In collaboration with artist Mischa Kuball, Weltkunstzimmer Düsseldorf is concluding its year-long project space_relations with the final presentation How to make friends. Over the course of 2025, the project developed into an open laboratory in which more than 30 artists, theorists, and cultural practitioners from various disciplines came together to test models of collaboration, temporary communities, and joint authorship.

space_relations explores the interrelationships between urban space, society, and artistic practice. Throughout 2025, the project brought together artists, theorists, and the public in site-specific interventions, performances, and discursive formats. As its final chapter, How to make friends celebrates the experimental nature of the project with new models of collaboration, interdisciplinary encounters, and the initiation of networks in the city and beyond.

How to make friends brings together works and interventions that explore the concept of space as relational practice: How do we design spaces together? How can shared spaces promote encounters and cooperation? How do artistic strategies redefine public and institutional spaces?

The participating artists in How to make friends are: Elvire Bonduelle, Rada Boukova, Bidisha Das, Daniela Georgieva, Wanda Koller, Robin Meier, David JongSung Myung, Daria Nazarenko & Moïse Fall, Yoshinari Nishiki, Denise Ritter, Mohamad Moe Sabbah, Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber, Luca Thiel, Louretta & Dr. Schmitt.

How to make friends invites visitors to engage, participate, and reflect on the forms of togetherness and relationships we can create within and outside institutional spaces.

space_relations was developed together with Mischa Kuball, the Weltkunstzimmer team, and a team of international curators. It connects art institutions, urban spaces, and the public in an open laboratory that explores new forms of collaboration and participation.
With the open, year-round project space_relations, Weltkunstzimmer and Mischa Kuball want to consciously give space to artistic processes that negotiate and reflect on our pluralistic community in a socially challenging and polarizing time. In doing so, they question how cooperation can succeed and what conditions are necessary for it.

© Pia Koop

Kindly supported by