The exhibition Donner à Voir focuses on works grounded in research, experimentation, and collaboration. Julius von Bismarck, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Noémie Goudal, Felix Kiessling, and Sinta Werner explore phenomena such as space, time, ecology, perception, and authority from their own distinct perspectives, often beyond anthropocentric frameworks. In addition to the works, a central platform gathers research materials, books, models, photographs, film excerpts, audio recordings, and other project-related documents. These materials extend the encounter with the works to include the processes of thinking, working, and research that led to their creation.

Julius von Bismarck

Self-Revolving Torus, 2016

The kinetic sculptures of the series Self-Revolving Torus by Julius von Bismarck appear as autonomous creatures moving tentatively through space. Their rotation follows no external impulse but arises from an internal force that continuously turns the object inside out. The work is based on the idea of translating a four-dimensional body into a three-dimensional form. The starting point is the torus as a mathematical model, often used to illustrate projections of higher-dimensional spaces, which our universe might conceivably resemble. The works shown in the exhibition are related to the large-scale installation Julius von Bismarck created for the new terminal at Frankfurt Airport, which will open this year.

Polizei NNG, 2025/26

In the photograph a long line of uniformed police officers stands on the steps of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The location is significant: the museum as a cultural site becomes the stage for a scene of state authority. The presence of the police is frustrating and creates an atmosphere of latent threat. Yet not all the uniformed officers are human; some contain robots, which are indistinguishable to the naked eye. This ambiguity highlights the growing role of technology and artificial intelligence in societal and political structures.

Felix Kiessling

Die Stimme, 2025

Felix Kiessling’s Die Stimme is the result of a year-long artistic research project. Over this period, Kiessling worked closely with scientists to study the Kiel Fjord not from a political or economic perspective, but as a natural entity itself. In collaboration with the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, water samples were systematically collected and analyzed in the lab using high-resolution hydrophones. The resulting recordings reveal microbiological life processes usually imperceptible to humans. Kiessling isolated the acoustic activity of a single plankton organism and translated this “voice” into a sculpture, carving its amplitude pattern into an aluminum column. The accompanying sound work, a four-track acoustic collage, consists of raw recordings as well as mathematical analyses of the noise inherent in the data. Here, the plankton organism appears not as an abstract component of a system but as an acting subject with its own voice. The work thus shifts questions of agency and representation: it is not humans speaking about an ecosystem, but the non-human actor narrating its own environment, the Kiel Fjord.

Anne Duk Hee Jordan

Groundwater / Sediments of Memory / Plop Drop Slop, 2025

Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s A Reconciliation with Water was created as part of Tatort Paderborn in close collaboration with researchers, local experts, a school class, and a lawyer. The starting point for the work was the question of how a river can be studied and represented as a complex, more-than-human system. In the work the Pader, Germany’s shortest river, is not treated as a mere natural motif but as a body, a habitat, and an actor. How can care for a non-human entity be organized?

A central element of this artistic research is a contract, developed by Jordan with a lawyer, which designates the Pader as a legal entity and names a group of human representatives to act on its behalf. A commission of volunteers was established to oversee the care of the Pader.

Complementing this is a three-part manifesto based on Jordan’s research and data analysis of the river, translated into a musical manifesto. Sounds recorded with underwater microphones, microscopic images of microorganisms, and chemical analyses of the water provide multiple perspectives on the ecosystem. In the exhibition, the contract, video work, publication, and record are presented together, demonstrating the different layers of this long-term research project.

Sinta Werner

Modul im Modell – Licht im Bedingungsgefüge II, 2025
Entre être et paraître – la lumière au conditionnel

Sinta Werner’s practice plays with the relationship between two- and three-dimensionality, reality and image, and physical presence and projection. Her assemblages Modul im Modell – Licht im Bedingungsgefüge and Entre être et paraître – la lumière au conditionnel arise from precisely controlled experimental arrangements of light, material, and time. The starting point is simple transparent glass modules that recall strucutral architectural models. When illuminated from the side, zones of light and shadow appear on the image surface, causing the glass forms to emerge as spatial structures.

In the photograph Modul im Modell – Licht im Bedingungsgefüge I, multiple lighting conditions are combined within a single image. The different angles of light and moments of exposure are combined in one shot, making temporal and perspectival shifts visible.

The series Entre être et paraître – la lumière au conditionnel is created as a photogram in the darkroom, that is, without using a camera. The glass boxes initially appear as bright traces on a dark background, resembling a photographic negative. To produce a positive image, Werner makes a contact print, in which the photogram is placed again on unexposed paper and re-exposed. A nearby light source inverts the logic of central perspective, causing the vanishing lines to diverge.

In these works, glass is not only represented and integrated as part of the assemblage, but also serves as the medium through which the shadow drawings are constructed. The layering of object and image produces ambiguous spatial situations: from certain angles, the three-dimensional forms dissolve into lines, while the photographic surface simultaneously suggests depth. Through the assembly of glass panes, the materiality of the glass comes into focus, oscillating between visibility and dissolution due to its transparency.

Noémie Goudal

Untitled (Mountain) II, 2021

Noémie Goudal works with precisely planned photographic set-ups in real landscapes. For Untitled (Mountain) II, she positions painted cardboard elements at a distance in front of a mountain range. From a precisely determined camera viewpoint, these artificial forms visually merge with the landscape, appearing as part of the mountains; evoking a kind of visual marquetry. The image is not created through digital montage but through the spatial arrangement on-site. The seemingly massive cuts in the mountains reveal themselves, on closer look, as fragile, temporary constructions. Goudal’s interest in paleoclimatological research provides a frame in which landscape is understood not as a static form but as the result of long-term change.