In 2016, Josh Kline debuted “Unemployment,” a series that explored mass joblessness brought on by technology and automation, and the potential end of the middle class. Nearly a decade later, those works are on view in Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Kline’s focus on how unemployment could fuel fascism appears more prescient than ever.
The exhibition, “Global Fascisms,” brings together the work of more than 50 artists to argue that fascism is not a relic of the past but an active, contemporary force in global culture and politics.
“Around the world, there is a glaring turn toward a dark form of politics,” curator Cosmin Costinas writes in an opening essay. “Fascism is here and it is everywhere.”
Fascism, Costinas continues, “has always manipulated aesthetics.” The exhibition examines the ways fascism has been made to appear attractive in public discourse, from its glorification of the past to its use of technology. Artificial intelligence, in this reading, becomes “the ultimate tool of nostalgia,” as it draws “entirely” on the past to perpetuate itself
The growing threat of AI gives new resonance to Kline’s Unemployed Journalist (Dave), the first work one sees in the show: a fetal-positioned figure, encased in a recycling bag, representing job loss and disposability. The 3D-printed sculpture depicts an American journalist who lost his job when his publication’s staff attempted to form a union, prompting Kline to question the transformation of human beings into human capital.
“I often think about this phrase ‘human capital’ and what that means when you turn people into resources,” he told ARTnews. “If people become resources, then that capital can be spent, used up, and discarded like other forms of waste.”
The context around the work has changed in the intervening years. Now, Kline said, he thinks of the “creatives losing their jobs” in Hollywood and elsehwere to AI video and image generators like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and others.
The context around the work has shifted in the intervening years. Now, Kline said, he thinks of the “creatives losing their jobs” in Hollywood and elsewhere to AI video and image generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. That idea of disposability runs through Desperation Dilation, where a shopping cart overflows with silicone and plastic sculptures in trash bags, echoing scenes Kline has witnessed in New York and Hong Kong, where “desperate people in poverty are collecting cans and other things for recycling to make very small amounts of money.”
“I was thinking about what it means for society to reduce people to scavengers in this way. I found it deeply troubling,” he said. “What kind of society forces its elderly to collect recycling goods for pennies?”
Gülsün Karamustafa, Window, 1980.
Courtesy of the artist and BüroSarıgedik, Salt Research, Gülsün Karamustafa Archive
Throughout “Global Fascisms,” artists respond to the rise of fascist ideologies through a variety of media: painting, film, performance, publications, and digital formats. Historical artworks draw connections between past and present understandings of fascism.
The work of Gülsün Karamustafa, a 78-year-old Turkish artist, anchors the exhibition as a living testimony of surviving fascism. In the photograph Stage, Karamustafa and her husband stand in court awaiting a prison sentence after being arrested during Turkey’s 1971 military coup. Their crime, she told ARTnews, was hiding a person the police were looking for. She spent six months in prison; her husband spent two and a half years. In the work, a rotating projection overlays the photo with the words “stage, control, regime, ideology,” calling to mind a searchlight over a prison yard.
“This really sums up the ideology of the time,” she said. The work was first shown at HKW in 1998. Nearly thirty years later, it is just as relevant.
Karamustafa’s earlier works, like Soldier and Window, extend her reflection on turbulent times in Turkey in the 1970s and ’80s into domestic and social spheres, depicting familial tension and separation. Her newest work, Reminder (2025), commissioned by HKW, is a 25-panel mural commemorating the first 25 years of the 21st century through protest imagery, calling for history not to repeat itself.
The omnipresence of technology and surveillance links works across the exhibition, from Karamustafa’s historical pieces to Kline’s future-minded ones. The work of Julia Scher also picks up this theme with her installation, Danger Dirty Data, Tell Your Story (2025). This installation uses repurposed surveillance cameras to engage visitors at the entrance to the Global Fascisms exhibition, while a CCTV set up invites the viewer to interact by creating their own data-narrative on a keyboard. Kline said he feels a sense of connection and kinship between his work and theirs.
The site of the exhibition also carries resonance, given Germany’s history. Kline said the Weimar period figured heavily into the creation of the Unemployment works, as mass unemployment during the interwar period is considered by historians to have been a major factor in sending “the destabilized working and middle classes into the arms of Hitler,” in Kline’s words. This is the first time the works will have been seen in Germany.
“I was also making these works during the 2016 presidential campaign when Trump was running for the first time,” he said. “There were already these very disturbing images of Trump rallies, very reminiscent of fascist rallies during the Second World War. And what led to the rise of Trump in the U.S., too, was the destabilization of the blue-collar middle class.”
With tech executives regularly projecting mass white-collar job loss due to AI, Kline said it raises the question of what might happen in the U.S., Germany, or elsewhere “if there’s an even greater population cast into precariousness and poverty.”
That urgency runs through much of “Global Fascisms,” including the work of Sana Shahmuradova Tanska. Her paintings, all made after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, draw upon different strands of Ukraine’s history, literature, and folklore. For Shahmuradova Tanska, the language of fascism is becoming “less and less sophisticated.”
Josh Kline, Desperation Dilation, 2016.
Photo: Joerg Lohse, courtesy of the artist
“It is getting rather literal to the point of absurdity,” she told ARTnews, adding that she examines the absurdity and repetition of fascist methods across different generations.
In one work, Negotiations, figures sit at a table. No one has a head and one has already been killed, though they are still seated at a chair. According to Shahmuradova Tanska, the work shows the “staged and fake presumed presence of the party, the agency of which is not taken into account whatsoever by other members of the table.”
It represents “the uselessness and absurdity of negotiations with aggressors,” she added..
While not every work in the show names fascism directly in titles or wall text, the ideology suffuses the exhibition, which Kline said is rare today.
“In the U.S., I can’t think of a single exhibition that is dealing with fascism directly in a 21st-century context,” he said.
Karamustafa echoed the point. “We are all talking about a reality which is here and existing now,” she said. “Every one of us is trying to talk in our own languages.”
Global Fascisms is on view at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin through 7 December, 2025.
