air shelter (FFM)

At our Frankfurt location in Sachsenhausen, the gallery offers two distinctive exhibition spaces. One is a gallery room located in a former workshop, providing a versatile environment for contemporary art presentations. The second is an additional exhibition space situated directly beneath it in a historic air-raid shelter in the basement. The shelter retains its raw architectural character and offers a unique atmosphere for artistic displays. Please note that both spaces are accessible via stairs. Visitors to the air-raid shelter should proceed with caution and enter at their own responsibility. Our team is happy to assist whenever needed.

“One’s sunset is another one’s sunrise” (2025), starting 3 December 2025.

During Jacqueline Hen’s solo exhibition “I saw a rainbow at midnight … At night, all cats are grey“, both levels of the gallery will be activated. In addition to the main exhibition space, the air shelter in the basement will also be part of the show. On display is the work One’s sunset is another one’s sunrise. The work explores a global perspective on the sun – which neither rises nor sets, and even shines at night – yet remains deeply embedded in cultural projections, power structures, and constructed realities. In this new installation, the sun interacts with a water basin filled with black-colored water that reflects its particles, while wind sets them in motion, accompanied by an immersive sound installation.

Jacqueline Hen works at the intersection of design, art, and research, exploring possibilities for social transformation through communication and participation. In her light art objects and large-scale immersive installations, she explores the unconscious perception of one’s own movement, tension, posture, and position in space (proprioception) as well as experiences of contingency (Luhmann, Parsons) in the intertwining of physical and virtual living spaces. In her research and teaching Hen focuses on developing a contemporary „basic doctrine of design“ that relates to all areas of analog, digital, 2d and 3d design techniques and addresses universal principles such as symmetry, rhythm and interaction. 

Photo: One’s sunset is another one’s sunrise, exhibition view air shelter Galerie 3AP, Frankfurt. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie 3AP.

Epiphenomenon (2025)

During Nadine Karl’s exhibition Epiphenomenon, both levels of the gallery will be activated. In addition to the main exhibition space, the air shelter in the basement will also be part of the show.

In her artistic practice, Nadine Karl explores the multilayered entanglement of temporality and fiction. At the core of her work are analytical dialogues between sculpture and installation that critically question conventional, linear structures of time. Her works transform ephemeral and potential elements into complex, overlapping spatiotemporal configurations that deconstruct concepts of identity and collective memory, making a dynamic, fleeting reality perceptible. A key feature of her practice is the multidimensional approach through various senses: olfactory elements and sound are purposefully used to create immersive experiential spaces that expand and destabilize perception. In doing so, eco-feminist questions increasingly come to the forefront.

Karl draws on discourses of ecological feminism, planetary empathy, and the „more-than-human world“ to imagine new forms of connectedness between human and non-human beings. Her installations open up (fictional) spaces that stage time and space as flexible constructs shaped by social and ecological factors. They invite viewers to reflect on their own positions within the web of relationships between body, environment, and narrative. Literature and film – as condensed forms of time – play a central role in Karl’s work. Her practice employs various cinematic and literary vocabularies, oscillates between genres and narrative forms, and generates hybrid interspaces.

These complex approaches culminate in the exhibition “Epiphenomen”, which incorporates both the gallery space – located in a former workshop in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen – and the adjoining air raid shelter in the basement. The basement becomes an archive of memory, filled with sand. This space functions as a threshold between above and below, inside and outside, memory and imagination. In an era increasingly focused on linear notions of time and archived identity constructs, Karl’s work opens a poetic terrain where the sand not only trickles, flows, or falls – but tells stories. At the center is a mixture of fill- and silver sand – a material that functions both as a fragment of landscape and as a metaphysical cipher. The sand recalls natural erosion processes and the human inability to control time. Referencing Hiroshi Teshigahara’s film Woman in the Dunes (1964), the sand evokes an existential threat: the human as prisoner in an amorphous, boundless world of granularity, memory, and ritual. 

In the gallery space, the exhibition focuses on a series of talismans and photographs. The photographs were taken during an artist residency in a desert and reflect its extreme topography, lighting conditions, and geological depth. Rather than being documentary, the photographs function as poetic fields of visual resonance. The sculptural works – fragile glass talismans with rough surfaces – are based on the motif of transformation: they reference fulgurites, glassy formations created by lightning strikes, appearing as ciphers of sudden metamorphosis.

Embedded symbols such as hourglasses, hair, or worry dolls point to a practice of externalizing internal states. Their presentation under glass domes quotes museological systems of order but undermines their legibility – the talismans remain enigmatic, somewhere between protective object, memory carrier, and imagined narrative. Without accusation, yet with quiet intensity, Nadine Karl’s work sketches the sparse silhouette of a possible reality – not as prophecy, but as an imagined future in the tension between memory, fiction, and geological truth.

Photo: Joëlle Pidoux. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie 3AP

During Julie Mia’s solo exhibition “Ashton Hall“, both levels of the gallery will be activated. In addition to the main exhibition space, the air shelter in the basement will also be part of the show.

Julie Mia’s interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, painting, photography, and installation, unfolding over extended periods. Rooted in transformation and translation – from analog to digital, object to image, function to symbol – her work begins with everyday materials that she alters and recontextualizes, stripping them of original meaning. Objects become poetic, open forms through processes of layering, erasing, and repainting, reflecting ambiguity and temporality. She employs diverse techniques, including bronze and wax casting, 3D printing, and steelwork, exploring resistance and permanence. Her evolving visual language invites viewers to experience materiality and meaning as fluid, emphasizing the continuous process of change and reinterpretation. Painting plays a central role in her practice, permeating all processes and works: it is both the starting point and recurring focus of her creative process. Her sculptures and installations emerge as thoughtful conceptual extensions that engage with and expand the language of her painting, reflecting a cohesive and evolving artistic vision.

On display is the work Vanity, a paraffin cast of a kitchen knife mounted on synthetic felt within a plexiglass case. The piece investigates the ambivalent nature of the knife, an object that can both preserve and take life. By rendering the blade unusable, Vanity transforms a potentially harmful tool into a symbol of peace and contemplation.

Those interested in exploring Julie Mia’s work beyond the exhibition are invited to visit the „Union“ in eastern Frankfurt, where her work Vanity – a 3-meter-high wall sculpture depicting a knife tray – was installed last year.

Photo: Joëlle Pidoux. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie 3AP.

Der Blick ins Unbekannte (2023/2025)
Site-specific video installation, HD projection on stainless steel mesh (250 µm)

In Der Blick ins Unbekannte (A Glimpse into the Unknown), Willi Bucher presents a site-specific projection that intertwines visual, material, and existential dimensions. At the center is a high-definition video projected onto fine stainless steel mesh – a precise, semi-transparent industrial material whose structure evokes neural networks through its 250-micron weave.

The image layers three visual components: a medical CT scan of the brain, a photographic portrait, and a hand-drawn line drawing. This composition becomes a hybrid – merging inner visibility (the brain), outer identity (portrait), and symbolic abstraction (drawing/text). The work reflects on the limits of perception, rooted in Bucher’s personal experience of a sudden loss of vision due to an eye infarction. Beyond the clinical event, the installation explores the uncertain zone between sensing and knowing – where intuition arises before clarity. In this space, the body is no longer a fixed image but a fragile interface between the physical and the conceptual. Bucher’s work resonates with traditions of body-based art from Arnulf Rainer to Bruce Nauman, and with media artists like Gary Hill and Bill Viola, who use the body as a vessel for inner states.

Installed in the context of Julie Mia’s exhibition, the projection gains further resonance as it intersects not only different media, but also artistic voices. The mesh becomes a literal and metaphorical interface – between space and image, artist and viewer, diagnosis and self. Der Blick ins Unbekannte questions how identity is shaped by medical imaging, and how art can reclaim that image through complexity, ambiguity, and transformation.

The work Inflect by the artist Jacqueline Hen was created in close connection with her large-scale installation Light High, for which she won the Unna Light Art Prize in 2019. Both works explore themes of space, sound, the digital and the analog, as well as how humans perceive these structures and principles of order. Consciously with sensory stimuli and the impressions they evoke plays a central role in the artist’s work. 

Upon entering the air-raid shelter, two acoustic signals can be heard, accompanied by blue light. The two sound tracks consist of rising and falling tones, which create the illusion of an infinitely ascending or descending scale. This acoustic illusion, first described in 1964 by psychologist Roger N. Shepard, complements the installation, which, through optical illusion, creates the impression of an infinite light tunnel. This is achieved by two parallel ’spy mirrors‚ with a circle of light in the middle. Especially in the participatory interaction of multiple viewers approaching the installation from both sides, another sensory impression arises, where the individuals‘ faces overlap – they seem to merge. What self-image, what parts of the self and the other can be recognized here? The installation brings this experience to life. Photo: Thorsten Wagner