Sabine Himmelsbach
Landis & Gyr Stiftung Residency
2026
Since 2012, Sabine Himmelsbach is director of HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel. After studying art history in Munich, she worked for galleries in Munich and Vienna from 1993–1996 and later became project manager for exhibitions and conferences for the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, Austria. In 1999, she became exhibition director at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. From 2005–2011, she was the artistic director of the Edith-Russ-House for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany. In 2011, she curated gateways. Art and Networked Culture for the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn as part of the European Capital of Culture Tallinn 2011 program.
Her exhibitions at HEK in Basel include Ryoji Ikeda (2014), Poetics and Politics of Data (2015), Rafael Lozano Hemmer: Preabsence (2016), unREAL (2017), Lynn Hershman Leeson: Anti-Bodies, Eco-Visionaries (2018), Entangled Realities. Living with Artificial Intelligence (2019), Making FASHION Sense and
Real Feelings. Emotion and Technology (2020), Anne Dukhee Jordan, Collective Worldbuilding: Art in the Metaverse, Exploring the Decentralized Web: Art on the Blockchain (2023), Libby Heaney: Quantum Soup (2024) or Quantum Visions (2025). In 2021, she realized the Online exhibition and
conference Hybrid by Nature. Human.Machine.Interaction in collaboration with Goethe-Instituts of East Asia. In 2022, she curated Earthbound – In Dialogue with Nature for the European Capital of Culture Esch-sur-Alzette in Luxembourg.
As a writer and lecturer, she is dedicated to topics related to media art and digital culture. In 2025, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel for her commitment to making scientific questions understandable to a broad audience through the language of art.
Landis & Gyr Stiftung, Switzerland
The Landis & Gyr foundation awards studio scholarships to Swiss artists and cultural professionals in London, Budapest, Sofia and Zug. Its London-based residency partnership with Acme was established in 1987, and provides six month long work/live opportunities for ten Swiss artists per year. Artists are selected for the programme directly by Landis & Gyr Stiftung and must demonstrate a track record of achievement in their field. Over two hundred visual artists, curators, writers, musicians and composers have benefitted from the programme. Residencies are based in Stepney, E1 and are available to Swiss residents only
For more information visit lg-stiftung.ch.
