Anna Witt’s solo exhibition Radical optimism presents new works exploring radical hope as both an emancipatory force and a strategy for navigating crisis and social change.

At the centre of the exhibition is the two-channel video installation Nights of labour. The work positions dreaming as a deeply personal, visionary mode of imagination that serves as a crucial precondition for societal transformation. For the project, Witt invited a group of people to gather and dream within the former industrial hall of the Hydra Werke in Berlin, a space poised between its industrial past and the pressures of gentrification. The camera moves gently across the stage-like setting of carpets and furniture, capturing the participants’ faces as they lie in quiet concentration, imagining their hopes for the future. Daydreaming emerges as both an intimate and collective experience. The camera moves gently across the stage-like setting of carpets and furniture, capturing the participants’ faces as they lie in quiet concentration, imagining their hopes for the future. Daydreaming emerges as both an intimate and collective experience. In the second video channel, the dreams and ideas articulated by the group return as voiceovers. We encounter the same space; however, it now appears deserted and gradually disintegrating.

The work draws inspiration from Jacques Rancière’s non-fiction book Nights of labor, which tells the story of 19th-century workers who met at night to articulate their dreams, hopes, and utopian visions of another society as a form of resistance to the roles ascribed to them. Witt translates this gesture into the present and asks: Which spaces exist for imagining futures within a post-industrial, hypercapitalist society that often feels hopeless?

In her series Crushed and melted, Witt extends this inquiry to the sphere of digital intimacy, combining textile collages encased in acrylic glass with an ASMR-inspired sound layer. The works address the idea of digital care communities and reflect on the fragile relationship between destruction and care, digital intimacy and emotional exhaustion. While Crushed and melted – Running away traces the dream of escape, Crushed and melted – Cruel optimism takes its title from Lauren Berlant’s eponymous concept, which describes the paradoxical attachment to outdated notions of the good life.

Witt continues this exploration in her text-based work Survival of the softest, conceived as a plea for the critical power of gentleness.

In Radical optimism, Witt demonstrates how dreaming, as a collective act, can open up social imagination and constitute an active, shared practice of shaping possibilities. By creating spaces in which people can share and articulate their thoughts, she lends a voice both to the participating individuals and to us, one that reaches beyond the here and now and renders tangible the imagination of another, more human future.

Special thanks to the participants of Nights of labour: Anita Arora, Atif Muhammad, Jenna Sintic, Khalil Said, Khan Yahya, Mary Serena Brown und Rene Sotona.