Sophie Innmann – a precise explorer of contemporary art

Art that emerges, disappears, and resonates: The world of Sophie Innmann

Sophie Innmann (*1986 in Münchberg) is considered one of the most exciting figures in contemporary art from Germany. Her artistic development is research-based, site-specific, and process-oriented. Whether installation, intervention, sound work, or performative action: Innmann knows how to make social routines visible and actively involves the perception of viewers. As a master student of Leni Hoffmann at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe (graduating in 2014), she has formed a distinctive practice that navigates between conceptual art, social sculpture, and experimental aesthetics. Her works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, and Museum of Modern Art, Moscow.

Biography and artistic development

While a music career may belong to others, Innmann's stage is the urban space, the institution, the private environment, the digital realm. Early on, she shifted the focus of her music career-like “stage presence” to artistic research: Not the individual object, but the artistic action, its arrangement in context, and the production conditions of perception take center stage. Since 2015, she has been living and working project-based without a fixed residence – a nomadic setting that lends a particular alertness to her work. Her journeys have taken her to Paris, Barcelona, Minneapolis, Moscow, Yogyakarta, Plovdiv, Elefsina, Berlin, and the Alpine region, where this sense of being on the move condenses into works that investigate relationships, networks, and processes as aesthetic and social phenomena.

A significant building block in her artistic development is her education in Karlsruhe. There, Innmann sharpened her sensitivity to material as a conceptual figure: Painting, drawing, object, video, sound, installation, and performance appear to her not as genres but as instruments. Each decision regarding a piece follows the necessity of the concept: When is a gesture sufficient? When is collective participation necessary? When does sound become a carrier of history? Thus, a work emerges, its quality derived from precision, contextual awareness, and unpredictability.

Practice, media, and methodology: between concept and resonance

Innmann’s research-based concepts revolve around processes of appearance and disappearance. The focus is on social choreographies that structure our environment – working hours, paths, rituals, sounds. She understands composition as the arrangement of situations: things, time frames, participants, accidents. Her works activate viewers as co-actors, through which “audience” and “work” are mutually produced. This artistic method connects to traditions of conceptual and performance art, yet Innmann updates them with contemporary technologies, platform economy logics, and media ecosystems.

The outcome is formats that intentionally remain open: drawing can become a trace of an action; an installation can become the infrastructure for encounter; sound can serve as a topographical marker of a place. The production remains transparent, and the archiving – as text, photo, sound, or object – is part of the work. Thus, Innmann understands “arrangement” not just as an aesthetic but as a social act.

GoArtist: Art delivery service and critique of platform economy

In 2019, Innmann invented a model with GoArtist that is simultaneously service, performance, and artistic research. GoArtist inverts the classic reception relationship: Art comes to people – in homes, schools, institutions, on the streets. The “delivery service” does not deliver a product but a time structure where exchange, conversation, and shared experiences occur. The artistic composition lies in organizing proximity, negotiating roles, and consciously forgoing quick, consumable results. GoArtist addresses value, work, and visibility in the digital age and offers a fair alternative to algorithmically accelerated consumption.

The project has been practically tested in Germany, Switzerland, and Indonesia, supported by grants (including NEUSTART KULTUR; Stiftung Kunstfonds). GoArtist expands the repertoire of cultural education: as a complementary offering for museums, schools, or community spaces that lowers thresholds and makes art experienced as situational, reflective engagement.

Kick-off moments: Sound, work, and collective time

With “Chronicles of Work,” Innmann addresses the social rhythm of everyday life in 2020. For several weeks, bells are rung according to the guidelines of local residents – an arrangement that confronts historical work rhythms with the present. Four times daily ringing makes audible how work, religion, care, or shift operations structure our life time. The composition is minimal, the effect maximal: a place becomes a score, residents are transformed into interpreters, and the public space becomes a resonant body of a shared present.

In the project “Rhapsody (Black Forest Edition),” Innmann invites people to share whistled melodies as the sound of “home.” The anonymous whistling voice strips visual surface attributes such as age, origin, or gender from assignments – what remains is sound as a social fiction. Carried into the forest via loudspeakers and nesting boxes, human and non-human voices merge into a choir. The composition becomes an ecological and social statement: a soundscape that allows for differences and reimagines belonging.

Current projects 2024/2025: City, identity, raw density

In 2024/2025, Innmann will explore identity in an urban context in Kaiserslautern as part of the exhibition “Betze, K‑Town, Pfaff.” Her focus is on the stadium as an acoustic and emotional site of identification. The work fits into a line of work that understands urban space as a medium and activates collective narratives – from the football myth to industrial history – through sound, place, and memory.

In 2025, Innmann was also a resident artist on the gallery ship ARTE NOAH of the Kunstverein Würzburg. From her stay, the exhibition “Raw Density” emerged, where she uses the materiality, gravity, and movement of the ship as a conceptual figure. “Raw Density” combines research, site-specific observation, and an aesthetics of the minimal: small shifts that invite perception, mathematics of the everyday, physics as poetics.

Additionally, in 2025, Innmann was chosen as the “Artist of the Month” in Hof by the Forum Culture of the European Metropolitan Region of Nuremberg – an award that highlights her continuous innovative power, curatorial presence, and regional as well as international networking. In the same context, she acts as a co-initiator and director of ANTHROPOZÄNTA, which consolidates artistic perspectives on environment, society, and technology.

Exhibitions (selected) and curatorial positions

Innmann's works have been exhibited in Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Museum of Modern Art Moscow, Frac Alsace, and in the context of European Capital of Culture (Plovdiv 2019, Elefsina 2021), among others. Concurrently, she works curatively: early on, she developed offspace structures, participated in curatorial teams, and initiated the platform ANTHROPOZÄNTA in 2013 – a network project with international reach. This dual role strengthens her authority in discourses between production, mediation, and institution, showcasing how consistently she understands art as an infrastructure for the common.

Her exhibition practice remains diverse: solo presentations, participatory settings, site-specific interventions, and research with local populations. The common thread is the attention to contextual effects: How does a place shape perception? What social conditions become visible? Where is the point at which a gesture suffices – and when must it insist?

Grants, awards, and publications

Innmann’s musical career in a metaphorical sense – the precise tuning of situations – has been widely supported: working grant from Stiftung Kunstfonds (2020), funding as part of NEUSTART KULTUR, residencies including at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Fundaziun Nairs (CH), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Hangar Barcelona. In 2015, she received the Art Prize of the District of Hof for the exhibition project ANTHROPOZÄNTA. Her projects have also been supported by regional and supra-regional institutions, documenting the trustworthiness and relevance of her artistic research.

Publications include the volume “Sophie Innmann – Shortcut to the Highway” as well as catalogs and text contributions that place her practice in larger art theoretical contexts. With this, Innmann is anchored in the professional public: her expertise extends from the composition of social situations to reflections on digital spaces as landscapes.

Work method, style, and music-related aspects

Although not a musician in the strict sense, Innmann often operates in the field of sound: bells, whistling, environmental sounds, silence. Her sound installations read like scores of everyday life – with tempo (rhythm of the city), dynamics (density of events), timbre (material sounds), and form (sequence, repetition, pause). This music-related perspective opens a vocabulary that the audience understands immediately: rhythm, improvisation, call-and-response. At the same time, the work remains precisely composed: rules, intervals, entry points. Thus, art is created that is technically informed and emotionally resonant.

Material serves the idea: plywood, stone, cable ties, loudspeakers, tape, bell ropes, textiles, papers – everyday fabrics that Innmann shapes into semantic carriers. Production for her means not just creation but the setting up of a situation with measurable effects: a changed room acoustics, a newly ordered attention, a different way of walking. The echo – the most important music-related image – is central to this: What remains after disassembly?

Cultural influence and reception

Innmann’s work strengthens an art that does not preach to the public but activates it. In Kaiserslautern, she examines urban identity through sound; in the Black Forest, she conceives of home as a choir; with GoArtist, she develops a participatory infrastructure against reflexive consumption. This approach resonates in cultural institutions, educational spaces, and communities: it connects local stories with questions of work, sustainability, and digital everyday life. The response spans from art associations to museums, from municipal cultural initiatives to international residencies.

Her recognition as “Artist of the Month” in 2025 in Hof exemplifies this impact: Quality, continuity, and innovative strength become visible. Media and museum texts emphasize the clarity of her concepts and the sensitivity in dealing with places. Critical reception additionally notes the internal logic of her projects: no effect for effect’s sake, but precisely set parameters that allow for perception and participation.

Conclusion: Why experience Sophie Innmann now?

Because her art draws attention to structures that we overlook daily. Innmann’s works unfold not as spectacles but as clever, finely tuned compositions in which social experience becomes audible and visible. Those seeking contemporary art as a space for thought will find here a practice that stimulates curiosity, encourages engagement, and resonates long after. Recommendation: mark the upcoming projects in your calendar, seek exchange, understand your surroundings as a score – and experience Innmann’s works where they are strongest: on-site, in the moment, in conversation.

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Sophie Innmann