Longing for Trust / On Trust in Art

                                                                                                                  deutsch/German
November 8, 2026 to March 7, 2027

Trust functions as an invisible and connection in personal relationships as well as in society as a whole. It is an elemental force wherever knowledge and uncertainty meet, in private relationships as well as within the structures of a globalised society. The exhibition Longing for Trust. On Trust in Art at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop explores this fragile phenomenon through the perspective of visual art.

Longing for Trust brings together works by international artists dating from the late 1950s to the present who address, call for, or critically question trust. Thus, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on trust, its prerequisites, implications, and manifestations, whether in the intimate dialogue between artwork and viewer or in an engagement with systems of political power and control. The selected works encourage visitors to explore the idea of trust as something both ubiquitous and highly specific, and to consider its different forms and meanings. In doing so, the exhibition approaches trust not as a static state but as a dynamic process whose necessity and vulnerability have repeatedly played a central role in contemporary art.

With works by:
Abramović & Ulay, Alice Creischer, Thomas Demand, Gauri Gill, Hans Haacke, Martin Kippenberger, Koizumi Meiro, Lee Mingwei, Cristiana Cott Negoescu, Yoko Ono, Trevor Paglen, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Julia Scher, Shimabuku, Andreas Siekmann, Rajesh Vangad.

The exhibition is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the Egon Bremer Foundation, and the Ministry of Culture of Taiwan. WDR 3 is the cultural partner.