A Porsche as a resonating body: for her exhibition marking the Kurt Schwitters Prize 2026, Nevin Aladağ takes an object from her own family history as her starting point. The car belonged to her father Ismail, who died in 2023. The Sprengel Museum Hannover has announced that Aladağ is transforming it into a playable sculpture – incorporating instruments such as the saz, cabasa and accordion. Ahead of the opening, no public description has yet detailed exactly how the components will be arranged on the vehicle and made playable. This open question is itself part of the work: a familiar object is intended not merely to evoke someone’s memory, but to produce sound.
The work is personal, but has not been presented as a private relic. Aladağ connects her family history with an artistic enquiry that has revolved for years around objects, their origins and their cultural significance. In Hannover, this strand takes on a new, explicitly biographical intimacy.
When Objects Begin to Play
Nevin Aladağ was born in Van, Turkey, in 1972 and grew up in Stuttgart. From 1994 to 2000, she studied sculpture under Olaf Metzel at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. She now lives in Berlin and has taught ‘Sculpture in Motion’ at the Dresden University of Fine Arts since 2019. Her work encompasses sculpture, installation, video and performance; she repeatedly asks how people and places are shaped by objects, sounds and cultural traditions.
In ‘Music Room’, she turned furniture into instruments. In the 2009 video work ‘City Language I’, she allows environmental forces to make musical instruments sound: air, water and animals take on roles usually performed by musicians. SFMOMA describes these works as explorations of how identity and community are formed. Sound is not merely an accompaniment to a sculpture here. It changes how an object is perceived – and who can set it in motion.
The Porsche brings this interest into a different set of relationships. A car is an everyday utility, a technical object and a potential repository of journeys taken together. Yet whether it holds such memories in this particular case, or what significance the car had for the family, has not yet been explained in any detail. Only the biographical connection is certain: it was her father’s vehicle. The sculpture does not turn it into a mere proxy for grief; it gives the object a new function. Rather than being driven, it is to be activated musically.
Memory as Collaboration
Collaboration with musicians is central to Aladağ’s practice. The Sprengel Museum has announced a musical activation of the installation for the award ceremony, with further performances as part of the exhibition programme. How the participants will make the individual elements of the car sound, which instrument makers or musicians are involved in its development, and whether the work envisages specially composed sequences remain unknown. The publicly available announcements also contain no specific statement by the artist on these decisions.
These gaps matter: they cannot be filled with a ready-made interpretation. Rather, the announced work stands at a threshold between private memory and public event. The car remains connected to a family history, but becomes an instrument that needs other hands and ears. Memory thus appears not as a closed narrative, but as something that can be set in motion anew through playing together.
On 27 November 2026, Aladağ is due to receive the Kurt Schwitters Prize at the Sprengel Museum; the exhibition is scheduled to run from 28 November to 21 February 2027. The prize recognises artists who bring together different disciplines or open up new areas of artistic practice. In Aladağ’s work, this connection becomes audible and physical: an everyday object becomes a sculpture, and the sculpture does not remain silent. What this means for the memory of her father will only become clearer through conversation with the artist and encounters with the work.
Original reviewed by the editors · 26 October 2026
