2026 | Scholarship | Soundinstallation

Anna Schimkat
FATHER RHINE

January 29 - March 23, 2025
Opening: January 29, 2026, 7 PM 

Anna Schimkat's artistic work moves at the intersection of sculpture and sound. Whether as a performance or installation, in each context she examines location-specific processes, causes, and laws of the natural, social, and culturally created reality.

As part of her scholarship, Anna Schimkat is developing a new sound installation that engages with the Rhine as a cultural site of memory and a mythically charged European symbolic space. Wiesbaden, located in the heart of the Rhine region, serves as the starting point for the project’s compositional and installation development. In the Bellevue Hall, a place is to be created that weaves together sound, space, and memory – as a sensual approach to the river as a bearer of European history and imagination.

For centuries, the Rhine was a border, a conflict zone, and a projection surface for European identities. In mythical figures like the Loreley or Undine, fears, desires, and the ambivalent relationship of humans to nature and the unknown are reflected. The installation links historical and literary narratives with recorded sounds along the river—from its source in Switzerland to its mouth in Rotterdam— including water sounds, calls of ship horns, or the rumble of bridge traffic mixed with the tones of self-developed object instruments—into a multi-layered acoustic and visual topography.

© Photo: Nina Buttendorf, Anna Schimkat @ “ZiMMT, Leipzig”