Antifa's Original Blueprints: How a Munich Group Is Reframing a Century of Anti-Fascist Art

Theodor Kramer once wrote that in Munich in 1929, the first organised anti-fascist street patrols went to work before the world had a word for what they were doing. The name "Antifa" — shortened from Antifaschistische Aktion, a banner raised by the German Communist Party in 1930 — came later; the practice preceded it. On 10 July 2026, a group exhibition titled Antifascism: Now opens at Lothringer 13 Halle, a municipally backed contemporary-art space in the Bavarian capital, to argue that the inheritance is not settled. Twenty-two artists and collectives are showing works that span archival reconstruction, participatory documentation, and what the curators describe as a deliberate refusal of nostalgia. The premise is modest and pointed: that the movements called anti-fascist today are heirs to a 1930s European tradition, that the inheritance is partial, and that the gaps matter.

The show is a quiet act of curatorial positioning at a moment when the word "antifa" has been absorbed into cable-news shorthand and parliamentary record alike. By foregrounding the work of artists from Brazil, Syria, Germany, the United States, and Eastern Europe, the organisers are staking a claim that anti-fascist practice is a transnational civic vocabulary — not a brand. Whether that claim survives the gallery walls is the question the exhibition itself is built to ask.

The premise: a longer timeline than the cable-news version

Munich matters for the historical anchor alone. The city's 1920s were the laboratory in which the German far right reorganised itself after the First World War, and in which the Communist Party and the Social Democrats first coordinated street-level resistance to it. The Red Front Fighters' League, the Reichsbanner, and a constellation of neighbourhood defence units set the template that Italian partisans, French résistants, and eventually Yugoslav and Greek anti-occupation fighters would adapt after 1943. Antifascism: Now opens its curatorial statement by situating its artists inside that longer arc.

A work by the Brazilian artist Gabe Nascimento, realised in cooperation with the collective Error 417, is the exhibition's organising image. Titled How to Foster Local Networks, the piece — photographed above during its installation at Lothringer 13 Halle by Christian Kain — uses archival material from the German-Brazilian anti-fascist diaspora of the 1930s to ask a question that is plainly also a current one: how does a movement that has no headquarters, no membership card, and no central media channel keep itself organised across borders? The work is participatory; visitors are invited to annotate it. The show's curators are explicit that this is not a decorative gesture. They argue, in a written statement released with the press preview, that the central failure of the historical anti-fascist left was organisational fragility under sustained state pressure — and that the contemporary art world, for all its privileges, can be a rehearsal space for the kind of horizontal coordination that street movements require.

The counter-frame: an inheritance that excludes

The exhibition is also a curatorial argument against itself. Several of the contributing artists, in interviews conducted by ARTnews ahead of the opening, push back on the framing. A piece by the Syrian-German collective that goes by the working name of Künt Schatten (a transliteration of a Damascus studio that was destroyed in 2016) consists of printed correspondence between early 1930s German antifascists and anticolonial organisers in North Africa. The work is presented unfinished, with missing pages marked by hand. The accompanying wall text argues that the historical record of 1930s anti-fascism is, in its preserved form, a European record — that anticolonial movements of the same period were anti-fascist in substance but rarely named as such, and that the genealogy the exhibition claims is therefore narrower than it appears.

This is the most politically loaded move in the show, and it is the one the curators are most clearly inviting. A second generation of contributors, including two US-based artists whose work documents Black antifascist organising in the 1980s and 1990s, makes a parallel point from the other side of the Atlantic. The argument, in plain editorial terms, is that "antifa" as a brand — the way it is marketed, mocked, and mobilised in current political culture — has been allowed to obscure the broader question of who gets to inherit the name, and on what terms. The exhibition's curatorial note concedes the point and then, characteristically, refuses to resolve it.

The structural question: what an exhibition can do

The deeper question the show raises is institutional rather than political. A municipally funded Kunsthalle in Bavaria in 2026 putting "Antifascism" in its title is, on its own, a notable act — Bavaria being a state in which the regional government has, in recent years, moved administratively against organisations it classifies as extremist, including some groups that self-describe as anti-fascist. The legal status of Lothringer 13 Halle, which operates under the city's cultural affairs office, gives the show a public anchor that private galleries cannot replicate.

The structural problem, however, is the one that has dogged politically engaged art since at least the 1930s: the gap between a curated object and a political constituency. The exhibition's own programme, which includes public readings, neighbourhood walking tours, and a partnership with a Munich-based documentation centre, gestures at the gap without closing it. A walk-through is, by design, a different kind of public space than a picket line. The artists seem aware of the tension; several of the works on view are explicitly about the failure of art to be the movement it depicts. A video piece by a Berlin-based duo, recorded in workshops with the Antifa-Karneval-Koordination in Cologne, treats the preparation of a 2025 anti-fascist carnival float as a case study in the kind of patient, unglamorous organising that exhibitions tend to omit.

Stakes: the politics of the word in 2026

The show arrives in a year in which anti-fascist politics are again a live electoral question in several European countries, in which the German federal government has expanded the legal definition of domestic extremism, and in which US civil-liberties organisations are still litigating the post-2020 designation of antifa as a "domestic extremist ideology" in American federal documents. The exhibition's wager is that the long view — a century of anti-fascist practice, examined honestly — offers something that the current political vocabulary does not.

That wager is not obviously winning. The art press has been broadly sympathetic; ARTnews's preview frames the show as a serious curatorial intervention rather than a polemic. The German tabloid coverage, to the extent it has engaged, has been mixed, with at least one Munich daily highlighting the participation of artists whose work documents recent street clashes. The municipal authorities, asked for comment by ARTnews, declined to weigh in beyond confirming their funding role. What remains unsettled, and what the exhibition is honest enough to leave unsettled, is whether the historical inheritance it excavates can be claimed by the present, or whether the gap between the two is precisely the political problem the show is trying to name.

— Monexus framed this exhibition against the 24-hour cable-news treatment of "antifa" rather than the longer curatorial literature on antifascist movements; the editorial decision was to treat the Munich show as a moment in a continuing European argument about civic memory, not as a response to a single news cycle.