METTINGEN.- Magical Women brings together artistic positions from the 20th and 21st centuries that engage with magic, the occult, and spiritual practices from feminist and decolonial perspectives. The exhibition examines how artists mobilize the magical as a means of questioning social norms, gendered power structures, and culturally embedded systems of belief.

Figures such as witches, priestesses, seers, and ritual practitioners have shaped imaginaries of femininity across centuries and cultures. These figures oscillate between fascination and fear, empowerment and demonization. Historically, they have served as projection surfaces through which patriarchal societies defined deviance, otherness, and control. Magical Women addresses these ambivalences by foregrounding artistic practices that reclaim and reconfigure the symbolic charge of the magical.

Long dismissed as superstition or as incompatible with rational modernity, spiritual and esoteric practices have nonetheless persisted within art as subterranean forms of knowledge. In recent decades, artists have increasingly connected magical thinking with feminist, activist, and anti-colonial strategies. What was once marginalized as irrational acquires renewed political urgency—not as belief, but as method: a way of producing alternative epistemologies, embodied knowledge, and speculative futures.

The exhibition highlights how contemporary and historical artists draw on magic not as illustration but as practice—through ritualistic gestures, mythological references, performative strategies, and the invocation of ancestral or hybrid belief systems. Their works destabilize fixed notions of identity, challenge binaries of reason and imagination, and open spaces for re-reading histories of the body, sexuality, and gender.

Magical Women asks how narratives change when seen through feminist and intersectional perspectives shaped by multiple cultural lineages. How can magic function as a tool of resistance, self‑empowerment, and refusal? And how might artistic practices invent new forms of meaning-making beyond dominant systems of value?

Artists: Myrlande Constant, Cordula Ditz, Mary Beth Edelson, Bev Grant / W.I.T.C.H., Vivian Greven, Rebecca Horn, Ana Mendieta, Zanele Muholi, Wangechi Mutu, Rosana Paulino, Paloma Proudfoot, Gillian Wearing, Portia Zvavahera

An exhibition catalogue, published by HIRMER Publishers, will be released in February 2026 in German, English, and Dutch. In addition to a foreword and an extensive essay on the exhibition and the project Magical Women, it will include in‑depth texts on the 13 artistic positions.

Curator: Birte Hinrichsen