How can blind, visually impaired, or deaf people gain access to art? This question was explored by literature students in Dr. Jessica Bundschuh's seminar “The Blind Witness: Poetry and Painting.”
“The seminar was part of the three-year project Sensing Literature . We explored the senses of touch, hearing, and sight. Our exploration of the sense of sight also included blindnessxplains Bundschuh, a literary scholar in the Department of English Literature and Cultures at the University of Stuttgart. "In our investigations into how poetic language and visual art intersect, we wanted to explore ways of making aesthetic encounters more inclusive. This is exactly what the Sensing Literature project achieves: It provides blind and deaf people with access to art through multiple interconnected senses."
“Above all, the translation was an exercise in making both art and the discourse surrounding it accessible to as many people as possible,” explains Felix Huber, a student teacher of German and English.
Inclusive audio tour “Poetics of Sight”
Together with Katharina Rohne, head of digital communication at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Bundschuh and the students developed the audio tour “Poetics of Sight,” which appeals to all the senses. Using vivid language, the students engaged with selected works of art not only through sight but also through less dominant senses such as touch, hearing, smell, and taste.
"It is wonderful that we can now offer a tour with 22 stops featuring masterpieces from the collection that deals with the perception of those who cannot see and therefore rely on the description of artworks through words. I would like to thank everyone who dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to this project and collaborated to make it a reality,” emphasizes Prof. Dr. Christiane Lange, Director of the Staatsgalerie.
“Promoting inclusion, diversity, and community is one of the central tasks of both universities and museums,” adds Rohne. The Staatsgalerie’s media guide offers image descriptions for blind and visually impaired visitors, along with transcripts to support those with hearing impairments. The great thing about this project is that the image descriptions show the different perspectives of 22 young students on the artworks.
Multilingual image descriptions for selected works
The carefully selected works include paintings by well-known artists from the early modern period to the 19th century, such as Georg Flegel, Rembrandt, Edward Burne-Jones, Anselm Feuerbach, and Caspar David Friedrich. The works contain narrative and mythological elements that connect them to literature.
Multilingual audio recordings in German, English, and partly Ukrainian have been created for the tour “The Poetics of Sight”, focussing on 22 paintings from the Staatsgalerie collection. The texts were written and recorded for the students in collaboration with Dr. Jessica Bundschuh, Katharina Rohne, and other staff members at the Staatsgalerie.
The new media guide tour has been available free of charge on the Staatsgalerie website since March 3, 2026. The tour of the collection can be accessed, listened to, and read along with on your smartphone at the State Gallery, at home, or on the go.