Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

The collaborative audio tour by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and University of Stuttgart is now available to visit at the Alte Staatsgalerie. With 21 stops developed in collaboration with students from Dr. Jessica Bundschuh's course "The Blind Witness: Poetry and Painting" and an introduction by Prof. Dr. Christiane Lange and Katharina Rohne from the Staatsgalerie, as well as Dr. Jessica Bundschuh and student assistant Sui Lung from the University, the audio tour spans approximately 70 minutes. It aims to let you rediscover paintings by artists such as Rembrandt, Johann Heinrich Füssli, Edward Burne-Jones, and Caspar David Friedrich through sensory-focused verbal descriptions, especially for blind or low vision individuals. The tour is available in English and German, with a selection of stops also being available in Ukrainian.

The objective of each audio guide entry is sensory immersion, linguistically conveying the visual world of the painting through as many senses as possible: What sounds can be heard? What does it smell like? How do fabrics and objects feel to the touch? What does the wind feel like on one’s cheek? What is the mood of the scene? 

Through this, the tour aims to create community both on an institutional level between the University and the Staatsgalerie and for visitors of various backgrounds by incorporating as many senses as possible and showcasing a diversity of voices and languages. We invite visitors to the Staatsgalerie to listen to our descriptions and reflect on our impressions to develop a relationship with these artworks embedded in a communal and public museum space!

The tour is available for online access at home or on your smartphone during your visit to the Staatsgalerie!

As an outreach collaboration project emerging from the third season of the Sensing Literature School for Talents Faculty Project, students enrolled in the summer semester 2025 Hauptseminar ‘The Poetics of Sight and Blindness’ wrote multi-lingual audio guides in German and English for 25 paintings from the permanent collection of the Staatsgalerie with the objective of making the visual arts more accessible to blind and visually-impaired visitors to the museum. In heightened and vivid language intended to elevate the less dominant senses of touch, sound, smell and taste, students approached their selected works through senses other than sight in isolation. Curators from the Staatsgalerie carefully chose works from their collection from well-known artists from the early modern period to the 19th century, like Hans Memling, Georg Flegel, Rembrandt, Edward Burne-Jones, Anselm Feuerbach, and Caspar David Friedrich, which incorporate narrative and mythological modalities that align them with the literary arts. With tech support from Dr. Toni Bernhart from the Modern German Literature Department, and the recording and editing expertise of Sui Lung, the 25 participating students will record their audio guides in early winter 2025. Starting with a welcome from the two project organizers – Katharina Rohne of the Staatsgalerie and Jessica Bundschuh of the English Literatures and Cultures Department – the digital audio guide will be available online for smartphones to accompany museum visitors on a walking tour through the Staatsgalerie collection beginning in January 2026.