Sophia Süßmilch
Rhythm 67
Live performance: 28.03.2026
Curated by Nadia Ismail
Sophia Süßmilch works across media and uses performance, photography, film, and installation to play humor, taboo, and social norms off against one another. In her often body-focused actions, she places her own naked body at the center in order to openly question female sexuality, cultural contradictions, and social rules. Her performances—from butter-covered rituals to Sanatorium Süßmilch—combine vulnerability, exaggeration, and radical self-staging. For the Kunsthalle, Süßmilch is developing a new site-specific performance that alludes to Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, in which the artist exposed her body to the audience in order to make power, projection, and transgressions visible. Süßmilch transfers this work into the present by countering it with the deliberately meaningless Gen Z/Gen Alpha meme “67.” In doing so, she points to rituals and the emptiness they can assume when endlessly reproduced.
Sophia Süßmilch (born 1983 in Munich) studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich from 2006 to 2015 under Stephan Huber and completed her studies as a master student. At the same time, she was a scholarship holder of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and, within this framework, undertook a nine-month research-based study trip to the United States in 2011. From 2011 to 2013, she studied contextual painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Ashley Hans Scheirl, where she began to engage intensively with painting. Süßmilch received, among others, the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize (2018), the Visual Arts Promotion Prize of the City of Munich (2020), and in 2021 a NEUSTART KULTUR scholarship for visual artists from Kunstfonds Bonn.
Her practice encompasses photography, video, painting, sculpture, and performance. In works often grounded in autobiographical references, she addresses feminism, intimacy, life stories, and extreme situations. Central themes are the deliberate bypassing of academic value systems, the tension between quality and quantity, and failure as a principle of resistance. With humor, anger, and poetic directness, her work oscillates between ironic distance and emotional closeness. Sophia Süßmilch lives and works in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna.
Sophia Süßmilch (born 1983 in Munich) studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich from 2006 to 2015 under Stephan Huber and completed her studies as a master student. At the same time, she was a scholarship holder of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and, within this framework, undertook a nine-month research-based study trip to the United States in 2011. From 2011 to 2013, she studied contextual painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Ashley Hans Scheirl, where she began to engage intensively with painting. Süßmilch received, among others, the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize (2018), the Visual Arts Promotion Prize of the City of Munich (2020), and in 2021 a NEUSTART KULTUR scholarship for visual artists from Kunstfonds Bonn.
Her practice encompasses photography, video, painting, sculpture, and performance. In works often grounded in autobiographical references, she addresses feminism, intimacy, life stories, and extreme situations. Central themes are the deliberate bypassing of academic value systems, the tension between quality and quantity, and failure as a principle of resistance. With humor, anger, and poetic directness, her work oscillates between ironic distance and emotional closeness. Sophia Süßmilch lives and works in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna.