Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld is a visual artist and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her practice unfolds as a series of epistemic laboratories: experimental set-ups in which substances, materials, machines, sound, places, and communities become co-authors — not as tools she controls, but as agents in their own right. The question is always who or what holds the authority to produce meaning.
Her work has been shown at the Schering Stiftung Berlin (2024), Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2018), Kunsthalle Mainz (2025), and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2026), among others. She has received grants from the Stiftung Kunstfonds and the Villa Aurora as well as the Foam Talents Award (2014); a monograph was published by Spector Books in 2026.
In Kyoto she continues her research on technology and animism, focusing on religious and cultural differences that influence how humans interact with and understand (intelligent) machines. She aims to create a new participatory installation that includes clues from both cultures and enables playful interaction with machines on a spiritual level with fictional elements to reveal underlying cultural expectations.
