Frankfurter Hauptschule
Frankfurter Hauptschule is a twenty-member art collective that came together in 2013 at the Städelschule Academy of Fine Arts in Frankfurt am Main. In recent years, the group has made a name for itself primarily with media-effective performance art. In 2024, they won the author prize at the Heidelberg Stückemarkt for their text ‘2x241 TITEL DOPPELT SO GUT WIE MARTIN KIPPENBERGER’. The Frankfurt secondary school is now making its directorial debut in the Werkraum and staging its own text itself. The Swiss premiere by Theater Basel will follow in 2026.
In 2022, the artists opened their solo exhibition ‘kANzELKuLTuR’ at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, in which they examined the connection between esotericism and fascism against the backdrop of the Querdenken demonstrations. Invited by the Oberhausen Theatre, the Frankfurt Hauptschule caused an international media response in 2020 with their intervention ‘Bad Beuys go Africa’: they faked the theft of a Beuys sculpture and its transfer to an ethnological museum in Tanzania as a gaga gesture of restitution of colonial looted art. In 2018, Frankfurt’s Chief of Police was outraged by the collective, which had placed a burnt-out patrol car in Frankfurt’s railway station district to draw attention to the police authorities’ rigid approach to drug addicts.
The collective has been teaching at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2021. Since 2024, the group has been represented by the publishing house henschel SCHAUSPIEL. In 2026, a catalogue about the first ten years of the Frankfurt Hauptschule was published by DISTANZ and their educational play ‘MOTOR’ by Merve, a continuation of Bertolt Brecht’s “Measure” and Heiner Müller’s ‘Mauser’, which they staged at the Staatstheater Kassel in the 26/27 season. Their play ‘KAFKA KITANO KASTLE’, a fusion of Kafka’s unfinished novel ‘The Castle’ and the Japanese game show ‘Takeshi’s Castle’, also premiered shortly afterwards at the Landestheater Tübingen
