Sculptures around the SCHIRN
The multi-part exhibition in SCHIRN’s public spaces translates fleeting natural phenomena into artistic experiences. The works enter into a relationship with their surroundings and the forces of nature — sunlight, rain, and wind, animals, and the rhythms of day and night.
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Supported by
SCHIRN ZEITGENOSSEN
In A Silent Way. Sculptures around the SCHIRN
A group exhibition in several episodes
Intro
The multi-part exhibition in SCHIRN’s public spaces translates fleeting natural phenomena into artistic experiences. The works enter into a relationship with their surroundings and the forces of nature — sunlight, rain, and wind, animals, and the rhythms of day and night. With restraint and care, the artists intervene in existing structures and expand them through their work, opening up new ways of experiencing the environment.
Summer 2026 with Katja Mater, Margaret Raspé, and Bernhard Schreiner
The first episode of IN A SILENT WAY presents three installations, each entering into a relationship with the environment in its own distinct way. The partly newly created works by Katja Mater, Margaret Raspé, and Bernhard Schreiner make audible and visible processes that otherwise go unnoticed in everyday life. They amplify the sound of rain, capture the movement of the sun, or transform the electrical impulses generated by growing plants into sound. Starting June 2026, the artists activate various locations across the outdoor grounds — with rain drums hanging from the trees, a sundial that marks the entire site with the time of day, and a sound work that gives voice to the inner life of plants.
Katja Mater
HIC. EST. TUUM. HORA. 50° 07′ 16″ N 08° 39′ 12″ E, 2026
How can the measurement of time become a spatial experience? Unlike modern digital or mechanical clocks, sundials — used since antiquity — make the rotation of the earth visible. For the SCHIRN, Dutch artist Katja Mater develops her site-specific work HIC. EST. TUUM. HORA, which transforms the grounds of the interim site in Bockenheim into a sundial from April to September. It functions similarly to conventional sundials, which consist of a flat surface, a scale, and a so-called gnomon — the shadow caster. As the sun moves across the sky, the shadow aligns with various markings on the scale, allowing its position to be determined and the time to be read.
Mater’s sundial consists of four hour markers distributed across the SCHIRN grounds. In doing so, the artist draws on existing elements and built structures. The chimney, for instance, becomes a shadow caster that strikes the façade at 10 o’clock in the morning. Depending on the month, the shadow falls on different floors: in June and July on the first, in May and August on the second, in April and September on the third. Mater also incorporates existing numerals — such as the house number at Gabriel-Riesser-Weg 3 and the HALLE 2 sign — or adds new ones, as at Zeppelin-Allee 13. At 2 PM, a reflection of sunlight marks the time; at 1 PM and 3 PM, it is shadow lines that do so.
The Latin title HIC. EST. TUUM. HORA translates into English as “This is your hour.” It speaks to every person who encounters the work in action. The subtitle 50° 07′ 16″ N 08° 39′ 12″ E gives the geographical coordinates of the sundial. In this way, Mater’s intervention locates visitors not only in a particular moment, but also places them within a broader geographical context.
Katja Mater (1979 in Hoorn, Netherlands; lives and works in Brussels and Amsterdam) studied Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her artistic practice encompasses photography, film, installation, and performance. Mater documents phenomena that lie beyond visual perception, opening up alternative experiences of reality by negotiating space, time, and our understanding of both. She first developed the sundial HIC. EST. TUUM. HORA as a site-specific installation for the Brussels district of Buda, as part of the cultural programme Border Buda. Mater’s work has been presented at, among other venues, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Marta Herford, and Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen.
Margaret Raspé
Regentrommeln (Rain Drums), 1988/2023
Margaret Raspé was drawn to slow, hidden processes and automated sequences, and sought to make these visible through her art. Suspended between branches, her rain drums transform falling precipitation into delicate, aleatory soundscapes. Derived from the Latin “alea” (die, chance), the term describes chance-dependent processes that rely on unpredictable elements. The organic forms of the drums — made from fabric primed with beeswax — amplify the sound of rain, staging a fleeting, non-invasive collaboration with nature.
For Raspé, the garden embodied the possibility of touch and the experience of growth. There, seasons, weather, warmth and cold, transience and time become tangible. The artist aspired to enter into a resonant relationship with the environment: “How do we engage with given nature, and with ourselves — estranged, exploitative? What must we change in our consciousness in order to think and feel the apparent opposites, the relationship between culture and nature, differently from the way it has conventionally been understood in the Western world?” Both in content and form, Raspé’s artistic practice was shaped by sustainability and local modes of production — at a time when ecological questions were only slowly entering public consciousness. The rain drums were newly produced in Berlin in 2023, based on archival materials.
The Berlin artist Margaret Raspé (1933–2023) is regarded as a pioneer of feminist experimental film. Between 1954 and 1957 she studied painting and fashion at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München and the Universität für Bildende Künste, Berlin. In the 1970s she developed the camera helmet and began producing her camera helmet films. Her films attracted international attention early on and were shown at, among other venues, Anthology Film Archives in New York and the Hayward Gallery in London. Her practice also encompasses performative actions and sculptural works that engage with questions of our relationship to nature, ecology, and spirituality. She became known to a wider audience in 2023 through a retrospective at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin and the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe.
Bernhard Schreiner
Instant Sonification (Local real-time composition, N 50° 7′ 16″ E 8° 39′ 10″), 2026
Bernhard Schreiner’s work is concerned with sound as a temporal process through which the world becomes experienceable. Sound, as musician and music theorist David Toop has noted, is a present absence; silence is an absent presence. There is almost always something to be heard, and more than sight, sound proves itself as evidence of reality — precisely because sound is typically restless, changing from one moment to the next. For Schreiner, sound is a connection between the outer, physical reality and the neural, inner reality. He engaged early on with field recordings of sounding, external things — less interested in their authentic reproduction than in using sounds to imitate an acoustic world in which things and non-things appear in equal measure, and in which constant sonic modulation introduces duration into that world.
For IN A SILENT WAY, Bernhard Schreiner has developed a work in the form of a synthesizer whose sounds are generated and shaped by the plant life in its surroundings in interplay with the weather. Rain, sunlight, and even cold thus become ephemeral producers of a real-time soundscape. In Schreiner’s installation, these external sound sources act in concert with internal modules — as when the voltage in a plant increases as it absorbs water. The Sample & Hold module, for instance, registers the impulse of this rising voltage and repeats that impulse — translated into sound — until a new change is measured in the plant. By scanning such external signals and translating them into sounds, an autonomous and infinite composition emerges: an analogue-digital piece of music that undergoes constant transformation over an unbounded period of time.
Bernhard Schreiner studied film under Peter Kubelka at the Städelschule from 1992 to 1998, and served as assistant to the film class from 2004 to 2022. Through his long-standing teaching in the Film and Video Lab, he helped establish the Städelschule’s film workshop and sound studio. Between 2005 and 2007 he ran the label feld-records, releasing recordings by artists including Kouhei Matsunaga, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, and Carlos Giffoni. Schreiner currently teaches at the HfG Offenbach and at the Städelschule. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Kunsthalle Lingen, Overbeck-Gesellschaft – Kunstverein Lübeck, and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.
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Curators
Matthias Ulrich
Theresa Dettinger
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Supported by
SCHIRN ZEITGENOSSEN