New York Toronto, 2025
200 x 46 x 56 cm

Beijing Hanoi Paris, 2025
78 x 44 x 65 cm

Stainless steel, plywood, PU leather, steel gears, motor, step motor, music box mechanic

Courtesy the artist

Thuy Tien Nguyen (b. 1993, Hanoi, Vietnam) is a graduate of the Städelschule and lives between Frankfurt am Main and Hanoi. Her artistic practice often begins with the properties of everyday objects. She questions their narrative associations and their communicative power within societal codes.

For And This is Us 2025, Nguyen commissioned the production of three pieces of furniture in Vietnam and had them imported to Germany: a filing cabinet, a boardroom table, and an office chair. These are elements typically found in any standard office environment. She has had them manufactured with high-gloss polished surfaces in reflective dark tones, accented by gleaming steel rods. The refined design language evokes a sense of prestige, yet also standardisation—reminiscent of executive offices in major law firms or corporate headquarters. Nguyen has scaled down the dimensions of the three objects. They have been stripped of their original function to become resonating bodies for a system of gears that plays a melody.

Across cultures and historical periods, the staging of power through the arrangement and design of interior spaces has always been cultivated. The size of a president’s desk, the distance it creates between them and their counterpart, the subtly elevated height of a seat that reinforces hierarchical order, or a room divider separating public from private space—like an ornate folding screen—all serve as spatial tools of power. In Frankfurt’s financial district, where banks and international law firms are based, the spaces where power is exercised and managed are always carefully choreographed.

Nguyen has installed delicate systems of gears into three everyday objects from financial capitalism, which produce a melody via music boxes: “It’s just a burning memory.” The song refers to a music project that centres on the theme of forgetting. It is a slowed-down version of a 1930s original, allowing the past to leave an echo in the present. The mechanism itself was reverse-engineered based on existing models and then recreated by a Vietnamese engineer. To activate the system at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Nguyen uses a voltage converter. This transformation of electrical voltage—from the Vietnamese to German system—serves as a conceptual device within her work. It highlights standardised systems that, when mismatched, produce a distortion: the melody played is altered. The attempt to translate a global aesthetic of office furniture fails slightly; the distorted sound disrupts the illusion of perfection. In many of her works, Nguyen juxtaposes materials with opposing qualities: hard and soft, organic and metallic, solid and fluid.

The three pristine and elegant objects present themselves in their flawless execution. Their refined formal language conveys a sense of universality. They seem to stand as metaphors for global societal and economic systems. Yet they are also the product of outsourced labour within a globalised market economy—one that continues to follow colonial fault lines.

Nguyen reflects on how subtle differences in the design and treatment of materials can convey hierarchical positions. This visual language also carries with it a model of corporate organisation and behaviour that has been adopted worldwide.

Thuy Tien Nguyen (b. 1993, Hanoi, VN) lives and works in Hanoi (VN) and Frankfurt am Main (DE). In 2024, she completed her studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule as a Meisterschülerin in the class of Prof. Haegue Yang. Previously, she graduated with a BA from the Hanoi Academy of Theater and Cinema (VN) in 2015. In her artistic practice, she explores materiality and perception by staging contrasts such as hardness and softness, or dryness and moisture. Her works often create atmospheric scenes that bear traces of past actions and challenge the viewers’ senses.

Her works have been shown in numerous international institutions, festivals, and off-spaces, including Stiftung BINZ39, Zurich (CH), Hanoi Creative Festival Weekend 2024, Hanoi (VN), RAY Triennale at the Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (DE), Nova Contemporary, Bangkok (TH), Delfina Foundation, London (GB), Documenta 15 at the Stadtmuseum Kassel (DE), and Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden (DE). She has been nominated for several prestigious awards and has won numerous prizes, including the Young Generation Art Award by Monopol Magazine x Degussa (2025), the Städelschule – Portikus e.V. Graduate Prize (2024), the McKinsey Award (2023), the Deutschlandstipendium (2021), the DAAD Prize (2020), and the Ernst & Young Rundgang Prize (2020). Her residencies include the V.A.C. Residency Program in Hanoi, VN (2025), Salonul de proiecte in Bucharest, RO (2024), Koganecho Bazzar in Yokohama, JP (2018), and Mutual Unknow by CuratorsLab in Jakarta, ID (2017).

Courtesy the artist

In Sonja Yakovleva’s new works, specially created for this exhibition, the overarching motif is the representation of an abstract power that governs bodies and is embedded in them.

In State of Strike, the city itself is a body whose vital functions are maintained by various organs, and the blood in its veins are the workers who supply the living organism. Sonja Yakovleva depicts these people crowded together in the streets as they go on strike, utilising their bodies in public space. But pigs from industrial fattening farms are also freed and become part of the resistance against the exploitation of their bodies.

Yakovleva has created a mural over 10.5 metres long. It depicts a city in which e-commerce, the meat industry, delivery services, day-care centres, hospitals, construction sites, industrial cleaners and restaurants have been condensed into a very small space. She also deliberately incorporates recognisable Frankfurt buildings into her composition — the Alte Oper, the central railway station, the facades of brothels and the Sudfass-Beine. Some of the motifs were photographed by the artist in Frankfurt, and others come from online stock photography providers or Instagram. In the images’ composition, various locations in the post-industrial city, which are otherwise marginalised or made invisible, are placed at the centre.

The city is depicted here as a symbol of the modern age and society at large, with all the buildings representing different production sites. We see a dense flow of bodies going on strike. Yakovleva is driven by the contradictions of an increasingly flexible and yet insecure work environment. People, especially those with migrant backgrounds, are often forced to take on difficult jobs — characterised by poor working conditions. In her depiction, she shows us a city of delivery drivers, temporary workers, cleaners and meat industry employees. What would happen if not only the unionised workers, but they too were to go on strike? Would everything come to a halt? Who are all these people who keep the pulsating system of a city and a state functioning? In her mural, Yakovleva takes a close look at migrant workers and has them populate the city streets with their bodies. The artist also includes animals in the strike, because they too have lost self-determination over their bodies.

Through her thematic focus on the migrant strike of precariously employed workers, Yakovleva succeeds in raising the question of the relationship between body and politics in two different ways. On the one hand, how are workers’ bodies controlled and exploited in today’s precarious labour conditions? And on the other hand, how can these bodies become a new force by going on strike and opposing precisely this control and exploitation? And by going on strike, demands for solidarity and new forms of social organisation are brought to the streets by these protesting bodies.

Yakovleva’s working process is characterised by montage and collage, collecting and assembling. For Germany, 2023 and 2024 have been the years of nationwide waves of strikes. Not only for higher wages, but also for the implementation of climate protection measures. So for State of Strike, a variety of elements have been incorporated into the monumental mural: research into historical sources and literature on migrant strikes in the 1970s and the working conditions of precarious workers since the post-war period, interviews with e-commerce workers, the publication of the investigative collective “correctiv” in early 2024 and the remigration plans of right-wing networks. Through the social mobilisation against racism that soon followed, Yakovleva thought about a migrant strike as a means of protest against racist tendencies in society. During her research, she sifted out scenes and stories, contradictions and patterns from her own world of experience, which she incorporated into the themes of labour and strikes. She visualises the strike of migrants and workers, who represent a large part of the working class, and sets her monumental work of art against the fast-moving flow of information in the media.

For this new mural, Yakovleva quotes the visual language of various forms of propaganda art: the agit prop of the 1920s in Soviet Russia, the murales (wall paintings) of Mexico’s Diego Rivera and even street art. She uses isometric perspective, in which the image has no single vanishing point and in which the edges of components are drawn in abbreviated form. And through the use of collage and condensing visual elements, she depicts different scenes simultaneously , using geometric forms and the symbolism of colours —black, white and red.

This is the first time that Yakovleva has combined her characteristic technique of paper cutting with drawing. In her practice, the drawing is the central starting point for design and image composition, but it is lost in the act of cutting. Her pictures are created as drawings, which the artist rescales with the help of a grid      and transfers to larger paper. In State of Strike, we see her painting skills, her mastery of lines, shapes and shading, her ability to observe and reproduce the world around her, her love of experimentation and her craftsmanship. Sonja’s drawings and papercuts thrive on the flattening of motifs and stage like perspective. Her style can be associated with the phenomenon of superflat, an artistic style that reacts to consumer culture in postmodern painting.

Yakovleva says of her choice of papercutting that she likes the cross-references to historical development. From the 17th century onwards, the papercut became popular in Europe as a time-saving and cost-effective substitute for portrait painting. And whilst painting was reserved for the aristocracy, the lower classes could have silhouettes made from the outline of a profile, which were offered by street artists.

In her work State of Strike, Sonja Yakovleva combines references to an artistic technique with socio-political questions — regarding the possible outcomes of going on strike, through which the invisibility of these precarious and often migrant forms of labour becomes visible. There is a sense of solidarity among the workers who go on strike, which provides strength to build alternative ways of living and working. These bodies, that otherwise work, deliver, pack, transport or wash up, become visible through the movement on the street.They become resistant bodies that withdraw their physical strength from exploitation, and instead, bundle it in the collective in order to protest against their exploitation and bring about change.

Video installation
Five videos 7:04 min, 3:44 min, 6:15 min, 4:21 min, 11:00 min
Wood, MDF, cardboard, paper and 5 screens
3 x 3 x 3 m

Sculpture
Metal
92 x 68 x 210 cm

Courtesy the artist

The body is a material unit with which the individual inhabits time in the here and now. But what constitutes our existence? What is the irreducible essence of human existence? What is humanity when it’s no longer governed by its self-created structures of order?

For her new exhibition, Gintarė Sokelytė has constructed a self-contained universe. She transports the viewer away from their familiar sense of perception and releases them into a constructed parallel world. Like through a rabbit hole, the space can only be entered via the elevator. The door opens, and we find ourselves in a prehistoric cave. Sokelytė has painstakingly recreated part of the Blombos Cave in South Africa, using scientific 3D models. Blombos is the oldest Stone Age site where evidence of human creativity and culture has been discovered. Stone engravings depicting intersecting lines, painted with ochre, and numerous artefacts testify to the fact that 71,000 years ago Homo sapiens thought in abstract terms. They had to possess the ability to imagine, synthesise and visualise things. And the result was their rock art—the few traces left of human beings from ancient times, and evidence of their need to create images and symbols that bear witness to rich inner worlds.

These first traces of human art, the first visual language of early humans, are what Gintarė Sokelytė picks up on. Through her multimedia installation entitled * (Asterisk), which faces the cave, the primal symbol of prehistoric rock art inspired her to create her metal sculpture. Sokelytė welded it to the size of a human body—this recurring symbol of humanity, found from the Blombos Cave to the digital world. She then tied five people, five volunteers, to the metal star by their arms and legs. Bound to this cruciform sculpture, she then interrogated them about fear, power and order. How do you describe fear? What are you most afraid of? What if this happens? What is power? Who is allowed to wield power? Describe your understanding of order. How do you feel when reality slips away from you? What forces make you feel powerless?

These five people were interrogated through constant, cyclical repetition, each speaking in their respective native language and allowing their bodies to be subjected to external coercion. Exposed to the lens of the camera, their bodies began to ache from the gravitational force exerted on them. They surrendered to the influence of this external force until, in a transcendent state of essentiality, they gained deeper insight into their own perception of society and the self.

The result is five films forming part of a large geometric sculpture—a dodecahedron, a geometric construction with twelve equal faces and thirty equal edges. The viewer may enter the structure, brightly lit from the five monitors, and listen to the five volunteers as they question their innermost selves on notions of fear, power and order. In geometry, the dodecahedron is one of the five Platonic solids. Plato assigned them to his worldview as fundamental geometric figures, and their significance remains fundamental to mathematics and science today. Due to its perfect symmetry, the dodecahedron is considered the most sacred of the five Platonic solids, and the golden ratio is found repeatedly within it. In Plato’s time, it was even forbidden for people to speak about the figure. It symbolised the soul of the world (the ether) and the universe, and its twelve faces draw a connection to a number that holds special significance for human systems: the twelve zodiac signs, the number of months or hours within units of time, all the way up to the twelve apostles. For Gintarė Sokelytė, the dodecahedron forms a conceptual counterpoint to the primordial nature of the cave.

Its interior is lined with numerous copies of texts, which Sokelytė has researched and printed, from ancient to modern codices. Nearly two hundred international state constitutions and around forty collection of laws, from prehistory to the present, have been arranged chronologically and mostly in their original national languages. For the artist, they represent humanity’s struggle for structure. Laws are both protection and restriction, defining a transition in human history towards a normative order for communal life. Sokelytė explores a timeless urge with which one resists the uncertain through order and form.

25, 2024
Wall sculpture
Styrofoam, iron wire, metal, various plastics and engine oil
5 x 1,8 m

Courtesy the artist

A-Type Complex is the title of the igloo-like hemisphere woven from salvaged, rusty construction grids. Inside is a display of human figures, either upright or sitting down, and neither female nor male; not individuals as such, but rather forms of human existence. Their bodies are open, raw and permeable, reminiscent of survivors of a catastrophe. Gintarė Sokelytė creates them out of plaster, malleable and porous at the same time, then paints them with burnt engine oil. The mineral oil is viscous and toxic, and yet, at the same time, it is the fluid that kept the engine of the industrial age running.

The floor is covered with coal from which the human figures rise up, their bodies hollowed, ravaged and reduced, as if by fire, to their essential form. And beneath them there is a monitor screen. Time holds a special significance in Sokelytė’s work. It continues to tick relentlessly, and yet repeatedly returns to a starting point. This special significance is exemplified by her fascination with George Woodcock’s book The Tyranny of the Clock. Time, rhythm and measurement are seen as distinguishing features between early societies and people in the modern era — time as a structure and order that determines the life and experience of individuals. Above the lattice igloo-like structure hangs a mirror, doubling its hemispherical shape, and the memory of an hourglass is suggested in the reflection. Time and transience, the past and the ever recurring, seen as eternal principles of all life.

The final part of the grand installation consists of a 5-metre-long wall sculpture. The black, three-dimensional work, entitled 25, is a dense formation of architecture, geometric structures, ruins of grids and stone and a flow of people winding through the construction. The work resembles a medieval altarpiece in its compression and superimposition — abstract yet concrete. Gintarė Sokelytė built it out of found materials, materials that the city itself produces, uses and leaves behind.

The artist attributes strong narrative value to each of her materials. Thus, the wall painting, like the human figures, is not painted with colour paint but blackened by the layered application of burnt engine oil. This toxic substance is a residual waste of industrial production — from engine combustion — a lubricating non-biodegradable oil that sticks to people’s skin. Coal is also an intensely associative material for the artist. The material encompasses time itself — from the primeval age of its geological formation for over 350 million years. It was the catalyst for human energy production from ancient times to industrialisation in the age of machines, and then as a raw material and force behind toxic environmental impacts.

How does the past affect the present? How is the future already embedded in the present? For this exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Gintarė Sokelytė has created a stunning and monumental world. Her pictorial spaces are experiential universes that trigger associations and know how to strike the viewer at the very core of their emotional depths. She thinks in images and works with her own references. Like Aby Warburg, she compiles her picture atlas — her Mnemosyne Atlas — from which she feeds her grand installations.

She is a seeker who strives to gain knowledge, to establish connections, to explore what holds the world, humanity and the eternity of time together at its core.

Filter #0 (F)
Filter #1 (F)
Filter #2 (F)
Filter #3 (F)
Filter #4 (F)
Filter #5 (F)
Filter #6 (F), 2023
Screen clusters

Annual Plots (Frankfurt), 2023
12 Inkjet prints on paper

Courtesy the artist

Benedikt Ackermann works conceptually, questioning the meaning of images in the digital age. His interest lies in the invisible shift in power that accompanies the ongoing development of digital technologies.

Ackermann has developed a complex spatial installation for the exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, comprising more than 20 monitors and a series of prints. The installation accesses the image material of a camera mounted on a Frankfurt skyscraper. Installed in the south of the city, it records the skyline and its surroundings. The data is archived online and can be retrieved there. Ackermann has downloaded the pictures the camera took every 5-10 minutes from 2021 to 2022. These images total more than 100,000.

He assembles them into a time-lapse recording, which he in turn crops so that often only highly pixelated videos remain. Some of these videos, those showing individual windows, he uses as the basis for a series of inkjet prints, images somewhere between a digital contact print and a diagram. Where exactly the windows are, he deliberately leaves unclear. He sorts all the frames of a year into a coordinate-based system of day and time, thus revealing the daily routines of people who live and work behind each window. He writes down observations on the edges: when people get up or when they are on holiday, when they start working and when they stop again. In a fascinating yet comprehensible way, Ackermann reinterprets the images as data and the camera as a measuring instrument.

Beyond that, his pictures have a painterly quality. For the apparent rationality of the material loses its contours and becomes flowing, implied forms, behind which we recognise the coming-into-being and elapsing of human existences, as well as the infinite circularity of everyday life. The temporality of all things, making the individual recede as a replaceable part behind the machinery of the city. Recurring sequences of day and night, of summer and winter, mirrored in the glass towers of the financial world, behind which light and shadow offer us a glimpse of people’s stories.

Ackermann examines the images not as individual works created by an individual author, but as data, as a record. For today’s production of image information is created as bits, as information exchanged between computers, often no longer designed for a human viewer at all. Just consider the millions of surveillance cameras, whose images are increasingly analysed automatically, for example by facial recognition software. But the number of man-made images has also grown rapidly. Digital files, images, videos, sound are constantly produced and exchanged, copied, reproduced, whether by industry, the financial sector or private users. The global data throughput is constantly expanding. Computer centres have been turned into hubs of social power without questions being asked about who owns the data, who evaluates and uses it. The computer has made us a society of data collectors, and the sensors on our cameras busily assist in amassing this.

Benedikt Ackermann (*1994 in Frankfurt am Main, DE) works mainly with photography, video and digital media. Since 2019 he has been studying at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (DE) with Prof. Gerard Byrne and Prof. Haegue Yang. Previously, he studied philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (DE). Among others, Benedikt Ackermann has exhibited at Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (DE) and at Goethe Institut, Dublin (IE).