Munich's 'Antifascism: Now' turns the historical lens on today's far-right infrastructure

The fifteen works gathered under the title Antifascism: Now at Munich's Lothringer 13 Halle, on view since early summer 2026, do something the genre rarely attempts: they refuse to let antifascism freeze into a museum piece. Curated, according to ARTNEWS's review dated 10 July 2026, as an explicit rejoinder to a resurgent far-right across Europe and the United States, the show pairs archival material from the historical fight against National Socialism with documents, photographs and network-mapping projects generated against present-day movements. The wager — that an exhibition can be both remembrance and reconnaissance — lands uneasily in places, and decisively in others.

The premise of Antifascism: Now is that today's far-right has changed costume. Where the 1930s enemy came in uniform and announced itself in party newspapers, the contemporary iteration moves through parliaments, encrypted chat groups and youth subcultures. The exhibition's argument is that the methods that defeated the first wave — street defence, international solidarity, cultural infrastructure — still apply, but only if antifascists also update their tooling.

Munich, then and now

Lothringer 13 Halle sits in a city that takes the question personally. Bavaria's capital absorbed war guilt into its post-1945 rebuilding project with a thoroughness that turned the Allies' "denazification" mandate into local civic religion. The city's own reckoning has frayed in recent years: the Alternative für Deutschland and its Bavarian sister party, the WerteUnion-aligned Free Voters' right flank, have steadily grown in the surrounding Landtag, while a documented rise in assaults on migrant and LGBTQ+ targets has tracked the same curve. ARTNEWS notes that several of the exhibiting artists specifically cite this local uptick as the reason they accepted the invitation.

The result is a show pitched at two registers. Historical works — including loaned images from the White Rose resistance circle, with the consent of the foundation that administers the group's archive — sit alongside photographs taken at 2024 and 2025 counter-demonstrations in Erfurt, Chemnitz and Leipzig. A wall text frames the move as continuity rather than analogy: "the same refusal, different century". The claim is generous; critics will note that lumping the White Rose's pamphlet-press clandestine apparatus with a smartphone-recorded street action flattens distinctions of stakes and state response. The curators appear to accept that charge and lean into it — the throughline, in their telling, is not the symmetry of means but the persistence of the demand for refusal.

The network question

If the show has a structural centre, it is Gabe Nascimento's contribution, How to Foster Local Networks, executed in cooperation with the Berlin-based collective Error 417. The piece — a printed wall-and-table installation of diagrammatic material drawn from interviews with antifascist organisers across five European countries — argues, in effect, that what contemporary antifascism lacks is not courage but cartography. The artist treats the dispersed, mostly informal cells that monitor far-right activity as an archipelago with no shared chart.

It is the most polemical work on view, and the most useful. Nascimento's research process — fifteen months of recorded conversations, conducted under agreed anonymity with organisers in Germany, France, Poland, Italy and Spain — produced a working typology of tactics: rapid-response legal aid, independent press infrastructure, encrypted early-warning chat groups and the unglamorous labour of patient relationship-building in neighbourhoods where the far-right has moved from rallies to tenancy. The artist has, according to ARTNEWS, declined to publish the raw transcripts but has agreed to share redacted versions with selected researchers under embargo.

The network problem is also the show's sharpest political fault line. Several German states, including Bavaria, have moved in the past three years to widen the definitions of extremism used in domestic-intelligence dossiers, with consequences that have bitten both organised groups and individuals. Antifascism: Now takes no party-line position on that legislation, but the work's implicit argument — that informal watching networks function as a civic immune system — sits awkwardly in a jurisdiction where volunteering for such a network can, under some readings of the statute, attract surveillance. The curators acknowledge the tension in a printed panel near the entrance.

What the historical material does — and doesn't

The archival sections are the show's intellectual scaffolding and, intermittently, its weakest stretch. The temptation in any antifascist exhibition is to dwell on the iconography of 1930s defeat — the clipped bourgeois respectability of the White Rose, the industrial muscle of the International Brigades, the disciplined anonymity of the French Resistance. Antifascism: Now resists most of that temptation but does not fully escape it. Two video loops of Weimar-era street footage play on small monitors near the back of the hall; they are competent without being revelatory, and a viewer familiar with the existing documentary record will find little new. The work that earns its keep here is documentary in register: a set of forensic reconstructions of the September 1992 Mölln fire and the June 1993 Solingen fire, drawn from court records and presented with a deliberately clinical captioning that refuses both mourning and triumphalism.

What holds the show together, and what may carry it past its closing date, is the deliberate refusal to be reassuring. There is no wall listing victories, no panel assuring the visitor that the arc of antifascism bends toward triumph. The curators have, per ARTNEWS, described the exhibition as a "temporary instrument", to be dismantled in late September when Lothringer 13 Halle returns to its next programmed tenancy. The implicit claim is that any useful antifascist infrastructure is itself temporary, mobile and revocable.

What remains unresolved

The show leaves a series of questions it does not attempt to answer, and several its framings cannot contain. The first is empirical: how, exactly, the listed contemporary tactics translate to jurisdictions with weaker rule-of-law traditions than Germany's. A second is comparative: how Europe's far-right networks — which the show gestures at but does not fully document — fund, recruit and coordinate across borders, and which states tolerate or facilitate that movement. A third is internal: how an art institution, structurally dependent on municipal funding and reputational capital, sustains work that may antagonise the same authorities on whose tolerance it depends. None of these are objections to the exhibition; they are the questions the exhibition's most honest moments raise without resolving.

Lothringer 13 Halle is in Munich's Schlachthofviertel district. Antifascism: Now runs through 27 September 2026.