14/03/2026 – 10/05/2026,

hell is other people (if you're lucky): Chloe Chignell, Ewa Dziarnowska, Dorota Gawęda + Eglė Kulbokaitė, Liina Magnea, Abdoul Karim Martens + Dominik Sartor, Sinaida Michalskaja, Alexandra Sheherazade Salem, Gaia Vincensini

, Stadthausgalerie Münster

Kunsthalle Münster and Residence NRW⁺ are pleased to present hell is other people (if you’re lucky), an exhibition that understands the public as an affective field, shaped by the ongoing work of being in relation.

Borrowing its title from the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and her book The Inconvenience of Other People (2022), the project takes everyday frictions as its starting point: irritations, (un)solicited glances and touches, misunderstandings and irritations that structure everyday coexistence. Rather than smoothing over these tensions or ignoring inequalities, the exhibition asks how we might stay with them and what forms of attachments and collective imaginations can emerge under these conditions—and what kind of public space we need.

The Stadthausgalerie is situated in the inner courtyard of the historic town hall in Münster’s city centre. It functions simultaneously as an election office and an exhibition space—a hybrid site between democratic infrastructure and artistic presentation. The installed works reflect on the increasing privatization and commodification of public space. Behind the glass facade of the Stadthausgalerie, ceramic works by Gaia Vincensini look out onto the city with irony and precision. Motifs of locks, clocks, crosses and chains reference systems of belief, finance and protection. They evoke promises of stability upon which capitalist systems and privatized public spaces are built.

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė transform the inside of the Stadthausgalerie into a semi-transparent architecture of enclosures and reflections. With their large-scale, translucent work, Enclosure (Lower bound of a landscape) (2023), they blur distinctions between interior and exterior, artwork and surrounding. The monumental installation, consisting of several printed chiffon panels, refers to the historical enclosure of land while drawing parallels to contemporary forms of digital segregation. Yield II (2021) presents a metal flower that oscillates between a nostalgic vanity mirror and a surveillance camera, its gaze dependent on the movement of visitors and confronting them with their own reflection.

Alexandra Sheherazade Salem contributes with a poetic work that mobilizes language and scent to explore the entanglement of spirituality and economies of profit. Developed specifically for the exhibition, her piece unfolds as a sensorial meditation on belief, exchange, and the architectural structures of the space. For her site-specific work, she draws on practices of spiritual cleansing and fumigation.

In dialogue with the space and its function as an election office, Sinaida Michalskaja’s large-scale work HANNAH (Deutsche Wärme) recalls the necessity of civic engagement. Referencing the tradition of monumental portraiture, it depicts political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). By overlaying two tapestries, her smile appears almost physically present. Michalskaja’s video work SOPHIE is dedicated to another public figure, the transfeminist electropop musician SOPHIE (1986–2021). Drawing on the track Forever, the work translates the lyrics into a visual rhythm and brings the struggle for bodily self-determination into focus.

With three performative works by Chloe Chignell, Ewa Dziarnowska and Liina Magnea as well as an intervention in the public space by Abdoul Karim Martens and Dominik Sartor, the exhibition opens a space for narratives of moving bodies and temporary gatherings.

Curators: Anneliese Ostertag + Antoine Simeão Schalk