27.06.2026 / 11 a.m./ Schloss Balmoral, Villenpromenade 11, Bad Ems

Alchemy has long been misunderstood as a quest for transformation through mastery: the conversion of base matter into gold, the pursuit of perfection through refinement. Yet beneath this familiar narrative lies another history, one concerned not with completion, but with process; not with the finished object, but with the material traces left in its wake. The group exhibition “The Remnants of Alchemy: Trials & Tribulations“, curated by Kamogelo Walaza, turns towards this alternative genealogy, attending to the fragments, remnants, tools, experiments, and abandoned propositions that accumulate within artistic practice.
The exhibition emerged through conversations and studio visits with participating artists. Rather than selecting completed works, the curatorial process has centred on listening, tracing, and uncovering the stories embedded within the material residue of making. What appears here is not the artwork detached from its conditions of production, but fragments of a practice still in motion. Each object carries with it a history of repetition, doubt, desire, and experimentation. Together they form a constellation of trials and tribulations through which artistic transformation becomes visible. The exhibition takes place within the white cube, that familiar architecture of clean surfaces and finished stories. Yet rather than treating the gallery as a vessel for completed objects, The Remnants of Alchemy approaches it as a temporary workbench. Into its ordered space enter worn tools, abandoned experiments, fragments, notes, and materials still carrying the weight of unrealised possibilities. The gallery becomes a space for what it has often overlooked: the labour of making, the hesitations that alter direction, the residue left behind by transformation. For a brief moment, the white cube is occupied by process rather than product, becoming a space where uncertainty, vulnerability, and becoming are allowed to remain visible.

Text by Kamogelo Walaza, curator-in-residence at ARSB.

Participating artists of ARSB:
CHAVELI SIFRE
JAKOB FORSTER
JALEH TANNAZ TAVASSOLI
KITSO LYN LELLIOTT
NAZANIN HAFEZ
SIMON SHIM-SUTCLIFFE

Opening: 27.06.2026 / 11 a.m./ Schloss Balmoral, Villenpromenade 11, Bad Ems

The artists and curator will be present.