FRANKFURT.- The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents In A Silent Way. Sculptures around the Schirn, a group exhibition unfolding across several episodes in its public outdoor grounds at its temporary location in Frankfurt’s Bockenheim district. The works explore the transience and fragility of environmental phenomena, transforming them into aesthetic experiences. Each of the works are in dialogue with their surroundings and the forces of nature—sun, rain, wind and the rhythms of day and night.
The first episode of the exhibition opened on June 24, 2026, with three site-specific installations by Katja Mater, Margaret Raspé, and Bernhard Schreiner. Each installation has its own unique way of relating to nature. The works, some of which are new productions, give audible and visible form to processes that usually go unnoticed in everyday life. They amplify the sound of rain, capture the movement of the sun, or transform the electrical vibrations generated by growing plants into sound.
The exhibition will continue in autumn/winter 2026 and spring 2027 with additional works. In resonance with the preceding works, an ephemeral sculpture park around the Schirn will gradually take shape.
Sebastian Baden, Director of the Schirn: “Our new exhibition series makes art encounters around the Schirn freely accessible, in its outdoor spaces—where you wouldn’t normally expect to have them. With site-specific works, some of them ephemeral, the participating artists respond to environmental phenomena and transform them into aesthetic experiences: a sundial, a rain drum, or the sonic effects of plants. It is an exhibition that sharpens our senses to the subtle manifestations of nature. Further works will be added to the Schirn’s Bockenheim site in the coming months.”
Matthias Ulrich and Theresa Dettinger, Curators of the Exhibition: “The site-specific installations in In A Silent Way are like instruments that resonate with and amplify their surrounding environments, in the process questioning their place in the world and addressing their dependence on natural processes. With restraint and deliberation, Katja Mater, Margaret Raspé, and Bernhard Schreiner intervene in existing structures on the Schirn’s grounds and expand them through their works, enabling new experiences of the environment. The artworks enter into dialog with their surroundings and the forces of nature—sun, rain, wind, and the rhythms of day and night.”
Artists and Works in the Exhibition
Katja Mater
HIC. EST. TUUM. HORA. 50° 07′ 16″ N 08° 39′ 12″ E
2026
Aluminum, stainless steel, mirror, glass film, existing numbers, and chimney.
In collaboration with Hendrik Hollander, courtesy of the artist.
How can the measurement of time become a spatial experience? Katja Mater transforms the grounds of the Schirn’s interim site in Bockenheim into a sundial. The Latin title HIC. EST. TUUM. HORA. translates into English as “This is your hour,” and addresses every person who experiences the work in action. The subheading 50° 07′ 16″ N 08° 39′ 12″ E refers to the clock’s geographic coordinates.
Conventional sundials consist of a flat surface, a scale, and a so-called gnomon, a protruding part that casts a shadow. As the Earth rotates, the sun appears to move across the sky, leading the gnomon’s shadow to fall on different markings on the scale, which allows us to read the time.
Mater’s sundial for the Schirn features four hour markers distributed across the site. The sundial is readable from April through September, depending on the changing position of the sun. The artist incorporates existing elements and structures such as the ground’s chimney, whose shadow falls on the building facade at 10 a.m. Depending on the month, the shadow falls on three different floors, each marked with the number 10: in June/July on the first floor, in May/August on the second, and in April/September on the third.
Mater also makes use of existing numbers such as the building number 3 on Gabriel-Riesser-Weg, and the “2” on the sign for HALLE 2. In addition, the building number 13 on Zeppelin-Allee is added. Various shadow casters or reflections highlight the numbers at specific times, activating the work.
Katja Mater (*1979 in Hoorn, Netherlands; lives and works in Brussels and Amsterdam) studied fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her artistic practice encompasses photography, film, installation, and performance. Her works document phenomena that lie beyond visual perception and open up alternative experiences of reality by negotiating space, time, and perception, as well as our conceptions of them.
She initially developed the sundial HIC. EST. TUUM. HORA. as a site-specific installation in the Buda district of Brussels for its Border Buda cultural program. Mater’s works have been presented at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Marta Herford, and the Kunst Halle St. Gallen.
Margaret Raspé
Rain Drums
1988/2023
Cotton fabric, beeswax, hazelnut branches, nylon thread.
Courtesy of the estate of Margaret Raspé and Galerie Molitor, Berlin.
Margaret Raspé sought to make slow, hidden processes and automated sequences visible through her art. Suspended between branches, her rain drums transform falling precipitation into delicate, aleatoric soundtracks. The organic shapes of the drums, made of fabric primed with beeswax, amplify the sound of rain to stage a fleeting, non-invasive collaboration with nature.
Throughout her practice, Raspé strove to have a symbiotic relationship with the environment. In terms of both content and form, her artistic work was shaped by sustainability and local forms of production—at a time when ecological issues were only just beginning to enter public awareness. Rain Drums was newly reproduced in Berlin in 2023 using archival materials.
Margaret Raspé (1933–2023) is considered a pioneer of feminist experimental film. Between 1954 and 1957, she studied painting and fashion at the Kunstakademie München and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Berlin. In the 1970s, she developed her “camera helmet,” mounted with a Super 8 camera, in order to film everyday actions from a radically subjective perspective.
Her films garnered international attention early on and were shown at venues including Anthology Film Archives in New York and the Hayward Gallery in London. Her practice also encompasses performative actions and sculptural works that explore questions of our relationship to nature, ecology, and spirituality. She received wider recognition in 2023 with a retrospective at the Haus am Waldsee and the Badischer Kunstverein.
Bernhard Schreiner
Instant Sonification (Local real-time composition, N 50° 7′ 16″ E 8° 39′ 10″)
2026
Custom-built modular synthesizer system, amplifier, outdoor speakers, sensors, PV modules, hydrophone, cables, grapevine, ivy, display case.
Courtesy of the artist.
Bernhard Schreiner’s work explores sound as a temporal process that makes the world tangible. He sees sound as a connection between two types of reality: one that is external and physical, and one that is internal and neural. From an early age, he made field recordings of external, audible objects. Schreiner is less interested in their authentic reproduction than in using sounds to imitate an acoustic world in which things and non-things commingle and, through constant tonal modulation, introduce a sense of continuity into this world.
For In A Silent Way, Bernhard Schreiner has developed a synthesizer whose sounds are generated and influenced by the interaction of the surrounding plants with the weather. Rain, sun, and even cool temperatures become transient producers of a real-time soundscape. In Schreiner’s installation, these external sound sources operate in interplay with the synthesizer’s internal modules.
One module activates, for example, when the voltage in a plant increases as it absorbs water, translating the impulse of this heightened voltage into a sound that repeats until a new change is detected in the plant. By sampling such signals and translating them into sounds, an autonomous and infinite composition emerges: an analog-digital piece of music that undergoes continual transformation over an unending period of time.
Bernhard Schreiner studied film with Peter Kubelka at the Städelschule from 1992 to 1998. From 2004 to 2022 he worked as an assistant in the film class. Through his many years of teaching in the Film and Video Lab he was instrumental in building up the Städelschule’s film workshop and sound studio.
Between 2005 and 2007 he ran the label feld-records, which released recordings by, among others, Kouhei Matsunaga, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, and Carlos Giffoni. Schreiner currently teaches at the HfG Offenbach. His works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Kunsthalle Lingen, the Overbeck Gesellschaft – Kunstverein Lübeck, and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.
