Program 2026: What does it mean to be human?

In its 2026 program, Kunstverein Arnsberg brings together artistic practices that explore states of transition, collision, memory, and collective transformation. Through three solo exhibitions, a public installation, and a parade, the program reflects on how human existence is shaped across geographies, bodies, political systems, and ecological realities.

Extending from the exhibition spaces into the public sphere, the program opens spaces where personal and collective histories intersect and where artistic experience becomes a way to reflect on how we inhabit the world with others.

Viron Erol Vert: The Colliding Ones
Exhibition, March 1–May 31, 2026

The first exhibition of 2026 is a solo exhibition by Viron Erol Vert. His artistic practice deals with the inner states of being human: with transitions, closeness and distance, and with the question of how individuals relate to one another. Painting forms the core of the exhibition and is expanded through objects, drawings, sound, and spatial installation.

Movement and Anatolian-Greek mythology are recurring points of departure in Vert’s work, creating connections between geographies, cultures, and temporalities. The exhibition is conceived as a spatial sequence of passages and thresholds. Its title refers to the Symplegades, the moving rocks at the entrance to the Black Sea in Greek mythology, which collide and destroy everything attempting to pass between them. Yet collision here also means encounter, overlap, and transformation.

Viron Erol Vert: Colours Between Earth and Sky

Public Textile Installation, May 29–September 30, 2026

As an extension of The Colliding Ones into public space, Vert presents the large-scale textile installation Colours Between Earth and Sky on Arnsberg’s historic Neumarkt. Suspended above the square like a floating canopy of color, textile bands transform the site into an atmospheric space of movement, light, shadow, and shifting perception. Focusing on gradients, intermediate tones, and transitions between colors, the work reflects on public memory, coexistence, and historical transformation.

Ines Doujak: Living on Air

Exhibition, June 14–September 13, 2026

Ines Doujak’s works are complex, interconnected, and contaminate beauty with a spirit of playfulness and joy. Despite pervasive violence and the failures of a globalized world, Doujak continues to find hope in collective forms of speaking, gathering, and resistance. Her practice brings together scientific research, political satire, and grotesque imagery to examine how power structures shape bodies, environments, and social relations.

At the center of the exhibition is the ongoing series Ghost Peoples, in which botanical and medical illustrations merge into hybrid figures reflecting on colonial histories, disease, and systems of classification. This investigation becomes tangible in the newly developed installation Animal Process, where visitors enter a courtroom-like environment centered around a pig put on trial. The work reflects on scapegoating, structural violence, and speciesism while questioning systems of exclusion and responsibility.

Ines Doujak: Hope against Hope
Parade, June 28, 2026

An integral part of the exhibition is the public parade Hope against Hope, developed together with local participants, activists, and residents. Moving through the city of Arnsberg, the parade becomes a collective artistic action against capitalist and patriarchal exploitation and makes visible struggles against environmental destruction, land dispossession, and systems of oppression.

Kathleen Bomani: What the Fiber Remembers

Exhibition, September 27–November 15, 2026

What the Fiber Remembers is the first institutional solo exhibition by Tanzania-born, Berlin-based artist Kathleen Bomani. Bringing together film, installation, and virtual reality, the exhibition investigates how colonial histories of extraction continue to shape environments, bodies, and systems of perception in the present.

Centered around the material history of sisal, transferred through colonial botanical systems from the Yucatán Peninsula to East Africa, Bomani’s work connects plantation economies with questions of memory, labor, and everyday life. The project also includes workshops with local schools centered around storytelling and material memory.

The project by Viron Erol Vert is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Hochsauerlandkreis, Sparkasse Mitten im Sauerland, and the City of Arnsberg.
The project by Doujak is funded by Kunststiftung NRW and the City of Arnsberg.

For press inquiries please contact presse@kunstverein-arnsberg.de. 

Artistic Direction / Curation: Pauline Doutreluingne.