2025
AMBASSADORS 2025, Karlsruhe
Photo: Laura Waterstradt & Levi Zimmermann
AMBASSADORS is an installation consisting of 120 stuffed animals that connects 12 of the most media-effective narratives of polar bears in human captivity. In the fight against the climate crisis, polar bears have become a symbolic image of nature in need of protection—an image that has etched itself into the collective memory. Each set of ten AI-generated images represents one of the twelve stories depicted in the installation. These images were transferred individually onto the backs of the 120 stuffed animals and collectively woven into an immersive Wimmelbild. In this way, the stuffed animals once again become ambassadors of an artificial population—extending the chain of representations of representations of something that once was natural, without causing harm to living beings.
COLLABORATORS
Graphic design: Dshamilja Tükerek
Sewing: Antonia Sanden, Johanna Merkelbach,
Rebecca Barbara Lob
PINK ELEPHANT 2025, Karlsruhe
Photo: Laura Waterstradt
Pink Elephant is a textile sculpture created during the Sprint Residency at Studio Hö of the Hoepfner Foundation. The work translates the saying “seeing pink elephants” into space—an idiom for hallucinations, usually caused by severe alcohol withdrawal or alcoholic hallucinosis, representing a state of delirium in which the mind fabricates bizarre sights like bright pink elephants. The work thus alludes to the context for which it was originally made and presented: the art foundation of a brewery.
2024
MY LITTLE FARM 2024, Karlsruhe
Video Stills: Alena Pfanz
MY LITTLE FARM is a series of works consisting of the objects FIELD, SHEEP, and FENCE, whose application for stress reduction is demonstrated in the video of the same name. The romanticization of country life by city dwellers is exaggerated, and elements of it are adapted to urban life and polished to a high gloss. Country life is twisted from a place of hard work into a place of leisure and relaxation, transplanted into the urban environment. Each object can be played with, as demonstrated in the video. Parts of the series have been shown at the Badischer Kunstverein and the ZKM.
COLLABORATORS
Camera: Alena Pfanz
Music/Sound: Paul Bachmaier
Assistant: Johanna Merkelbach
2023
DISRUPTIVE WORLDING 2023, Karlsruhe
Photos: Karolina Sobel
The performance-activated exhibition DISRUPTIVE WORLDING staged a fictional water pipe burst in the ZKM Pavilion, which became the reason why the equally fictional exhibition originally planned for the space was canceled. Instead, the audience was invited to an opening in the garden in front of the pavilion, where they could watch the performers/artists pouring buckets of water from the pavilion into the garden. Following this narrative, the works of the exhibiting artists—disguised as archival materials—were performatively presented as discoveries from the archive that had surfaced during the exhibition. Hinting at the fictional layer of the exhibition, each piece engaged with the broader theme of water.
COLLABORATORS
Nils Bergmann, Sophia Rosa Bollinger, Jaya Demmer,
Lina Determann, Charlotte Eifler, Laura Haak
Moritz Simon, Nis Petersen, Sophie Reißfelder
Jette Schwabe, Ebba Fransén Waldhör
APOCALYPSE 2023, Tenerife
Video Stills: Jakob Suranovsky
The video work APOCALYPSE is an adaptation of a short story by Sophie Catharina Xenia Metzmaier and is part of the SMOKING AREA series by Maximilian Zschiesche. The screenplay, also written by Metzmaier, consists of a dialogue between two alien figures who, while observing the demise of humanity on Earth, engage in a conversation about the responsibility they bear toward their own home planet. The video was shot in Tenerife and has been presented in various exhibitions together with the video work ROTTING HUMANKIND and the object VULCANO, which together form the SMOKING AREA series.
COLLABORATORS
Screenplay: Sophie Catherina Xenia Metzmaier
Costume: Johanna Merkelbach & Maximilian Zschiesche
Music/Sound: Paul Bachmaier
Camera: Jakob Suranovsky
Set Assistant: Alena Pfanz & Knut Kuhles
Postproduction (video): Kevin Beckmann
Performer: Sophia Rosa Bollinger & Maximilian Zschiesche
ROTTING HUMANKIND 2023, Karlsruhe
Video Stills: Kevin Beckmann
ROTTING HUMANKIND is the second video in the SMOKING AREA series and depicts the demise of humanity on Earth. To create it, Zschiesche carved two figures out of cheese, mirroring the two alien figures in the Apocalypse video. Over a period of two months, he allowed them to rot and recorded the entire process in time-lapse. It was important that humanity be wiped out while other life forms, such as mold, survived.
COLLABORATORS
Camera: Kevin Beckmann
2022
DIE SIPPE 2022, Karlsruhe
Photos: Bernd Hentschel
DIE SIPPE is a performance in four acts, developed by Maximilian Zschiesche in collaboration with the participating performers. The starting point of the research that laid the foundation for the piece was the performers’ biographies, experiences, and encounters with the themes of origin, gender, education, and property, from which the structure of the acts was derived. Based on the results of this research, Marie Charlotte Elsner wrote a text, which was collaged by Sanaa Attar and staged by Maximilian Zschiesche, who designed an object/prop archive that is cleared out, negotiated, and rearranged over the course of the performance as the themes of the four acts are debated.
COLLABORATORS
Production: Ben Rentz & Yoreme Walz
Text: Marie Charlotte Elsner
Costume: Johanna Merkelbach
Dramaturgy: Sanaa Attar
Music: Luise Peschko
Assistant: Rebecca Barbara Lob
Graphic Design: Ben Rentz & Sarah Nelly Mettendorf
Trailer: Kevin Beckmann
Performer: Marie Charlotte Elsner, Caleb Felder,
Sophie Catharina Xenia Metzmaier, Aisha Shige,
Clara Nagel & Sarah Nelly Mettendorf
Stagehands: Jordi Kühn & Lino Bachmann
2021
INBETWEENS 2021, Karlsruhe
Photos: Ben Rentz
INBETWEENS is a video installation developed for the exhibition Autobiography – Performance – Space, at whose center a simple white platform displays the artist’s cut-off childhood hair. Hidden from sight, two speakers beneath the platform play a whispered text reflecting on the experience of wearing long hair as a child, addressing the ways in which this appearance is read in relation to the perceived gender of the person wearing it. On the floor in front of the platform, a roughly 10-meter-long video of the hair moving underwater is projected. To get close enough to understand the text and to see the cut-off hair in detail, visitors must walk across the projection. For additional context and serving as a signature of the work, a small photo of the artist wearing long hair as a child is displayed in a lightbox on the wall next to the installation.
COLLABORATORS
Video Recording: Ben Rentz
Audio Recording: Gerda Iguchi