Ines Doujak: Living on Air

14. Juni 2026 – 13. September 2026

Update: New Date – HOPE AGAINST HOPE Parade

The artistic parade HOPE AGAINST HOPE, originally scheduled for the end of June, had to be postponed due to the extreme heatwave.

We are delighted to invite you to the new date:

HOPE AGAINST HOPE

Artistic Parade by Ines Doujak

Sunday, 30 August 2026

4:00 pm Meeting point at Neumarkt (Assembly & Costume Preparation)

5:00 pm Start of the parade through the city of Arnsberg (Approx. 2 hours)

From 7:00 pm Performance, music and gathering in the garden of Kunstverein Arnsberg

With flags, animal sculptures, costumes, music, and performative interventions, the parade connects the exhibition with the public space, transforming the city into a moving image of hope, care, and resistance.

Everyone is warmly invited to participate—by carrying, walking, singing, organising, or simply by joining us.

The exhibition Von Luft Leben remains on view until 13 September 2026. We warmly invite you to visit the exhibition and to join us for the artistic parade HOPE AGAINST HOPE on 30 August. The exhibition and parade together explore questions of ecology, solidarity, and collective imagination through sculpture, performance, film, and public intervention.

With *LIVING ON AIR*, the Kunstverein Arnsberg is presenting a solo exhibition by the artist Ines Doujak.

How can art bring people together? We believe that art should have the opportunity to bring people together and create new visions of coexistence. Ines Doujak’s works are complex and interconnected, infusing beauty with a spirit of playfulness and joy. Despite the omnipresence of violence and the failure of a globalized world, Doujak continues to find hope in shared discourse. In the spirit of political satire, she combines grotesque, subcultural aesthetics with intimate narratives to expose patriarchal power structures and their entanglements with capital. Her works are unsettling, yet remain open to ambivalence and unexpected connections.

Since the 1990s, Doujak has been creating a body of work comprising collages, sculptures, performances, and films that explores the impact of human activity on the Earth, ecology, and microbiology. In doing so, she combines scientific research with humor, exaggeration, and a visual language that is often striking.

The exhibition unfolds as a spatial choreography: visitors move through a sequence of situations in which film, sculpture, and text-based works coalesce into condensed states. Between collective ecstasy, visual excess, and institutional order, a dramaturgy emerges that addresses perception, the body, and political systems in equal measure.

The exhibition opens with a darkened room in which the film *Masterless Voices* (2014), created in collaboration with John Barker, unfolds as a polyphonic musical poem. The film traces the roots of Carnival back to patterns of exploitation, labor, and trade, but also to rebellion and joy. Here, Doujak combines her sculpturally expressive visual language with her fascination for the joyful power of public parades and collective rituals. Subsequently, objects and collages coalesce into a multi-layered visual landscape. Historical botanical and medical depictions merge with body fragments and plant elements to form hybrid figures. The series Geistervolk (since 2015) refers to global circulations of knowledge, disease, and power and questions the supposed neutrality of scientific classification systems. Recurring sculptural figures permeate the exhibition and appear in transitional spaces and thresholds. They observe, intervene, or evade clear-cut roles, connecting the individual situations into an open narrative.

An integral part of the exhibition is the parade HOPE AGAINST HOPE (ongoing since 2023), which connects the exhibition space with the urban environment. It highlights the struggles of activists around the world resisting land dispossession and environmental destruction, demonstrating how collective action can emerge from situations of apparent powerlessness.

The title HOPE AGAINST HOPE refers to Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir Hope Against Hope. It evokes a form of hope that persists even under the most difficult circumstances—not as certainty, but as a shared practice of solidarity, care, and collective action.

The parade will take place on Sunday, 30 August 2026.

4:00 pm – Meeting point at Neumarkt (Assembly & Costume Preparation)
5:00 pm – Start of the parade (approx. 2 hours)
From 7:00 pmr – Performance, music and gathering in the garden of Kunstverein Arnsberg.

Die Parade bewegt sich entlang der Ruhr durch die Stadt – ein fließender Körper aus Stimmen, Bildern und Klängen. Eine Trage mit Hyäne und Rabe, Fahnen und kostümierte Performer*innen durchziehen den Raum, eine Versammlung jenseits des Menschlichen, vielstimmig, widerspenstig, wach. Lieder heben an, eigens geschrieben, eigens komponiert. Gemeinsam mit lokalen Gruppen entsteht ein Moment von Öffentlichkeit: ein Innehalten im Fluss, ein kollektives Fragen. Was kann werden? Was gilt es zu verteidigen? Und wie wollen wir leben? Wir freuen uns über alle, die mittragen, mitgehen, mitsingen, organisieren oder unterstützen möchten.

The exhibition and parade are funded by the Kunststiftung NRW and the City of Arnsberg.

BIOGRAPHY

Ines Doujak has presented her work at the following institutions and exhibitions, among others:
 Lentos Art Museum Linz (2025, 2018), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2025), Kunsthaus Wien (2021), Liverpool Biennial (2021), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2020), Bergen Assembly (2019), Centro de Iniciativas Culturales de la Universidad de Sevilla (2018), steirischer herbst (2018), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018), Belvedere Vienna (2018), Dhaka Art Summit (2018), Para Site Hong Kong (2018), Bunkier Sztuki Krakow (2017), Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (2016), MACBA Barcelona (2015), Kyiv Biennial (2015), São Paulo Biennial (2014), Royal College of Art, London (2013), Busan Biennale (2012), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010), and documenta 12 (2007). In 2022, she received the Austrian Art Prize for Visual Arts.