New location, new program: The SCHIRN from 2025
02/03/2025
10 min reading time
Renovations, relocation, exhibition program, and new website. 2025 will see a number of changes to the coordinates of the SCHIRN – find out exactly which ones here!
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To make way for the energy-efficient renovations of its main venue at the Römer square in the city center, the SCHIRN will be moving temporarily to the Bockenheim district of Frankfurt in the summer of 2025. Through 2027, the SCHIRN will be presenting its program on subjects related to art and the present day in the centrally located former Dondorf printing factory. Visitors will find exhibitions, events, and formats for all age groups as well as gastronomy by Badias Café.
In addition, the website and the SCHIRN MAG have been completely reworked and relaunched with a contemporary design and topical features. They aim to offer visitors a user experience focused primarily on people and their situational, individual needs, thus facilitating easy access to art, current discourse, and the SCHIRN’s various offers. The upcoming SCHIRN MAG MONTHLY will also give readers the opportunity to receive brand new articles, videos, podcasts, tips and specials directly to their inbox once a month.
Sebastian Baden, director of the SCHIRN, emphasizes:
“A number of groundbreaking changes will take place at the SCHIRN during 2025. By means of its energy-efficient renovations, the listed architectural complex of the SCHIRN at the Römer square will be made fit for the future during a state-of-the-art flagship project. In this way we shall be raising our continued commitment to sustainability to a new level. We are starting the year with the launch of our new website as a digital accompaniment to the transformation. It is delightful to have the unique opportunity to continue to develop the SCHIRN as a lively place of exchange which brings art, people, and discourse together in our temporary location in Bockenheim.”
“We want to take advantage of this remarkable interim period by presenting our visitors an ambitious program that includes new exhibitions, events, and educational formats.”
Sebastian Baden
Spring 2025 – Exhibitions at the Römer
Troika: Buenavista
March 7 – April 21, 2025
Troika’s work explores shifting boundaries between nature and artificiality, the real and the romantic, the living and the nonliving. The artist group explores how new technologies affect our relationship with the world. Founded in 2003, the German-French collective Troika—with the members Eva Rucki (b. 1976, Germany), Conny Freyer (b. 1976, Germany), and Sebastien Noel (b. 1977, France)—works across various media, including sculpture, film, installation, and painting.
For the SCHIRN, the group is developing a new immersive installation that explores different kinds of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they probe our understanding of our place in a more-than-human world. As developments in artificial intelligence rapidly advance, this new work directly addresses how conceptions of human intelligence and agency are shaking and shifting.
Curator Dehlia Hannah
Projekt Management Katharina Dohm (SCHIRN)
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Body and Building: 2 Evenings, 2 Days (of Performances)
March 28 – 30, 2025
This performative exhibition is a physical appropriation of the SCHIRN. On two evenings and two days the windows of the empty museum gallery, which are normally kept shut, will be opened. Flooded with light, the room, which is 140 meters in length, will be brought to life, invigorated, structured, confronted, and encountered through the unique atmosphere of live performances. A dialogue therefore arises between art and architecture: an engagement between the human body and the spatial presence surrounding it.
As a contemporary art form, performance has developed in recent years more radically than almost all other artistic forms of expression. It crosses the boundaries between genres, combines dance, music, and theater, and permits a direct and immediate encounter with its environment—with visitors as well as with spaces. Architecture and spaces are usually perceived in terms of doors, staircases, rooms, windows, perspectives, prospects, and insights. The performers enter into negotiations with the SCHIRN’s building: the movement of the body explores and questions the architecture. It tells of the power and strength of a space—and of new possibilities for experiencing and embracing it or forming new spatial bodies.
Curator Matthias Ulrich (SCHIRN)
Program in Frankfurt’s Bockenheim district
starting Summer 2025
Sasha Waltz & Guests: In C – Community
September 7, 2025
The SCHIRN is marking its temporary move from the Römer square to Frankfurt’s Bockenheim district with a festive parade and a large-scale performance to live music by over 100 dancers. The participatory project “In C – Community” by the celebrated international dance company Sasha Waltz & Guests is being created through a collaboration between professional dancers and amateur groups.
The structured improvisation “In C” was initiated in 2021 and has been realized in a variety of contexts ever since. It builds on the pioneering work of the same name based on music by Terry Riley from the minimalist school of composition. In parallel to this score, the choreography is developed from fifty-three figures that can be moved and varied. “In C” is open to adaptations in all dance styles, and to influences from different cultural circles; it appeals to professionals and amateurs as well as to both young and old. Active participants and spectators alike form part of a unique performance, which not only represents but also practices the democratic principles of participation and equality.
Curator Martina Weinhart (SCHIRN)
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Stephanie Comilang
September 25, 2025 – January 4, 2026
The impressive cinematic installations of Stephanie Comilang (b. 1980, Toronto, Canada) alternate between documentation and poetic narration in a compelling way. For the first time in Germany, the SCHIRN is presenting deep insight into the oeuvre of this Filipino-Canadian artist and filmmaker by showing a selection of her works, including her latest production “Search for Life: Diptych” (2024–25).
Humans and nature, homeland and diaspora, rituals and utopias are the recurring themes of Comilang’s multilayered tales of future and past, which the artist herself calls “science-fiction documentaries.” She immerses herself deep in the background stories and augments her research on historical facts with fictional elements and biographical experiences. Here, she focuses on the everyday lives of Filipino maids in Hong Kong or Thai migrants in Germany, as well as sailors on freight ships and the tradition of pearl fishing. In her lavishly produced films, which she frequently presents in interaction with textile works and sculptural objects as a part of her extensive installations, the artist spotlights colonial and postcolonial interrelationships and examines the effects of mobility, work, and capital on societal and cultural contexts.
Curator Martina Weinhart (SCHIRN)
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Suzanne Duchamp
October 10, 2025 – January 11, 2026
The SCHIRN is presenting the world’s first comprehensive solo exhibition on Suzanne Duchamp (1889–1963), a pioneer of the Dada movement. From abstract paintings and experimental collages to figurative representations, the retrospective features the multifaceted oeuvre of the artist, who contributed to the development of Dadaism in the 1910s and 1920s. Although Duchamp’s works are represented in world-famous collections, her artistic significance long remained overshadowed by her brothers Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Villon.
The focus of this show lies in particular on Suzanne Duchamp’s innovative treatment of materials and media. By combining aspects of the readymade, poetic inscriptions, and geometric forms, she created a unique, subtle, and humorous pictorial language. In addition to her Dadaist works, the exhibition also illustrates Duchamp’s later creative phases, including her figural and landscape paintings from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as her abstract late works.
Curators Talia Kwartler and Ingrid Pfeiffer (SCHIRN)
Program in Frankfurt’s Bockenheim district
from 2026
Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca
January 29 – April 26, 2026
The film installations of Bárbara Wagner (b. 1980, Brasília, Brazil) & Benjamin de Burca (b. 1975, Munich, Germany) focus on cultural movements and collective practices experienced outside of the established circuits of contemporary art. Their productions are characterized by collaboration, with those portrayed in their films actively participating in the design of script, set, music, choreography, and mise-en-scène. Wagner & de Burca’s audiovisual works underscore implicitly pressing sociopolitical issues in the performers’ communities and explore how people find a voice through the cultural expressions they identify with.
The SCHIRN is presenting the first comprehensive solo exhibition by the artist duo in Germany with a specially developed new production. The new work will engage with the local hardcore scene, and in particular with Straight Edge (“sXe” for short), a movement which arose on the East Coast of the United States as “clean” counterculture within the post-hardcore punk of the 1980s. The movement rebelled against self-destructive hedonism and against the mainstream at large by renouncing drugs and meat and orienting itself toward a “do-it-yourself” aesthetic. With the post-pandemic age defining a new understanding of political and social activism and inclusion, the hardcore punk scene, including sXe, is now experiencing a notable resurgence.
Curator Katharina Dohm (SCHIRN)
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Thomas Bayrle: Fröhlich sein! (Something positive must come)
February 12 – May 10, 2026
The wide-ranging work of Thomas Bayrle (b. 1937, Berlin, Germany) studies the contrasting aspects of technology, pop and mass culture, and (ersatz) religion—describing the path from analogue technology to the digitality so omnipresent today. Bayrle reexamines popular works from art history and delves into the subject of work.
The SCHIRN is presenting a major solo exhibition by this Frankfurt-based artist. The central focus of the show lies on works from the past fifteen years of his career, together with complementary works from the 1960s and 1970s which laid the innovative foundations for his characteristic Superforms. The repetition, interconnection, and interweaving of individual elements to form a comprehensive picture is found in almost all of Bayrle’s works and is closely linked to the artist’s biography. Bayrle initially completed an apprenticeship as a machine weaver before turning his attention to commercial art and printing. The exhibition establishes a dialogue with the industrial building of the Dondorf printing factory and provides insights into sixty years of the art of Thomas Bayrle.
Curator Matthias Ulrich (SCHIRN)
And here’s another new feature: The soon-to-be-released newsletter SCHIRN MAG Monthly will give readers the opportunity to receive brand new articles, videos, podcasts, tips and specials directly to their inbox once a month.
