IAS

IAS is an independent organization for advanced popular education in political aesthetics. The institute conducts critical research and education concerning cultural and political issues of common interest in a time of division, inequality, racism, and sexism. It aims to establish a place where free and non-instrumental thinking can be developed in spite of the privatization of the public sphere and the ongoing dismantlement of the infrastructures of popular education and critical human sciences.

IAS activities are based on the idea that cultural practices can create unique, new, and experimental ways of understanding, relating to, and transforming society. At the same time, cultural practices can only be understood on the basis of their material – social, political, economic, and technical – conditions.

Political aesthetics is an area where such possibilities and limitations intersect and enter into conflict. “Aesthetics” is here understood in three ways: as the domain of sensible experience, today to an ever increasing degree colonized and formatted by digital media technologies; as culture in the aesthetic sense – the arts – which can still, in spite of all, create figures of otherness and freedom in a homogenized and unfree world; and as a testing field for utopian projections of dignified lives: lives lived fully, life forms that remain to be constructed.

IAS works in a critical enlightenment tradition and strives, from the standpoint of an ideal of social equality, to create concepts, analytical tools, and theoretical models for an historical understanding of contemporary ideological and power formations, but also for the development of new forms of resistance and egalitarian modes of organization. Political aesthetics is a privileged domain for such theoretical practice: it is where shifts in dominance relations and their legitimating symbolical systems can first be perceived; but it is also where contradictions can become zones of conflict and alternatives can be tested in experimental openness.

IAS offers education for an engaged public with some habit or desire of reading advanced theoretical texts. Participation is free of charge but implies a commitment to follow course programs. At a first stage IAS will offer a one-year evening course with two teaching sessions per month: one lecture, one seminar; some focus will also be placed on essay writing and editorial practices. In addition to the main teachers, a broader teaching college is associated to the institute, which among other things will contribute with tutoring and critique during the one-year course. IAS will also arrange a long-term, higher seminar, convoked monthly.

IAS will also have a public program: open lectures, symposia, and events, in collaboration with organizations in Sweden and beyond. It wants to contribute to the development of a transversal, international critical public sphere, circumventing and counteracting contemporary tendencies toward media monopolization and political Balkanization. A progressive political and cultural project must today be a project for a critical universalism: for resistance against the anti-democratic offensive of the global far right, and for alternatives to the planetary nihilism of fossil capital; for community, solidarity, and organization across differences, identities, and borders.

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One-year evening course in political aesthetics, 2025–26:

The Aesthetics of Resistance

Register before October 22. Course start Wednesday October 29.

The starting point for the IAS one-year evening course 2025–26 is Peter Weiss’s antifascist novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. The aim of the course is to investigate if a critical universalism, mediated through cultural forms, can be possible today, in contemporary social, political, and technical conditions. If so, what would it signify? Can we imagine an “aesthetics of resistance” in relation to the surge to power of the racist, reactionary, and authoritarian far right today, in culture as well as in politics, in Sweden and internationally? The course will approach the problem from different perspectives and through texts from different fields: critical social and cultural theory, political philosophy and aesthetics, literature and poetry.

A fundamental question in Weiss’s novel is how a radically democratic community could be conceivable in a fragmented, “divided” world. The novel’s hypothesis is that the response must be found in culture. It is in and through the forms of culture that “we” might experience and think “ourselves” as a community in a divided world. If “we” can understand the histories of art and culture as a history that concerns “us”, then through it “we” can identify as a communal “we”, despite the world’s fragmentation. “We” means potentially everyone: radical democracy.

But the histories of art and culture are not and have never been a history that concerns everyone. It is not true sociologically, it is not true at the level of the artwork’s formal definition and social logic. The history of art is a history of gods and princes, patriarchs and colonizers, oligarchs and patrons. The monuments of culture are monuments of barbarism. To understand the histories of art and culture as a history that can concern all, must therefore be a critical project, an aesthetics of resistance. This insight is at the basis of the distinctive documentary montage technique that Weiss developed in his novel.

The course “The Aesthetics of Resistance” aims to test the novel’s hypothesis and investigate the possible validity of its experimental imperative in contemporary conditions. With reference to different histories, forms, and motifs in the book, the course will address a series of separate but interconnected themes and problems: the question of aesthetics as the domain for the experience of a “full life”; the problem of art’s autonomy and its political implications; the culture of the new fascisms and the aesthetics of the popular fronts; the legacies of colonialism and the possibility of a cosmopolitical cultural history; the traditions of documentary montage and their contemporary mutations.

The course has two teaching sessions per month: one lecture, one seminar. Course literature will amount to monthly readings of about 200 pages. The course will be concluded with a practical moment of essay writing and will be examined publicly, through publication of student essays in an anthology edited by 1|21 Press. The IAS teaching college will contribute with tutoring and critique during this moment of the course.

The course is arranged by IAS at and in collaboration with Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus. It is also designed as a collaboration with the exhibition The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026, curated by Kim West, François Piron, and Joanna Nordin, which will be shown at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in the fall of 2026. Leading up to and during the exhibition, a program of public lectures and presentations will be arranged, starting spring 2026.

The course will be held mainly in Swedish. Course syllabus available here.

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Staff

Initiators and main teachers: Gustav Strandberg and Kim West.

Teaching college: Majsa Allelin, Beata Berggren, Sebastian Dahlqvist, Anna Enström, Jackqueline Frost, Jörgen Gassilewski, Ane Hjort Guttu, Anna Hallberg, Elof Hellström, Johan Härnsten, Martin Högström, Mara Lee, Karl Katz Lydén, Asier Mendizabal, Nils Olsson, Christoffer Paues, David Payne, François Piron, Johan Sehlberg, Benjamin Thorel, Josefine Wikström, Anna Ådahl.