Hidden History – Facets of Subculture in Frankfurt Rhine-Main
18.04.2026 — 17.05.2026
Opening: 17 April 2026, 6 pm
Night of the Museums: 25 April 2026, 7 pm – 1 am (Hip Hop Night with Janina Jackson, Dascha Reimt, Gunnpassion, Momma Rose and DJ Raenah)
Annette Gloser (feat. Silke Thoss), Die Schmiere, Hannibal Tarkan Daldaban, Heiner Blum, Honji Wang, Labelstore, Leonard Kahlcke, Oguz Sen, Rushy Diamond, Schwarzi
The Frankfurter Kunstverein invites the Diamant / Museum for Urban Culture, Offenbach to the Steinernes Haus at Römerberg. Developed through close collaboration, the project unfolds as a four-week cooperation featuring numerous actions, activations, and opportunities for participation.
Hidden History is more than an exhibition. It presents spaces of documentation and reflection on historical and contemporary positions of subversive and subcultural activity through installations, interactive environments, visual wall newspapers, collaborative wall drawings, tape art, performances, and video installations.
Which actors and activities have shaped the scene in Frankfurt–Offenbach–Rhine-Main in recent years? And how do they continue to influence the cultural fabric of the city today?
Culture is usually transmitted through lasting images and texts. Ephemeral and undocumented practices circulate through oral histories, myths, and stories, gradually fading and disappearing over time. This is not only true for distant cultures but also for our own age of information.
The recent cultural history of our region has not been shaped solely by institutions and forms of high culture, along with their networks and publics. Although certain aspects of subculture occasionally enter the cultural pages, beneath the surface there remains a vibrant culture of the street and the urban realm—often below the threshold of what is formally documented, yet highly influential within specific scenes.
Hidden History takes a look behind the scenes of the city and offers glimpses into a cultural sphere that remains hidden from many. This culture, too, has its masters, legends, and masterpieces. In Hidden History, we can discover them together.
The exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein expands the cultural field of perception. Curated by Heiner Blum—who has actively fostered and made visible creative potential for decades—and developed in collaboration with the Kunstverein’s team, the project creates a lively and open platform for cultural research and activity.
The Frankfurter Kunstverein invites visitors to discover new perspectives and to participate playfully. A key component of Hidden History are performative events, lectures, guided tours, and concerts. For children and young people, an extensive workshop programme with artists from the exhibition offers opportunities to rediscover the city and its signs as a space of experience beyond digital habits, opening new analogue possibilities.
Over the course of four weeks, the Frankfurter Kunstverein transforms into a living archive of urban culture—searching for the history of the future.
To encourage visitors to return and experience the exhibition as well as the many performances, workshops, and special events multiple times, the Frankfurter Kunstverein offers reduced admission throughout the exhibition period: €5 per visit. Participation in events or guided tours during a visit is included. For more information, please read here.
Exhibition course
Annette Gloser
Annette Gloser opens the exhibition Hidden History at the Frankfurter Kunstverein with her installation Sierretta Nevada. Gloser has been one of the central protagonists of Frankfurt’s off-scene from the early 1990s to the present day. She is a pioneer in creating ever new, unconventional, temporary spaces where people come together to produce and experience art and culture in a free and experimental context. Her work represents a practice that organizes art independently of institutional and commercial frameworks. Projects such as Galerie Fruchtig, Muttertag, and Gartner’s remain deeply embedded in the memory of Frankfurt’s art scene.
For Hidden History, Gloser has created an immersive spatial installation together with artist Silke Thoss. In the entrance area of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, they have constructed an environment featuring a caravan, camping furniture, and illuminated signs. The artists restage their 1990s action Sierretta Nevada Wanted!. The caravan functioned both as living space and exhibition venue, with which they travelled across Germany, stopping at subcultural sites to present the works of a fictional artist—artworks they themselves produced overnight. Constant departure and arrival, improvisation, and self-initiative were at the core of this performative journey.
Several monitors with video documentation complement the installation.
Leonard Kahlcke
Leonard Kahlcke’s work is visible from afar. Kontakt zur Straße (Contact with the street) is the shop sign of Atelier Leonard Kahlcke’s store at Neue Mainzer Straße 22, in Frankfurt. It showcases his own work as well as that of featured artists such as Dan Kwon, here with his piece Shoes Life.
As part of his interdisciplinary work in the fields of design and fine art, Leonard Kahlcke, has collaborated with internationally renowned artists and cultural institutions. In the early 2000s, he co-founded and owned a notorious nightclub in Frankfurt, whilst simultaneously stepping back from his career as a fine artist.
Kahlcke graduated from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach in 2005 and received several scholarships that enabled him to study at the London College of Fashion, where he completed a Master’s degree in ‘Fashion Footwear’ with distinction. For his graduation collection, he was awarded the Dato Jimmy Choo Award in 2012 and won the prize for Accessory Collection of the Year at International Talent Support 2013 in Italy.
As a designer of elegant handmade shoes, Kahlcke has found his own aesthetic; in fact, he has developed a highly personal approach – moving away from conservative traditionalism, the designer and last-maker contributes to the canon of classic shoe design whilst challenging tradition.
Mindful of the heritage associated with bespoke shoemaking, the Leonard Kahlcke studio opened in 2016 at Neue Mainzer Straße 22 in Frankfurt’s banking district.
Hannibal Tarkan Daldaban
Over the course of the exhibition, Hannibal Tarkan Daldaban activates the foyer on the first floor. Together with designer Luzi Gehrisch, he has developed a bar counter for Hidden History that, on two weekends, becomes a lively gathering place through a DJ set by Luzi Gehrisch and a reading by Dr. Atmo.
Daldaban himself activates the exhibition space through his presence, inviting visitors to listen to stories about events, personalities, and places of Frankfurt’s subculture in the 1990s and 2000s. Visitors can select stories from a menu. These narratives are based on Daldaban’s personal memories and are passed on orally as urban rumor throughout the exhibition. When the artist is not present, the stories can be experienced in video form.
The installation is complemented by a continuous stream of video material offering insight into Daldaban’s work over several decades.
For decades, Hannibal Tarkan Daldaban has been an internationally active promoter and DJ, and a key figure in Frankfurt’s club and event culture. Despite his international career, he has remained based in the Rhine-Main region, where many of his projects originated. At the core of his work is the encounter between people. He creates spaces—temporary environments for connection and shared experience. Many of these past events were never documented and exist only in the memories of those who were there, turning the exhibition into a place of exchange and shared memory.
Heiner Blum
The light-filled exhibition space on the first floor, with its panoramic windows overlooking Frankfurt’s old town, is dedicated to Heiner Blum. The Frankfurter Kunstverein invited Blum to co-develop Hidden History. Blum is the initiator of the Diamant / Museum of Urban Culture. Time and again, he identifies and activates vacant sites, dedicating them to the production and presentation of socio-cultural events.
Along the window façade, Blum presents the large-scale tape installation Flying Glass. Using packing tape, he creates a geometric composition across the glass surfaces, visible from the surrounding city. This work references a historical practice from the World Wars, when windows were taped to prevent shattering from bomb explosions. Beyond its protective function, this technique produced an aesthetic that expressed a desire for structure and beauty in times of crisis. Blum’s work establishes a bridge between past and present through a simple yet fundamental gesture.
Inside the exhibition space, Blum presents a photographic documentation of his largely unknown, street-related works from 1974 to the present, forming an expansive wall collage. Included are images from the project Labelstore (1997), realized together with Leonard Kahlcke. Under this fictional brand, they explored consumption, branding, and authenticity through the language and aesthetics of fashion. The campaign was photographed by Nadine Fraczkowski, with Anne Imhof appearing alongside other models as a face of the brand.
A current series by Blum consists of signs that call for shared responsibility in public space. He has repeatedly placed objects within the urban environment, including the green Pininfarina bicycle, which has become a carrier of collective memory.
Blum’s work consistently investigates public space and forms of cultural expression beyond institutional structures. His practice revolves around the question of who owns urban space and how it can be appropriated through creative intervention.
Die Schmiere
On the second floor, the exhibition reaches back to the immediate postwar period of the Steinerne Haus. The space is dedicated to the cabaret and satirical theatre Die Schmiere.
Founded in the 1950s by Rudolf Rolfs, Die Schmiere began as a travelling theatre company. With a wooden caravan, Rolfs toured across the country before stopping in 1950 at the Römerberg—then marked by war ruins—where he set up his theatre in front of the Steinerne Haus (today home to the Frankfurter Kunstverein), under the programmatic motto: “Die Schmiere – the worst theatre in the world”.
Shortly afterwards, Die Schmiere moved into the basement of the heavily damaged building, , where traces of its activity can still be seen today in the form of wall paintings. Performed on simple chairs and an improvised stage, it developed into an independent, highly political theatre that confronted post-war society with sharp satire and radical dissent, addressing issues such as nuclear policy and the peace movement. Rolfs deliberately operated without institutional funding in order to avoid censorship. In doing so, he established a practice that can be understood as an early form of subcultural production in Germany. As stated in the theatre’s 1985 chronicle: “If there is such a thing as ‘subculture’ in the Federal Republic, it began in 1950 with Die Schmiere.”
Today, Die Schmiere is continued by Rolfs’ daughter Effi B. Rolfs together with Matthias Stich and is based in the Carmelite Monastery.
The theatre’s leaflets, pamphlets and publications appear strikingly relevant today, while also expressing the enduring necessity of critical and independent artistic voices. Supporting forms of art that are accessible, innovative and bold has remained a central concern of the Frankfurter Kunstverein to this day.
During the Night of Museums on 25 April 2026, this space will become a stage for young female hip-hop artists from the Rhine-Main region.
Schwarzi
The third floor is dedicated to Schwarzi, a key figure in Frankfurt’s skateboarding subculture. Since the early 1990s, he has been among those who claimed the brutalist concrete space of the Hauptwache and transformed it into a central meeting point for the German skate scene.
For the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Schwarzi translates the codes and aesthetics of skate culture into the exhibition space. He incorporates formal and chromatic elements drawn from the urban environment of the Hauptwache. The colors green and red, taken from the station’s orientation system, function as collective memory markers within the city.
These visual codes also inform the T-shirt and skateboard designs of his label Hauptwache 2.0. Together with a custom obstacle, Schwarzi presents boards and apparel in the exhibition, attempting to transfer urban subculture into an institutional context.
Oguz Sen and Honji Wang
The final room of the exhibition parcours is dedicated to the artist and activist Oguz Sen and choreographer and performer Honji Wang. For the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Sen and Wang have jointly developed a participatory work at the intersection of drawing and performance. La La Land – Aufhören anzufangen is conceived as an open system, sustained by collective participation and continuous transformation.
Over several weeks, a large-scale wall drawing takes shape in the space, developed collaboratively by different groups. Participants include people with experiences of addiction, people experiencing homelessness, individuals with migration backgrounds, as well as children and young people in care. Each contributes their own experiences, perspectives and forms of expression.
The process follows a simple principle: each group continues what others have begun. Drawings are added to, overlaid or extended—forming a collective image that has no fixed end.
In parallel, Sen and Wang develop a performance that activates the space together with students from the Rudolf Koch School in Offenbach and dancers Caterina Politi and Marco Di Nardo. Without a fixed choreography, movement emerges from presence, encounter and situation. Performers and participants share the space on equal terms—between action and stillness, decision and openness.
The work creates a temporary, democratic space in which artistic production becomes tangible as a collective process. The concept is transferable: it can adapt to different places, groups and contexts while remaining consistent in its core—starting, stopping, continuing.
Oguz Sen is an activist working in public space, engaging in social and political discourse. Through his large-scale murals, he addresses political issues and social injustices. His well-known works include a mural at Frankfurt’s Osthafen dedicated to Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015 while fleeing Syria, as well as a 27-metre-long painting beneath the Friedensbrücke commemorating the victims of the racist attack in Hanau, realised together with the “Kollektiv ohne Namen”.
He shares a long-standing friendship with internationally acclaimed and award-winning dancer Honji Wang. Wang is a choreographer and performer shaped by hip-hop underground culture. Raised in Frankfurt as the daughter of Korean immigrants, she is a self-taught artist who developed her practice outside institutional frameworks. Her work emerges from lived experience, where movement becomes a form of knowledge—rooted in breakdance, martial arts, and the physical realities of discipline, labor, and resilience. Across her choreographic and performative work, Wang is interested in the body as a site of memory, contradiction, and transformation.
The performance can be experienced free of charge during the exhibition opening on 17 April at 7 pm and 9 pm, without registration. Tickets for a second performance on Saturday, 18 April at 7 pm are available via Eventbrite. A video documentation allows the performance to be experienced in the space beyond its live presentation.
Rushy Diamond
Throughout the entire building, the site-specific tape work (Tape Modern) by artist and activist Rushy Diamond unfolds. His practice emerges from the urban environment, using colored adhesive tape inspired by the functional visual systems of street markings.
For the Frankfurter Kunstverein, he has created a floor installation spanning all levels of the exhibition. Using white and neon-colored tape, he connects the different spaces and works in a structure resembling both a tree and a motherboard. This graphic system links all rooms and participants into a single network.
Raised around the Hauptwache and Zeil, Rushy Diamond became known through his interventions in public space. In 2022, invited by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, he created a large-scale tape intervention at the Hauptwache, prompting public reflection on the future of the square.
For decades, his practice has functioned as a creative act of resistance. Through interaction with diverse communities, he activates public spaces and reclaims them as shared urban environments.
