularly perceptive to recognize the shortcomings in the ability to engage in dialogue and to see the logic of hashtag activism at work. Political scientist Anton Jäger coined the term “hyperpolitics” for this style of politics, describing the phenomenon of heated politicization without political consequences. It therefore seems inaccurate to me to describe the Federal Republic of Germany as an illiberal democracy, as some prominent cultural figures have recently done.

II. In any case, activist art in Germany currently seems to be intervening more explicitly–and mostly with impunity.

To read Karen’s full report on Germany, click HERE

Red Conceptualismos del Sur: A Report on Local Cultural Conditions in the Era of Neo-Authoritarianism (Latin America)

Todo poema

hasta que llegue la revolución

es sólo una lista de preguntas

Anne Boyer

Pourquoi une question et non pas une affirmation?

Imaraigu tapun mana de una ves nirpaman cunan?

¿Por qué la pregunta y no la afirmación hoy?

Why the question and not the statement today?

Perché la domanda e non l’affermazione oggi?

Porque a pergunta e não a afirmação hoje?

Chemu am ti. Ramtun. Kam genu rvf pin fachiantv?

We have conceived questions as an attempt for approximation. Questions provide a space to begin to speak, to raise one’s voice. Where the question mark itself draws the shape of a hook, a hook of words, to pull them out of a throat-knot (as Rolnik would say), out of a throat-bag (invented with Le Guin). There is something about manifestos and certain ways of taking over the word that, with their categorical nature, decree positions that are too rigid. They assume a certainty in the face of analysis, which is not very versatile in a context as turbulent and changing as the present. Our few statements, in this sense, if they decide anything, are to break out of closed, organised, compact modes. To situate is to ask questions, and asking questions is a form of writing that transports us to orality, to the tone of women and children, of those who stammer and allow themselves to tremble with words.

Without statements, without certainties, without verdicts. Without answers. It is about, without imposing a language, enabling it to prolong the time spent murmuring words, ruminating on the voice, finding images. Thus, we propose a stance that is rather an incitement to question, to loosen tongues. A process that unsticks what is closed off and unleashes language to continue digging, speculating. Our questions arise from a collaborative writing process involving many hands, touching gestures, linking voices and intermingling languages. The questions attempt to construct a fabric that is affected by its relationships of proximity, its closeness or distance, its insistence and repetition, or its shifts in pronoun, place, form or direction. Questions with swings and folds, questions capable of small underground movements. We try to compose a vibrating map-network in the face of current concerns: a list of things that agitate networks, webs, sensors, and overflows.

To read RedC del Surs full text on Latin America/Global South, click HERE