The international group exhibition Radical Hope examines how artists from modernity to the present day have approached the theme of worker resistance – documentarily, poetically, critically, radically, in solidarity and from personal experience.
In the early twentieth century, art brought working-class struggle against social injustice into focus. From the 1960s, labour struggles influenced artistic practice when artists themselves went on strike. And beyond the realm of art, resistance against working conditions has, to the present, generated impressive images and practices that move in step with global developments.
Gelsenkirchen is also home to a feminist chapter in the history of worker resistance. In the early 1980s, female workers fought for equal pay, thereby becoming part of a European movement which also included the campaign ‘Wages for Housework’ initiated by feminist artists in Italy. Both positions feature in the exhibition, which highlights various artistic perspectives and practices within the labour movement and at the same time looks at the manifold overlaps between different aesthetics of protest 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