TRICKSTER

Westwerk e. V., Admiralitätstraße 74, 20459 Hamburg

June 19 to 27, 2026

Opening reception: June 18, 2026, 7 pm

Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 2-7 pm

Westwerk e.V. presents the exhibition TRICKSTER as part of its 40th anniversary program under the guiding theme of complicities.

The exhibition brings together ten international positions in contemporary art: three artists from the United States, one from Switzerland, and six from Germany, four of whom are based in Hamburg. Within this constellation, a transatlantic dialogue unfolds, connecting local with global perspectives.

At the center of this exhibition is the trickster as archetypal figure of subversion, cunning, and deception. As the bringer of both luck and tragic fate, as both clever creator and destructive force, the trickster embodies sacred change. In European visual and narrative traditions, the trickster appears among other forms as Hermes to the Ancient Greeks and as a fox in fables and tales; in Indigenous North American storytelling as Coyote, Rabbit or Raven—a divine and contradictory figure who leads through detours, undermines established orders, overthrows fate, and provokes insight. The trickster is familiar to us and yet remains deeply unsettling: a figure who destabilizes norms, exposes truths, and compels transformation.

Against the backdrop of digital disinformation, political polarization, economic instability, and ecological crises, this figure gains renewed relevance. Trickster-like dynamics shape media, power structures, and social processes today. The exhibition asks: How do seduction, manipulation, and performative masking operate in the present moment? When do they undermine democratic structures, and where might they open spaces for resistance, self-empowerment, and renewal? What role do we ourselves play within these constellations of visibility and invisibility, shared responsibility and complicity?

The participating artists develop distinct and multilayered responses to these questions. Their works reveal mechanisms of deception and insight, investigate the productive potential of chaos, and illuminate the tension between destructive force and creative transmutation. In doing so, the exhibition creates a resonant space that renders both individual and collective processes visible and makes the figure of the trickster legible as a mirror of contemporary upheaval.

In the spirit of complicities, TRICKSTER understands itself as an open structure of relationships and negotiations, between artists, institution, and audience, inviting viewers not only to observe the ambivalent forces of the trickster, but to critically reflect upon them as part of our shared human condition.

Exhibiting artists: Molly Burt-Westvig, Nicolle Bussien, Colleen Francis Smith, Sanna Leone, Achilles P, Olivia von Pock, Janelle Rebel, Lilian Robl, Anne Schreiber, Simon Waßermann

Find a complete image list and floor plan in German here.