Schirin Kretschmann: TEN BY ONE

PEAC Museum is delighted to present TEN BY ONE, Schirin Kretschmann’s first solo exhibition at the museum. The exhibition is among the artist’s most ambitious to date, showcasing entirely new works commissioned for the show.

Schirin Kretschmann (born in Karlsruhe in 1980, lives in Berlin and Munich) explores the specificity of given situations and environments in her work. What defines a space? What visible and invisible structures shape it? What actions are embedded within it? For TEN BY ONE the artist has developed a new body of work based on the museum’s architecture, usage, and materiality. She repurposes existing materials, movement patterns, and acoustic traces, transforming their meaning through minimal interventions, performances, sound, and video works that alter the spatial experience and challenge habitual ways of perceiving. The works relate not only to the overall space but also to each other, creating ever-shifting spatial and temporal intersections. 

A large-scale installation connects the spaces into a cohesive whole: a nearly 100-meter-long gray strap, pulled taut under maximum tension, threads through the museum’s nine exhibition rooms and entrance area. Large foam pieces act as buffers between strap and wall, deforming under the strain. In one video work, the artist allows a self-navigating robotic vacuum cleaner to move autonomously through the spaces, continuously recording the ceiling as it moves. This reveals architectural details that normally escape our habitual gaze. Meanwhile, another installation explores the idea that images refer to something beyond their material presence—even when their substrate has been fragmented and lies scattered at the foot of the walls. In the next intervention, Kretschmann brings seating furniture from the museum’s entrance area into the exhibition itself, incorporating elements of waiting and lingering. TEN BY ONE weaves together installation, sound, and performance: a sound work takes as its starting point a series of ten instructions that are carried out on site, recorded and then played back. The irregularly emerging sounds spread like acoustic traces through all the exhibition spaces, creating a charged atmosphere. They evoke associations with sounds from activites beyond the gallery’s opening hours—such as construction, technical work, or cleaning. Kretschmann’s performative work is based on an instruction that visitors can freely interpret and carry out.

Rather than creating closed, self-contained works, the artist combines pieces that continually reconnect with each other and remain open to unexpected interactions. Kretschmann conceives of them as elements within a spatially networked system that makes actions, transitions and disruptions visible. The institutional space remains visible while its boundaries are simultaneously dissolved.

Schirin Kretschmann (born in Karlsruhe in 1980) studied fine art, art education, as well as German language and literature in Karlsruhe, Freiburg, and Mexico City, earning her doctorate in Basel and Weimar. Her work has been shown internationally in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions. Kretschmann also regularly creates works in public space and as part of architectural projects. For many years she has been involved in artistic and curatorial research projects. She is currently developing works for indoor and outdoor spaces as part of the “Werkstatt Morsbroich” at the Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen. Since 2020, she has been professor of painting and graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.