Dan Park

In 2009, Dan Park placed a heart made of pegboard with a swastika, alongside a tin can bearing the words “Zyklon B” – the name of the gas used by the German Nazis in the gas chambers of the extermination camps – outside the Jewish community centre in Malmö. He was acquitted here of the charge of incitement to racial hatred. In 2009 Park was on trial for placing swastikas and boxes labeled "Zyklon B" in front of a Jewish community center.^[2]

However, he has since been convicted of similar offences. Between 2012 and 2019, several convictions were handed down for incitement to racial hatred and defamation.

In 2022, Dan Park once again placed a tin bearing the words “Zyklon B” outside a Jewish community centre, this time in Gothenburg. A couple of months later, he also attached a beadboard in the shape of a swastika to the façade of the Jewish Museum in Gothenburg. He was convicted of incitement to racial hatred and unlawful threats. ^[3]

In 2011, Park was arrested for a collage poster depicting an Afro-Swede^[4] student activist naked and in chains along with text saying "Our negro slave has run away", and the activist's personal contact information. Park singled out the student activist for reporting a student party with people in blackface. Park was convicted of defamation and racial agitation, and given a suspended sentence, fined, and ordered to pay damages.^[5]

In 2014, Park was arrested at the opening of an exhibition of his collage posters, and was sentenced to 6 months in jail for incitement to racial agitation and defamation, and ordered to pay a total of 60,000 kronor ($8,700) in damages to four people depicted in his pictures.^[6] Additionally, the court ordered nine of his works destroyed.^[7]

In 2018 Park was sentenced to three months jail for publicly using racial slurs on social media and alleging rape culture was common among immigrants. The judges dismissed his claim someone else used his social media account without his knowledge as "far-fetched".^[8] The sentence was later increased to four months by an appeals court.^[9]

In 2021 Dan Park was featured in an exhibition at the CSW museum in Warsaw in Poland.^[10] At his arrival to the museum he was filmed by activists who was standing outside protesting, one of them holding up a mirror with the words "I hope you are not looking at a fascist" which made several visitors angry, trying to explain that the exhibition is about freedom of expression and anti-fascism. Dan Park is asked by an activist if he is a Nazi, to which he answers "no, I am a street artist" and "what do you mean by Nazism?" and "I think everyone should have freedom of speech, even Nazis". He explains to a smaller group of older activists that he has visited Auschwitz and he shows them his fake Auschwitz tattoo to which they respond "shame on you". During the exhibition, Park refused to answer people's questions about whether he sympathized with Nazism or not, but he said quickly that he supports "free speech for everyone", including "Nazis and Muslims". Later on he was asked if he has sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust to which he replied that he "was not born back then" and that he "feels sympathy for people today" and that there is a Holocaust today for the animals because people eat meat and drink milk (Park is known to be a vegan).^[11]

When interviewed by the Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR), a violent Nazi group, founded in 1997. The organisation seeks to overthrow democracy and glorifies Hitler. In US the organisation is classified as a terrorist group, in 2015, Dan Park describes himself as “nationalist”, a term used by the Swedish white supremacist movement to describe itself. In 2016 and 2017, he took part in demonstrations organised by the Nordic Resistance Movement, and in 2018 he posted a photo on He posted a photo on Twitter of a ballot paper on which he had ticked Vera Oredsson, of the Nordic Resistance Movement. He has also been a member of The National Democrats. A far-right party formed in 2001 following a split within the Sweden Democrats.

Park himself insists that his works are not racist, but a satiric commentary on current events and against political correctness in Sweden. Park is mainly notable for the intense public debate about freedom of speech that his case and works have generated, especially in Denmark, where his works have been exhibited in the Parliament building.^[12]

In an opinion published by Konstnärernas Riksorganisation (The National Organization of Artists), Swedish art critic Robert Stasinski does not believe Park's images can qualify as art as it is not possible to defend that "they are open to multiple possibilities of interpretation" and neither Park nor his exhibitors have tried to give the images any broader artistic context. He concludes that that is "not a sign that Dan Park is a bad or undeveloped artist, it is probably a sign that he never wanted to be one."^[13]

Artist Lars Vilks, who created controversy with his drawings of Mohammed, calls Parks a defender of the freedom of expression.^[2]

Art journalist Øyvind Strømmen said that Park's street art often conveys a message of far-right extremism and that Parks is at best a poser and provocateur, but likely worse than that.^[2]