Further information will follow shortly.

The format And This is Us – Young Artists Based in Frankfurt is an invitation to take a sensory approach to the phenomena of our time through the perspective of young artists. Once again in 2027, the exhibition aims to capture and make visible the pulse and moods of each new generation.

The exhibition format has been generously supported from the outset by the Dr Marschner Foundation, whose commitment arose from the vision of a Frankfurt citizen to keep cultural life alive for the people of our city in the long term.

Curated by Beat Hächler (Director ALPS Swiss Alpine Museum, Bern), Gian Suhner (Filmmaker) and for the contemporary art by Franziska Nori (Director Frankfurter Kunstverein)

With Julie Edel Hardenberg

Opening: 18 June 2026, 5.30 p.m.

Greenland – Not For Sale – Kalaallit Nunaat Forever sets the beginning of a cycle of political exhibitions at Frankfurter Kunstverein extending until 2028. Through the means of visual inquiry and art, the major upheavals of our time are examined and points of rupture made visible.

This exhibition is a journey into a country surrounded by the Arctic Ocean, six times the size of Germany, and which in recent years has unwillingly become the focus of global powers. Its strategic position at the intersection of Canada, the U.S., Russia, and Europe has sparked desires for dominance over maritime routes and access to its vast natural resources. The country reflects all the geopolitical challenges currently affecting people in many regions of the world in similar ways: the consequences of global warming, the interests and growing lack of solidarity of transnational corporations at the expense of local economies. Rising tensions between states and citizens, as well as identity-political conflicts within societies, are intensifying. What do we know about the people of Greenland, about its nature, and about the interconnections between economy, environment, and culture? What do we know about the history of colonial violence? Which political forces lay claim to a land that longs for independence?

Greenland – Not For Sale – Kalaallit Nunaat Forever is an exhibition presented in collaboration with the ALPS Swiss Alpine Museum, Bern. Over the course of four years, striking panoramic images, intimate cinematic testimonies, and video interviews have been created. They offer a sensory journey into the kaleidoscopic narratives of a complex country and its people. For the first time in Germany, Julie Edel Hardenberg and her political art are being presented. This is the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to one of Greenland’s and Scandinavia’s most influential artists.

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 

Events and actions with/about Die Schmiere, Dr. Atmo (Amir Abadi), Elisa Garcon, Hannibal Tarkan Dalaban, Lobo Texas, Luzi Gehrisch, Mathias Weinfurter, Oskar von Miller Straße, Rushy Diamond 

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

Even from a distance, Leonard Kahlcke’s work Kontakt zur Straße (Contact with the Street) catches the eye of passers-by. In the entrance vestibule of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, he has installed his former shop sign from Neue Mainzer Straße 22. On the advertising cube, Kahlcke presents both his own works and those of selected artists, including Dan Kwon, represented here with Shoes Life.

With his early street-based artistic works, Leonard Kahlcke had a lasting impact on the scene. At a time shaped by debates around urban development and the appropriation of public space, he realised clandestine, subversive interventions in the city together with other actors. Today, Kahlcke employs a different kind of subversive and incisive language, through which he comments on and caricatures the economic power structures of the city and its art institutions.

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 traces a historical arc back to the immediate post-war period of the Steinernes Haus. This gallery is dedicated to the cabaret and satirical theatre Die Schmiere.

Founded in 1950 by Rudolf Rolfs, Die Schmiere was initially conceived as a travelling stage, with a wooden caravan intended to tour across the country—an idea that was never realised. During the years of economic recovery and reconstruction, the satirical theatre and literary cabaret instead settled in the Steinernes Haus (now home to the Frankfurter Kunstverein), adopting the motto: “Die Schmiere – the worst theatre in the world”.

The group moved into the cellar vaults of the heavily damaged building, where traces of their presence remain visible today in the form of wall paintings. Seated on simple chairs and lit by a single 100-watt light bulb, performances took place on an improvised stage. The theatre was independent and highly political, holding up a mirror to post-war society with striking irreverence and addressing topics such as nuclear policy and the peace movement through satire. 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 noted in the theatre’s chronicle published in 1985: “If there is such a thing as ‘subculture’ in the Federal Republic, it began in 1950 with Die Schmiere.”

Since 1990, Die Schmiere has been continued by Rolfs’s daughter Effi B. Rolfs and Matthias Stich, and is now based in the vaulted cellar of the Carmelite Monastery. The theatre’s leaflets, pamphlets and publications still feel strikingly relevant today, while at the same time expressing the enduring social necessity of intellectually alert, courageous and non-conformist art. Supporting accessible, innovative and bold artistic practices within the Steinernes Haus remains 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.

The room installation is complemented by a wall piece by Mathias Weinfurter. A series of transparent fence panels forms a grid in front of the existing drawing. Slight shifts and interruptions within the panels guide the eye across the wall and structure the visual space. Individual segments are partially blocked or framed. These mechanisms of protection and demarcation alter the conditions for continuing the drawing by restricting access and deliberately guiding possible interpretations.

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.

Curated by Franziska Nori, Anita Lavorano, Pia Seifüßl and Angel Moya Garcia

The ways in which people look at, perceive and represent the body are in constant flux. Art and science have always used images of the body to tell stories about the human condition. And with each passing epoch new images and interpretations of the body have emerged.

But why reflect on the body today? Do we not already know enough about it? We all have bodies. More than that: we are all bodies. The body can be observed from the outside and examined from within, measured and quantified. It can be pathologised and objectified, healed and cared for. Bodies are vulnerable entities. The vulnerability of the body is an existential condition of being human. Or is it merely a problem we seek to bring under control? Bodies are finite. And at the same time, bodies are political. The body is not solely a private matter; it is the site upon which world views, value systems and thus politics are played out. For vulnerability is unevenly distributed within society.

Contemporary artists express a transformed sense of corporeality, its reinterpretation and the call for a new image of humanity. Their works encounter spectacular objects from different contexts and eras: from the idealised depictions of the body in Archaic Greek art, through religious votive offerings as prayers for healing, to anatomical wax figures of the 18th century presented in Germany for the first time, and on to the latest images from medical research, in which we travel virtually through a beating heart.

The exhibition takes you on a journey through the history of body images, where the increasingly scientific gaze into the interior of our bodies continually shifts and redefines the question of who we are.

Exhibition course

The exhibition opens with a Kroisos Kouros statue. The two-metre-high male figure from the Archaic Greek period (530 BC) stands upright, his gaze directed into the distance. The statue comes from the Collection of Classical Antiquities and Sculpture Hall of the Goethe University Frankfurt and symbolises the ideal conception of the body. It represents less an individual body than a culturally regulated and codified idea of the ‘beautiful body’. In Greece at that time, the free adult man was the measure of all things and the centre of social and political life. He stood at the top of a strictly hierarchical order divided into classes and estates: women and slaves beneath him. The Kroisos Kouros thus marks the vanishing point of the exhibition, in which the image of the body stands as a symbol of a world view—one that later unfolds into ever more individual interpretations.

From the standardised, idealised body the path leads into the radical present: The Alternative Limb Project by London-based designer, artist and prosthetist Sophie de Oliveira Barata (* 1982, London, UK). On view are two of her many prostheses—two arms. These astonishing objects do not seek to reproduce a missing body part as faithfully as possible, rather, they expand its appearance and function through artistic interpretation, transforming the alternative limb into an empowering expression of personality. Here the body is no longer merely medically repaired or socially standardised—but becomes an opportunity for a new conception of the self.

The past and future of the anatomical gaze meet here. For the first time in Germany, the famous anatomical Venus (ca. 1782) by Clemente Susini (* 1754 Florence, IT; † 1814 Florence, IT) will be on view at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. The life-sized female figure lies like a sleeping beauty, with long real hair. Her eyes are closed, her head tilted back, yet her torso is slit open, revealing the inner organs layer by layer. This anatomical wax figure stands as a symbol of the Enlightenment, an era in which knowledge moved to the centre of human experience of the world. In the 18th century, the artist Clemente Susini developed a new form of representation between anatomical knowledge and artistic interpretation. In collaboration with the University of Bologna and its “Luigi Cattaneo” collection and the Museum of Palazzo Poggi, the exhibition Anatomy of Fragility also presents nine further spectacular anatomical wax sculptures. Additionally, Iris Fegerl’s film The Lady Anatomist powerfully tells the story of the anatomist and wax artist Anna Morandi Manzolini. She was the first woman to gain admission to the exclusively male domain of the university in the 18th century.

Juxtaposed with the anatomical wax figures, visitors can explore the inside of the body as a virtual experience. The London-based artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast has created an intense VR experience.  Evolver was created in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS in Bremen. Rarely accessible to the public, medical raw data such as full-body MRI scans, MRA examinations and blood flow data of a single person form the scientific basis of this artistic work.

Evolver begins with an audio meditation in English, as the voice of Cate Blanchett guides visitors into the calm of their own breathing and thus into the steadying of their own heartbeat. Afterwards, with VR headsets, they immerse themselves into the bloodstream, the chambers of the lungs and the pulsating heart. A fifteen-metre moving image projection allows viewers to immerse themselves in medical and artistic images of the body.

Additionally, participation in the interactive part of the installation can be booked in advance. Appointments are available every Thursday from 5 to 9 p.m., every Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., as well as on public holidays. Each virtual journey lasts 45 minutes. Appointments can be reserved here: calendly.com/frankfurterkunstverein.

The Frankfurter Kunstverein have sought collaboration with the University Hospital Frankfurt. From the collection of the Department of Dermatology, Venereology and Allergology at the Goethe University Frankfurt, lifelike wax models of skin diseases and injuries are on display. These so-called moulages are three-dimensional wax reproductions of body parts, created for medical training. Unlike the anatomical wax models of the Italian tradition, which depicted idealised and anonymous bodies, moulages preserve the exact likeness of a real, individual person. They are thus images of bodily fragments that bear the traces of a real human being and their unique history of suffering—and at the same time they form the basis for the transmission of medical knowledge.

In spatial juxtaposition, the South Korean artist Yein Lee (* 1988 Incheon, KR) presents five sculptures. Now based in Vienna, the artist resists the notion of the body as flawless, intact and perpetually functioning. Her sculptures depict life-sized, humanoid figures that, freed from their outer shells, reveal their inner structures. Lee constructs her sculptures from electrical cables, steel pipes, computer parts, but also from branches, twigs and found everyday objects. Her material is at once synthetic and natural. The result is fragile corporeal beings situated between technology and nature, whose open structures embody instability and change.

Votives are offerings that people present to higher powers in times of need. They are materialised prayers—petitions for healing and protection in times of suffering, or expressions of thanks for miraculous rescue and aid. This form of invocation of divine power and intercession has existed for thousands of years, virtually unchanged. Bound up with each votive is the life story of a person, whose plea is told through the gift in the form of the object. The exhibition Anatomy of Fragility presents 23 Etruscan terracotta votives from the Collection of Antiquities of the Chair of Classical Archaeology at Justus Liebig University Giessen. They come from the collection of the anatomist Ludwig Stieda, who acquired them in 1899 in what is now Isola Farnese, built on the ruins of the ancient city of Veii. They date largely from the late 3rd to the mid-2nd century BC and are among the earliest surviving testimonies of a religious practice that has continued across cultures for millennia.

Opposite them are objects from the collection of Hans and Benedikt Hipp from Pfaffenhofen. The holdings include votives dating back to the early 17th century, and on display are blood-red wax votives and their corresponding wooden moulds. In southern Germany, from the Baroque period onwards, votive offerings were predominantly made of malleable, organic beeswax. The properties of wax are directly linked to the fleshiness and vulnerability of the human body. The figures were cast in series from the same mould and many are visually identical, yet each individual object carries within it a personal story, a wish or an urgent hope.

In spatial dialogue with the votive offerings are five paintings by the Italian artist Chiara Enzo (* 1989 Venice, IT). Her central subject is the human body as the interface of all human condition of being-in-the-world. The small-format paintings are highly detailed. They depict body surfaces that are never intact or unblemished. Traces of injuries, interventions, epidermal reactions or imprints of what is absent become the motif. Enzo poses questions about the universal experiences of human existence: intimacy, vulnerability and illness, and how we create an idea of reality from perception.

A large-scale spatial installation by Agnes Questionmark (* 1995 Rome, IT) forms the conclusion of the exhibition. It brings together three life-sized sculptures and six wall pieces created specifically for the show. The artist’s point of departure is images of open-heart surgery. These are altered via digital and analogue means and overlaid with silicone or wax. As imposing wall panels, they recall the corporeality and fleshiness of the body’s inner spaces. At the centre of the room stand three life-sized sculptures: hybrid beings between an alien and a mythological water figure, half human, half animal. The foreign, the other, that society deems monstrous, is embodied in Questionmark’s work as lived states of in-betweenness. Agnes Questionmark points to the power of purely medical assessment, which fixes subjects, assigns gender and pathologises deviation. She appropriates clinical visual worlds and reshapes them, transforming her art into an act of self-empowerment—beyond binary categories of male and female, healthy and sick, human and non-human, fragile and resilient.

The exhibition embodies the Frankfurter Kunstverein’s programmatic approach, treating contemporary art and the sciences as parallel expressions of humanity’s drive for knowledge and search for meaning.

The project was carried out under the patronage of the Italian Consulate General in Frankfurt am Main.

We thank:

Italian Consulate General in Frankfurt: Massimo Darchini (Consul General), Silvia Bianchi (Vice Consul), Michele Santoriello (Cultural Office)

Goethe University Frankfurt: Prof. Dr. Enrico Schleiff (President), Prof. Dr. med. Bastian Schilling (Director of Department of Dermatology, Venereology and Allergology, University Hospital), Prof. Dr. Falk Ochsendorf, Thomas Koculak, Ilona Büttner and Andrea Steininger-Rusch (Department of Dermatology, Venereology and Allergology, University Hospital), Dr. Matthias Recke (Custodian of the Collection of Classical Antiquities and the Sculpture Hall), Prof. Dr. Anja Klöckner (Professor of Classical Archeology), Dr. Judith Blume (Coordinator of the Collections at Goethe University)

Justus Liebig University Giessen: Prof. Dr. Katharina Lorenz (President), Dr. Michaela Stark (Collection of Antiquities of the Chair of Classical Archaeology)

Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, University Museum Network: Prof. Dr. Giuliana Benvenuti (President), Prof. Dr. Stefano Ratti (Scientific referent of the Anatomical Wax Collection “Luigi Cattaneo”), Prof. Dr. Lucia Corrain (Scientific referent of the Museum Palazzo Poggi), Dr. Annalisa Managlia (Technical Coordinator), Dr. Cristina Nisi (Rights, Reproductions and loans); Daniele Angellotto (Restorer at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence)

Hans and Benedikt Hipp (Collection Hipp, Pfaffenhofen); Agnes Questionmark; Arturo Passacantando (Studio Agnes Questionmark); Zabludowicz Foundation, Co-financing production Agnes Questionmark; Pepe Baena Diví (Airas Wang de Lafée, Girona, Representation Agnes Questionmark); Chiara Enzo; Lorenzo Ciavaglia, Paolo Zani (Galleria Zero, Mailand Milan, Representation Chiara Enzo); Matteo Larice; Mariolina Bassetti; Mauro de Iorio (Collezione De Iorio, Italy); Stefano Menconi (MA COLLECTION Singapore); Yein Lee; Sophie de Oliveira Barata (The Alternative Limb Project); Marshmallow Laser Feast: Mike Jones (Head of Production, Partner), Emmanuel Adanlawo (Producer), Sarah Gamper-Marconi (Head of Studio), Louise Deschamps (Communications and Content Manager); Iris Fegerl; Bianka Hofmann (Head of Science Engagement, Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS); Dr. Wolfgang David (Director Archaeological Museum Frankfurt)

We thank our colleagues from the ‘Netzwerk Nachhaltige Kultur Frankfurt’ for their support:

Historisches Museum Frankfurt: Dr. Doreen Mölders (Director), Carolina Maddè (Exhibition and event management)
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt: Esther Schlicht (Deputy Director, Head of Exhibitions, and Curator), Christian Teltz (Technical Director), Andreas Gundermann (Head of Hanging team)
Städelmuseum: Dr. Philipp Demandt (Director), Sven Lubinus (Head of Exhibitions), Thorsten Knapp (Technical team)
Deutsches Ledermuseum Offenbach: Dr. Inez Florschütz (Director), Ralph Müller (Facilities technology), Yvonne Scholz (Event management)

For the fifth time since 2017, the Frankfurter Kunstverein is showing contemporary art from Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region with And This is Us 2025 – Young Artists Based in Frankfurt. The exhibition, which is curated and produced by the Frankfurter Kunstverein every two years, offers artists from the Städelschule, the Offenbach University of Art and Design and, for the first time, the Mainz Academy of Fine Arts a nationally visible stage. The focus is not on an overarching theme, but rather the participants are accompanied in the conception and realisation of their very own themes in order to enable them to produce new works on an institutional scale.

The format And This is Us – Young Artists Based in Frankfurt is an invitation to take a sensory approach to the phenomena of our time through the perspective of young artists. Once again in 2025, the exhibition aims to capture and make visible the pulse and moods of each new generation.

The exhibition format has been generously supported from the outset by the Dr Marschner Foundation, whose commitment arose from the vision of a Frankfurt citizen to keep cultural life alive for the people of our city in the long term.

With Heidi Bucher, Lawrence Malstaf, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Petra Noordkamp, Claudio Parmiggiani, Toni R. Toivonen and with exhibits from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”, the Natural History Museum of Vienna, the LWL-Museum of Natural History in Münster, Associazione Gibellina Parco Culturale and with Prof Dr Luciano Rezzolla, Institute for Theoretical Physics at Goethe University Frankfurt

Curated by: Franziska Nori, with scientific support from Anita Lavorano and Laura Perrone

The exhibition The Presence of Absence revolves around the theme of humankind’s endless confrontation with the idea of change and transience and their forms of representation in art. The title alludes to matter as a presence in which traces of the living are inscribed. This vital energy is powerful, yet fleeting.

Where do we come from? What is the origin of all matter on earth and in the infinity of the cosmos? What does it mean to recognise black holes in the centre of our galaxy, in which infinitely condensed matter creates a void and absence? What effects do natural events create that reshape the earth and change people’s lives with their power? And how do people deal with the existential need to face eternity in their finiteness? What myths and images do they create in order to connect with the spiritual? Is art a way of immortalising oneself in time?

These questions have shaped the imagination of us humans from prehistoric times to the present day. Ever since humans have existed on earth, they have invented symbols and signs to give form to their feelings, thoughts and knowledge, to leave traces in time and perhaps to connect with eternity.

Works by important contemporary artists enter into a dialogue with scientific exhibits from the fields of geology and astrophysics, with casts from Pompeii, with footprints of prehistoric people from the Laetoli site in present-day Tanzania and with replicas of prehistoric cave drawings of human ancestors. All exhibits refer to existential questions of being human in the dimensions of space and time. They explore the idea of traces of existence that are inscribed in matter.

With the exhibition The Presence of Absence, the Frankfurter Kunstverein is continuing its collaboration with the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research for the fourth time. Following Trees of Life (2019), Edmond’s Prehistoric Realm (2020) and Bending the Curve (2023), the Frankfurter Kunstverein has now created a show that invited science to ask fundamental questions. The collaboration arises from the ongoing discussions between Prof Franziska Nori, Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Prof Dr Andreas Mulch, Director of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt. In addition, we have been able to win over Prof Dr Luciano Rezzolla, from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt, to allow science and art to enter into an intensive dialogue as a common force of human thought and research.

We thank

Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt: Prof. Dr. Andreas Mulch (Director), Prof. Dr. Ottmar Kullmer (Head of the Palaeoanthropology Department), Dr. Thorolf Müller (Head of Curation), Stefanie Klein (Exhibition Office), Olaf Vogel (Geological Preparation); Institute for Theoretical Physics ITP, Goethe University Frankfurt: Prof. Dr. Luciano Rezzolla, Marie Cassing; Italian Consulate General in Frankfurt: Massimo Darchini (Consul General), Michele Santoriello (Cultural Office); Archeological Park of Pompeii: Dr. Gabriel Zuchtriegel (Director), Dr. Silvia Martina Bertesago, Anna Civale (Exhibitions and Education), Paola Sabbatucci (Restorer); Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”: Prof. Dr. Fabio Martini (Director), Dr. Lapo Baglioni; Natural History Museum of Vienna: Dr. Karin Wiltschke-Schrotta (Head of Department Anthropology), Dr. Margit Berner (Staff Scientists and Curator); LWL-Museum of Natural History, Münster: Dr. Lothar Schöllmann (Head of Palaeontology Collection), Daria Carobene (Collection Manager Palaeontology), Sabine Frahling (Administration); Alberto Stabile (Gibellina Heartquake VR), The Heidi Bucher Estate: Indigo Bucher, Mayo Bucher; Ischa Tallieu (Tallieu Art Office); Ingrid Nelson (Artist Liason Lehmann Maupin); Michele Casamonti (Tornabuoni Art); Federica Popoli, Abel Herrero (Studio Claudio Parmiggiani); Tiziana Peparini, Marco Fusi (Ars Movendi); Galerie Forsblom: Ilkka Tikkanen (Director), Suvi Pajunen (Registrar); Nelimarkka Foundation: Joonas Seeck (Chairperson), Carmen Vendelin-Iaukkanen (Director); Anna Hjorth-Röntynen (Director Sara Hildén Art Museum); Tommi Pätilä; Ville Tuppurainen; Tobias Becker and the students of the Institute of Art Education at the Justus Liebig University Giessen; Andrea Cortellessa; Dr. Wolfgang David (Director Archaeological Museum Frankfurt); Matthias Eichhorn; Paolo Ferri; Daniel Gilgen (studio gilgen); Florian Langhammer (Collectors Agenda); Fabio Macaluso; Kathrin Sündermann; Dr. Norbert Zimmermann (German Archeological Institute, Rome); C.H. Beck Verlag; Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH

In the exhibition Who has Power? Striking Bodies, the Frankfurter Kunstverein has invited two emerging Frankfurt-based artists, Gintarė Sokelytė and Sonja Yakovleva, to present their largest institutional solo shows so far. With powerful new works, they have created self-sufficient pictorial spaces in which the question of power is posed subversively—what power are bodies exposed to, and what power is exercised by bodies in public space?

Sonja Yakovleva has been creating monumental papercuts with exuberant pictorial compositions for years. She became known for her ironic pop-feminist motifs, which developed into a manifesto of self-empowered female physicality. In this current exhibition, she looks at class issues and power relations in an achievement-oriented society. Yakovleva caricatures the cult of the body, the obsession with beauty and the competitiveness of today’s fitness culture as symptoms of internalised norms. In her visual worlds, she stages and reveals the work performed on one’s own body as a means of dictating a compulsion to perform. As a counterpoint to this, Yakovleva examines labour as a necessity both for people and for the functioning of cities and society as a whole.

Who has Power? Striking Bodies is an invitation to take a sensual approach to contemporary phenomena through the works of Sonja Yakovleva and Gintarė Sokelytė. The exhibition is embedded in the Frankfurter Kunstverein’s programmatic focus, which is committed to promoting emerging artists from Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region and presenting innovative perspectives on social issues.