The days are getting shorter, the wind roams around homes, and food for animals is becoming scarce: In the second episode of IN A SILENT WAY, the sculpture garden in the outdoor area will be expanded to include works by Denise Mawila, Paul Spengemann, and Ian Waelder. The works respond to the changing conditions of the dark and rather barren season. Once the sun sets, a creature appears on the north façade via a laser projection. In several locations around the Dondorf printing works, there are also birdseed-stuffed noses, which disappear over time. An installation made of tinsel, weathered by the elements, evokes a moment’s fleeting nature.

Denise Mawila
Prise (2000/2026)

Denise Mawila combines an awareness of form, and beauty with a sense of the fragility of the moment and a dash of anti-spectacle. Her works bear witness to the decay of elegance. As she ostensibly plays with beauty, the artist considers how everyday phenomena shape our perception. A new iteration of an idea more than twenty-five years old, Prise transforms public space into a site of encounter and joy – following in the spirit of relational aesthetics, which understands art as staging a social exchange between people. Mawila originally developed the minimalist sculpture, made from tinsel, with a fellow student at the HfG Offenbach. The notion use of readymades – industrially manufactured everyday objects – has since become a constant in the artist’s works, reflecting her interest in the rearrangement of existing objects and their relationships. The curtain’s mirrored strips, in constant motion and flux owing to the effects of light and wind, are exposed to the weather, which “marks” the curtain over time. Curtains like these are often seen in temporary settings like stage sets, parties, or storefront displays. As if announcing a celebration or else serving as its remnant, “Prise”’s shimmering material is deliberately arranged by Mawila in public “non-places,” such as here next to the parking lot on the north side of the Dondorf printing works. A celebration could hardly have occurred in a more inappropriate place.

Denise Mawila studied stage design, film, and art at the Offenbach University of Art and Design (HfG) and the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Her artistic practice combines installation, film, drawing, performance, and dance with interdisciplinary research and participatory educational programs. She is a cofounder of freitagsküche, an initiative that brings together cooking, art, and social exchange. Mawila has worked as an instructor in cultural education and outreach in the fields of movement, dance, and perception. In collaboration with the Deutsches Tanzarchiv in Cologne and the MAECENIA Stiftung für Frauen in Wissenschaft und Kunst, she initiated the Waltraud Luley Dance Archive, a project dedicated to the work and legacy of the Frankfurt-based dance educator.

Paul Spengemann
spin jump crawl climb dream bite hunt (ongoing since 2024)

On long dark nights, a creature weaving webs appears on the SCHIRN’s north facade. Its shape constantly morphs: At times it clings tightly to a thread as it lowers itself down, then it stretches out lengthwise, as though searching for a foothold. Out of fine white lines, it forms spiderwebs that transform into grotesque faces, or the shapes of letters and words that remain largely incomprehensible. Time and again the threads snap, and it has to start all over. Paul Spengemann uses lasers as a tool for exploring spaces and telling stories. “spin jump crawl climb dream bite hunt” revolves around the world of a spider-like creature. It not only crawls, climbs, jumps, and hunts, but also dreams and expresses fears and desires. With the help of its threads, it shares emotional experiences with the audience as it tries to form a connection. The repeatedly failed attempts at communication and the ambivalent soundtrack create an underlying mood of melancholia, which sometimes veers toward the unsettling. Could the creature actually be lying in ambush, luring in prey with its illusions? They might easily become entangled in the sticky webs. Occasionally the English word “gobble” can be discerned, which means, among other things, “to devour.” What is this figure really searching for—community, support, food? The work envisions a world in which secure connections no longer hold. It conveys a sense of alienation in an environment governed by particular rules. In an idiosyncratic, quiet, and delicate way, Spengemann thus crafts a narrative that hovers between suggestion and narration, leaving it up to the audience to fill in the gaps.

Paul Spengemann is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores various image-making processes, particularly in the realm of moving images. He examines not only their technical possibilities but also how they trace the world or create visual realities. He often uses the virtual as a tool for visibility and participation, such as when a laser show is projected onto a building. Spengemann’s works have been shown in numerous exhibitions and at film festivals around the world, including LOOP Barcelona, the São Paulo International Film Festival, the Goethe-Institut in Mexico City, Villa Massimo in Rome, the Vienna Art Foundation, the SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, the Dortmunder Kunstverein, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and the 66th Berlinale in Berlin.

With support by SOUND FOR FRIENDS GmbH

Ian Waelder
Self-Portrait As My Father’s Nose (2025/26)

What traces do we leave behind? How reliable is our memory? Ian Waelder’s facade sculptures can be found at several locations around the Dondorf printing works. They are based on a clay sculpture modeled after the nose of the artist’s father, Juan Waelder, depicting what the artist deems the “Waelder Nose.” It is an ironic self-portrait that will gradually disintegrate over time. The papier-mâché works, studded with birdseed, are subject to destruction caused by birds and the elements. Referencing the 1969 sculpture “P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the Artist as a Vogelfutterbüste [Birdseed Bust])” by Swiss artist Dieter Roth, they convey an anti-monumental gesture: Rather than treated as something stable and unchanging, memory here is constantly exposed to external attacks and forgetting. The birds, after all, are no harmless bystanders. Instead, through their aggressive assault and destructiveness, they evoke Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film. In a formal language that embraces brittleness and fragility, Waelder creates artistic reflections on biography, memory, and remembrance. In 2017, the artist became the first member of his family to return to Germany. His grandfather, Friedrich Wälder, fled from a concentration camp near Stuttgart to Chile in 1939, where he went by the name Federico Waelder. He was his family’s sole survivor. His grandson never met him and knows him only through historical, material traces, such as cassette recordings of piano music, his grandfather’s Opel car—and, indeed, his father’s nose. “Self-Portrait As My Father’s Nose” thus confronts the viewer with a historically charged motif. The stereotype of the “Jewish nose” is a central part of a long history of antisemitic depictions. Waelder deliberately takes up this physical feature that, due to its racist instrumentalization, is typically avoided, adding a personal reference to it.

Ian Waelder (b. 1993, Madrid) lives and works between Mallorca and Frankfurt am Main, where he completed his studies in fine arts under Haegue Yang at the Städelschule in 2023. His most recent solo exhibitions include the gallery Modern Art, London; GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen; Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover; and Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani, Palma. Waelder’s work has also been included in group exhibitions at venues including the Kunsthalle Wien, Museu Tàpies in Barcelona, the Delfina Foundation in London, the nsdoku in Munich, the ifa Gallery in Berlin, and Francis Irv, New York. He has participated in artist-in-residence programs including IASPIS in Malmö, the Laurenz-Haus Foundation in Basel, and WIELS in Brussels. Since 2019, he runs Printer Fault Press, a publishing house for artists’ publications.