The exhibition engages in a dialogue with a provocative claim made by Slovenian sociologist, literary theorist, translator, and political activist Rastko Močnik in his collection of texts titled How Much Fascism? (1995). Močnik suggests that we no longer need to ask ourselves whether “new local populism, new ‘fascism,’ [and] new right-wing extremism” drive the contemporary condition, but rather, how much they drive that condition. We must attend not only to the open manifestations of fascism, though we witness more and more of such instances and one needs to ponder how societies that permit and tolerate such phenomena still “qualify” as democracies. More importantly, WHW suggest, “we need to turn our attention to the silent fascism that is becoming normalized through the systematic violence seeping into the laws and everyday administration practices of the nation-state, and to assess the mechanisms of oppression and the various symptoms of contemporary fascism that are being presented as unavoidable, pragmatic necessities.” In sync with these thoughts, the artists in the exhibition inquire about the possibility of art vis-a-vis such circumstances and invest in the cognitive power of art and the potential within the aesthetic experience of questioning reality.
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