This exhibition aims to question the political and social function of art as a phenomenon of resistance. It also looks at the role of art in contemporary social movements, revolts and revolutionary struggles.

“Gewalt” is a German word meaning “violence”. In the 1960s, faced with the violence of the Japanese state and its police, the New Left seized on the term “GEBARUTO”. Its purpose was to designate the anti-violence, as a reaction to the institutional violence – that which serves the ends of the state. Anti-violence cannot be separated from reflections on the means and legitimacy of revolt, which asserts itself as the corollary of all resistance to the conservative violence of the law. In direct line with Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence, it also evokes Errico Malatesta’s remarks in Le Réveil anarchiste of May 1, 1928, on the slave’s state of self-defense “and how his revolt against the master, against the oppressor, is always morally justifiable”.

The works exhibited in “Gewalt” are committed practices or artistic experiments as metaphors for revolt. Faced with the violence of the state, the systemic oppression of capitalism or institutional authoritarianism (propaganda, censorship, surveillance), these works reflect a range of anti-violent reactions and their aesthetic modalities.

The exhibition aims to put these different forms of resistance to institutional violence into perspective. The historical approach forms the matrix for political questioning of the performativity of art, its potential to induce change in society in the manner of direct action.

In addition, the confrontation of artistic forms that have accompanied guerrilla experiences and practices that act as catalysts for resistance questions the modalities of rebellious artistic expression, as they respond to modes of political action, at the junction of anti-violence and non-violence.