On April 24, 2025, MOCAK – Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków – will open the exhibition Path of Most Resistance by Fabian Knecht. This is the artist’s fourth exhibition under this title, following shows in Berlin in 2022 and in Wolfsburg and London in 2023. The exhibition brings together works that express Knecht’s personal resistance to the Russian war against Ukraine (and against all of Europe).
Fabian Knecht (b. 1980 in Magdeburg) is a German artist who primarily works with performance, installation, and photography. Since 2006, Knecht has traveled regularly to Ukraine, where he has created works from his Isolation series with the support of friends. Since the outbreak of the full-scale war in February 2022, he has been actively supporting the Ukrainian resistance and volunteering as a humanitarian aid worker. He mainly collaborates with the Kyiv-based volunteer organization Livyj Bereh. His humanitarian involvement and frequent stays in Ukraine have significantly shaped his artistic practice.
Knecht never set out to make art about the war—he simply wanted to help friends and friends of friends. However, it quickly became clear to him that it felt inorganic, meaningless, and wrong to return from volunteer missions and speak about anything else in his artistic work. An artist, he believes, should speak about what they experience. His artworks also help finance humanitarian projects.
The exhibition Path of Most Resistance presents works created between 2022 and 2025, with a focus on those that directly relate to the war in Ukraine. The centerpiece is Laughing Is Suspicious (Lachen Ist Verdächtig), a large-scale outdoor installation on the museum’s facade. Measuring 40 x 7 meters, the work is composed of hand-made Ukrainian camouflage fabrics that Knecht has arranged and sewn together. He collected these heavily used materials and exchanged approximately 500 m² of them for 4,000 m² of professional-grade camouflage fabric.
Other exhibited objects and installations are made from materials sourced directly from the war zone. Rubble from destroyed buildings, fabric soaked with ash from burned Russian tanks, and a bullet-riddled cooking pot serve as tangible evidence and testimony of the Ukrainian resistance.
In addition, the exhibition includes several recent works by Knecht that address political and societal conditions in Western Europe. A detailed art historical text by Ukrainian curator Alona Karavai offers further context. The exhibition marks Fabian Knecht’s first solo show in Poland.
