Öffentliche Führung: Radikale Hoffnung. Kunst und Arbeitskampf

The international group exhibition Radical Hope traces how artists from modernism to the present day have addressed labor struggles - documentarily, poetically, critically, radically, in solidarity and from their own experiences.

At the beginning of the 20th century, art focused on the struggle of the working class against social grievances. From the 1960s onwards, labor struggles had an impact on their own artistic practice when artists themselves went on strike. Even beyond art, resistance to labor continues to generate impressive images and practices that are constantly adapting to global developments.

In Gelsenkirchen, this also includes a feminist chapter of the labor struggle: women workers fought for equal pay here in the early 1980s and thus became part of a Europe-wide movement that also included the "Wages for Housework" campaign initiated by women artists in Italy. Both positions are part of the exhibition, which shows different artistic perspectives and practices of the labor struggle and at the same time focuses on the diverse overlaps between protest aesthetics in art and everyday life.

Artists: Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Claire Fontaine, Jeremy Deller Milli Gandini, Nicolás Guagnini, Käthe Kollwitz, Lee Lozano, Anna Malagrida & Mathieu Pernot, Irène Mélix, Gustav Metzger, Malgorzata Mirga-Tas, Jean-Luc Moulène, Mariuccia Secol, Selma Selman, Takis (Panayiotis Vassilakis), Nicole Wermers