Image: © Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. Solarceptors, VR installation, 2025. Developed within Plants_Intelligence, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF, 2022–2025)
Kunsthalle Mannheim will present ‘Solarceptors’, an immersive new-media exhibition by Latvian artists Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, in the STUDIO from 3 September to 22 November 2026. The exhibition will open on 2 September at 7 p.m. and is being organised in cooperation with the International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg (IFFMH). It will combine a virtual-reality installation with an accompanying projection to examine plants as sensitive, perceptive beings.
According to the Kunsthalle, Smite and Smits translate scientific research into an experience designed to bring visitors into close contact with plant perception. The installation explores how plants register light, respond to their surroundings and remain connected to the rhythms of the planet. Rather than treating plants as passive elements of a landscape, ‘Solarceptors’ frames them as entities capable of sensing and interacting with their environment. The exhibition is curated by Julia-Katharina Thiemann, with curatorial assistance from Alessia Tardivo.
The exhibition is part of the 75th IFFMH’s anniversary programme, ‘Imagine Futures!’. The festival’s own site gives the dates of the 2026 edition as 5–15 November. The collaboration places the Kunsthalle presentation within a festival context focused on future-oriented cultural programming, while the exhibition itself remains on view in the museum’s STUDIO through 22 November.
Smite and Smits work between Basel and Riga. Their ‘Solarceptors’ VR installation is identified in Kunsthalle Mannheim’s image credits as a 2025 work developed within Plants_Intelligence, a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2022 to 2025.
The artists’ approach brings scientific knowledge into contact with sensory and spatial forms associated with contemporary installation art. In the accompanying projection and VR environment, viewers are invited to consider light not only as a visual phenomenon for humans but also as a condition to which plants respond. The exhibition’s description presents this shift in perspective as an alternative way of imagining the future: not primarily through technological prediction, but through a changed way of seeing.
‘Solarceptors’ is the principal STUDIO exhibition announced in Kunsthalle Mannheim’s September programme. The same programme lists separate museum activities, including meditation and yoga sessions, tours of the exhibition ‘Radikal. Real.’ and children’s workshops; those events are not part of the ‘Solarceptors’ exhibition itself. The exhibition will be on view at STUDIO, Kunsthalle Mannheim, from 3 September through 22 November 2026.
