IM KINOSAAL
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With: Antonia Alessia Virginia Beeskow, Gregor Darman, Dominik Geis, Alexandra Gruebler, Lukas Heerich, KOIR, Lilli Lake, Aylin Leclaire, Stefan Schneider, Gerhard Stäbler & Kunsu Shim, Nikolai Szymanski, Julian Westermann and DECHA
The year 2025 marks a very special moment for Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, as it is a year of farewell. A farewell to the striking concrete cube on Grabbeplatz, which is set to undergo extensive renovations starting in April 2026 and will close its doors for about three years. But it is also a (temporary) farewell to our many neighbours – Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, the bookstore Walther König, Kom(m)ödchen and Salon des Amateurs – the spatial and cultural proximity that has shaped this building for decades.
With the exhibition IM KINOSAAL, we now turn our attention to the audiovisual history of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf’s neighbour- hood. Düsseldorf is internationally renowned for its influential music and sound culture, which has long been closely intertwined with the visual arts. In the 1970s, bands such as Kraftwerk, Neu! and La Düsseldorf played a key role in the emergence of electronic music and went on to influence generations of musicians around the world. Punk, Krautrock and Neue Deutsche Welle with bands like DAF, Die Toten Hosen and Fehlfarben had their roots in the underground scene centred around the artist’s bar Ratinger Hof on Ratinger Strasse. Ratinger Hof was also a meeting place for artists studying or teaching at nearby Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In the decades that followed, the city remained a vital hub for experimental sound art, punk, new wave and techno.
While the sound history of the 1970s and ’80s in Düsseldorf has already been widely explored through exhibitions, publications and symposia, we now turn our focus to developments since 2000 and the current artistic landscape: from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, whose faculty and students have long pursued interdisciplinary and collaborative work with sound and music, to Salon des Amateurs, founded in 2004 by former academy students Aron Mehzion, Detlef Weinrich and Stefano Brivio in the Kunsthalle building. As an artist-run bar and cultural meeting place, the Salon has gained recognition far beyond Düsseldorf and remains a key venue for artistic exchange and musical experimentation.
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf itself has long served as a stage for performances, concerts and the fusion of sound and visual art, a place for experimentation and interdisciplinary exchange.
The exhibition IM KINOSAAL thus follows in the tradition of numerous projects and formats such as düsseldorf sounds (2007), Kunsthalle BÜHNE (2011–2014), time_based_academy (2015–2016), and Conrad Schnitzler – “Sometimes it gets out of hand and turns into music” (2022), all of which are exemplary of this history.
The exhibition IM KINOSAAL’s namesake and central venue is one of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf’s most striking architectural features: the Kinosaal (cinema hall). With ceilings nearly 12 meters high and a 17-meter-wide front wall, the space exudes a monumental and overwhelming, yet sublime atmosphere – a room that challenges perception and forms the spatial starting point of the exhibition. Over the course of 13 weeks, it will be transformed into a monumental, ever-evolving cinema through a wall-sized video projection and an immersive sound installation. 13 artists will each use the space for one week as a stage for audiovisual experiments, experiences and interventions. They explore the interplay between art and sound in diverse forms: from installation-based sound art, (music) videos and digital compositions to performative formats and public rehearsals.
The participating artists are central figures in Düsseldorf’s vibrant and ever-evolving contemporary art and music scene. Characterised by collective working methods, the blurring of genre boundaries and intergenerational dialogue, the exhibition captures a snapshot in the current artistic and musical landscape.
The exhibition also pays special tribute to Salon des Amateurs, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2024, marking two decades of inspiring neighbourly ties with Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Known for its excellently curated music programme, the Salon has, over the years, brought out numerous renowned musicians, DJs and producers. Artists such as Lena Willikens, Jan Schulte (Bufiman), Stabil Elite and Detlef Weinrich (Tolouse Low Trax), as well as labels like Themes For Great Cities, TAL, Candomblé and Offen Music, all have their roots here. The city’s electronic music scene has been profoundly shaped by Salon des Amateurs, which remains a vibrant gathering place for artists and students from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and is widely recognised well beyond the city.
In close collaboration with the team and many key figures who have shaped the Salon over the years, a retrospective has been created specifically for the exhibition, located on the gallery of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. It serves as an archive, a space of remembrance and a tribute to a place where creative exchange, community and nightlife have always gone hand in hand. Posters, flyers, photographs and videos form a subjective archive that captures the cultural significance of the Salon for Kunsthalle’s wider environment in a rich, polyphonic manner.
Timetable
7. – 15.6.: Alexandra Gruebler
17. – 22.6.: Stefan Schneider
24. – 29.6.: Gerhard Stäbler & Kunsu Shim
1. – 6.7.: Dominik Geis
8. – 13.7.: KOIR
15. – 20.7.: Antonia Alessia Virginia Beeskow
22. – 27.7.: Lukas Heerich
29.7. – 3.8.: Lilli Lake
5. – 10.8.: Nikolai Szymanski
12. – 17.8.: Julian Westermann
19. – 24.8.: Gregor Darman
25. – 31.8.: Aylin Leclaire
2. – 7. 9.: DECHA
The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive program of educational and supporting events, including concerts, performances, and talks.
Images
Antonia Alessia Virginia Beeskow studied Archaeology at the University of Cologne, Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus Liebig University Giessen, and completed a Master’s degree in Sound and Reality at the Institute for Music and Media in Düsseldorf. She is the recipient of the 2023 North Rhine-Westphalia State Award for Music. Her radio piece Ecce Sigh! Siren calls, still I feel the same was awarded the Karl Sczuka Förderpreis in 2024. As an artist, sound designer, and performer, Beeskow works interdisciplinarily in the fields of radio play, sound art, performance, dance, and theater across the German-speaking and international scene.
In the sound installation Un ménage de sorcières, Beeskow responds to the brutalist architecture of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf using techniques of musique concrète, a form of electroacoustic music based on the processing and manipulation of everyday sounds. Architectural elements of the building are transformed into loudspeakers by using transducers, turning the space itself into a resonating body and the concrete into a vibrating membrane.
Photo: Antonia Alessia Virginia Beeskow
Gregor Darman’s artistic focus lies in the field of electronic music. He completed a degree at the Robert Schumann University of Music and is currently studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Darman is a co-founder of the Düsseldorf-based label Candomblé and a member of the music projects Folie 2, Phaser Boys, and LSW (Lifestyle West), which have performed both in Germany and internationally. He is also a member of the curatorial board of the Salon des Amateurs, where he serves as a resident DJ.
Conversation Magic explores the endless and increasingly complex continuum of language and communication in contemporary society. The featured works are united by a shared focus: the search for time-based responses that create space for emerging, community-driven forms of expression.
At the core of Dominik Geis’ work is the body as a stage and mirror for social, cultural, and media inscriptions. He explores how performances construct identity, shape perception, and reveal power structures. These processes are translated into choreographic found-footage video collages that weave image, time, and sound into dynamic dramaturgies. Aesthetics and analysis intertwine through a play of ruptures, frictions, and divergences.
The 3D video animation rhythm is a theatrical staging of masculinity. In it, Dominik Geis explores the gestures and role models of masculinity; digitally animated figures are assigned specific gestures and movements that reflect these roles. A digital stage space, in which animated figures move, forms the framework of the performance.
Alexandra Gruebler is a Berlin-based composer, producer and performer of electroacoustic music. Through her solo project Baal & Mortimer, her artistic practice employs a dialogical interaction between the topography of her voice and various processed instruments such as the psaltery, bagpipes, acoustic artefacts and poetics.
In the exhibition, Alexandra Gruebler presents her work After The Periphery. After The Periphery is a sound installation on celestial mechanics, sonic abstraction, and grief. In the format of an audio essay and through experimental scores, the work explores the Roche limit – a point in space where everything that comes too close breaks apart – in relation to the materialities of loss. The piece uses the setting of the Kinosaal at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf to sonically map a liminal zone of polyphony, peripheries, and membranes.
Photo: © Marijn Degenaar
Lukas Heerich’s work investigates layers and thresholds, both material and immaterial, excavating tensions between protection and vulnerability, form and dissolution. Drawing invisible threads between sound, art, and architectural intervention, Heerich doesn’t resolve contradictions but instead creates spaces where they can resonate together, producing experiences that are at once immediate and unfathomable.
Photo: © Eva Baales
KOIR (founded in 2024 by Prof. Ari Benjamin Meyers and his class) is a vocal, musical, and physically performative practice based at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. KOIR explores and performs pieces from a wide musical spectrum – ranging from Hildegard von Bingen and Pauline Oliveros to Talking Heads and Kraftwerk.
With this exhibition, KOIR steps into the public eye for the first time, activating Kunsthalle Düsseldorf under the title KONZERT for an entire week, featuring public warm-ups, rehearsals and a concluding concert. At the heart of the project lies the question: “What can a concert be for us – for KOIR?” In addition to engaging with existing works, KOIR will also present three newly commissioned compositions, which will premiere over the course of the week.
Photo: © Ari Benjamin Meyers/KOIR
Düsseldorf-based artist Lilli Lake develops her working method in dialogue with concepts of sonic feminist materialism.
Her multimedia works are performatively composed of sound, space and sculpture. In her site- and context-specific projects, she explores the interface between visible and invisible materials.
Her work Off her stage locates the offstage as a parallel space of agency beyond the spectacle. Positioned between fragmented instruments and the cinematic codings of the female voice shaped by male narratives, she declares the detail a method of resistance.
Photo: Ardelle Schneider
Aylin Leclaire creates narratives with her works that explore power structures and human interactions. She uses a variety of materials and media to represent the political, emotional, and spatial aspects of states. A constant in her work is a holistic approach. To achieve this, she uses sound and music, allowing viewers to immerse themselves in places, stories, and situations.
In the exhibition, Aylin Leclaire presents the expansive installation Chronotopic Recording, in which she stages an abandoned laboratory setting. The installation is part of a long-term space opera project that moves between musical film, sculptural spatial installation and interactive opera. Through various sequences, it explores questions of cultural memory, intelligence, alienation, identity and responsibility, set against the backdrop of a speculative sci-fi world. The scenography in the Kinosaal is complemented by a multichannel sound installation, in which Aylin Leclaire works with musical motifs and song fragments from the opera, among other elements.
The Düsseldorf-based musician and producer Stefan Schneider has been dedicated to electronic music since 1994. He has collaborated with artists such as Katharina Grosse, Dieter Möbius, and Susanna Gartmayer. In 2022, he co-curated the exhibition Conrad Schnitzler – „Manchmal artet es in Musik aus” (Conrad Schnitzler – “Sometimes It Escalates into Music”) at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, in collaboration with Linnea Semmerling (Stiftung IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute).
The films Drawing the Line, 2006, and Floating Islands, 2023, share a related narrative structure and a deep engagement with the cyclical processes of nature. At their core lies observation—of the approaching storm over Mount Ararat or the quiet rhythms of arrival and departure. Both works are marked by a distinct musicality in editing and visual composition. Drawing the Line will be presented at the Kunsthalle for the first time with a specially composed score. Floating Islands features a richly layered soundtrack combining field recordings, music, and spoken texts.
Photo: © Ursula Schulz-Dornburg
The duo Gerhard Stäbler and Kunsu Shim has been a regular guest at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf for over ten years, performing an annual PerformanceConcert. They are internationally renowned representatives of contemporary music and co-founded EarPort in the 1990s, a space for experimental music and the meeting of the arts, located at the Duisburg Harbor.
Central theme of the project ÜBERGÄNGE, featuring videos by Taejoong Kim, music by Kunsu Shim & Gerhard Stäbler and a performance concert, is an aphorism by Walter Benjamin from Passagen, Durchgänge, Übergänge (1927–1940), in which he criticizes the “false romanticism” of seeking the extraordinary in the individual rather than in the collective process and the history of becoming human. This perspective on supposed progress through individualization and the glorification of isolated domains forms the point of dparture for the performance concert, which constitutes the core of the project. Works by Kyungwoo Chun, Taejoong Kim, Anton Lukoszevieze, Arnold Schoenberg, Kunsu Shim, and Gerhard Stäbler for string instruments and video interweave with Taejoong Kim’s audiovisual works, created over the past decade and partly conceived specifically for this performance concert.
Photo: © Taejoong Kim, Quartett
Nikolai Szymanski is a freelance artist, composer, and musician from Düsseldorf, and studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. As a founding member of the band Stabil Elite and with solo projects such as AIRCHINA, he has been active as a musician for over a decade. In his artistic work, he uses photography, film/video, installation, text, and sound, with a particular focus on the structures of cinematic storytelling and non-linearity.
Deep Down is a fictional exploration of Antarctica. Based on the hypothesis of an expedition, real geological, ecological and historical references are interwoven with speculative narratives and staged correspondences.
Photo: © Luis Nelsen
DECHA is the musical solo project of multidisciplinary artist Viktoria Wehrmeister, based in Düsseldorf. She began in the 1990s as part of Klaus Dinger’s band project la! NEU? and co-founded TORESCH in 2014 with Detlef Weinrich and Jan Wagner. Her hybrid compositions range from lo-fi to polyphonic sound arrangements, and she uses her voice playfully, shifting between bright and dark tones, thus transcending clear gender identities.
In the exhibition, Viktoria Wehrmeister presents a collaborative music video by Hedda Roman and DECHA, a video documentation of a DECHA performance, as well as two music videos and a video documentation on TORESCH by Jan Wagner.
Photo: © Jan Wagner
In his work, Julian Westermann explores the tension between alienated wilderness and pop culture. He works in various media, ranging from painting and sculpture to site-specific installations and actions that often blur the line between concert and performance. He uses self-produced pop music to create layered, sensory experiences.
Feathering is a six-day audiovisual performative installation in which Julian Westermann explores the longing for a connection with a nature that feels both familiar and estranged. A filmed performance, showing a kayak from a bird’s-eye view, is shaped like an eye and drifts in a continuous loop across the water. Simultaneously, a live sound composition is created from within a tent placed inside the Kinosaal, accompanying the video. Just as the eye in the film becomes an abstracted organ of perception, the tent transforms into an organ of voice, imagination and invisible action. Visibility and concealment, past and present, enter into dialogue. Two temporal layers interweave into a ritual of multisensory perception.
Photo: © Julian Westermann
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