How, one hundred years after the founding of the Bauhaus, can culture be rethought as a social project? And how does the design school continue to inspire visionary practices and discourses today? The curators of bauhaus imaginista Marion von Osten and Grant Watson discuss with art historian Mona Schieren the Bauhaus’s transnational relationships, correspondences, and migration stories, and its relevance for an art, design, and education of the future. To article...
Certain words have recently come to determine our everyday lives, one of these is fear. In combination with flight, migration, and a supposed flood of foreigners, it has been employed frequently of late. Reflections on a discussion at the HKW between the poet and author Sinan Antoon, the cultural scientist Joseph Vogl, and the anthropologist Allen Feldman on an emotion which is also instrumentalized by politics. To article...
How could the nation state become the central form of political organization worldwide? Why is it so difficult to conceive alternatives to this relatively young classification system? The program “Now is the Time of Monsters. What Comes After Nations?” explored the challenges and limits of the nation state system, the historical connections of its genesis, and alternative models for the reorganization of the international order. To article in German...
A hundred years ago educational reformers all over the world attempted to establish the foundations for new learning and teaching. In the long-term praxis project Schools of Tomorrow, which examines these past approaches from today’s perspective, artists, pedagogues, and scientists experiment with new learning formats in practice. The curator Silvia Fehrmann and Daniel Seitz from Jugend hackt discuss alternative approaches, the complexities of the daily life of the new generation, and independently minded children. To article in German...
The political theorist Sandro Mezzadra on “globalization from below,” labor mobility, and nations’ double-bind with capital. To article...
The historian Cemil Aydin about the effects of breaking up multi-ethnic societies and the Ottoman Caliphate as a symbol for Cosmopolitanism. To article...
Die internationale Brisanz der Wohnungsfrage, Kulturtransfers und das Bauhaus – HKW-Intendant Bernd Scherer im Gespräch mit Claudia Perren und Franziska Eidner. To article...
Recording in Progress! is a sound installation by Julia Tieke that translates German-language media reports on migration and flight into the languages spoken by the people being reported on. It confronts the audience with the situation of not understanding on the one hand, but on the other, it also presents German-language commentary by the translators and speakers about the political background of misunderstanding language. The radio moderator and author Julia Tieke talks to Elisabeth Wellershaus in an interview about discoveries, pitfalls and newly created words in the complex field of translation. To article...
The Film And-Ek Ghes… documents the arrival of the Roma Velcu family in Berlin. The filmmaker Philip Scheffner and co-director Colorado Velcu develop perspectives on the arrival in Germany and the self-determination of migrants and refugees in an aesthetic production. On the surface, the second installment of the three-part project series Soundtracks, curated by Nanna Heidenreich, shows the everyday life of the Velcu family who emigrated from Romania. The documentary, which was nominated for the Grimme Award 2017, addresses various ideas of (self-) presentation and offers an unusual contribution to critical revisions of the representation of migrants and refugees in film and the arts. To article in German...
The Ethnological Museum’s time in Dahlem is coming to an end, its move into the Humboldt Forum is imminent. A theme evening organized by HKW with lectures and a concluding discussion in the museum addressed one of the core questions of museology: The complexity of the term thing. Museal things are removed from their original context, their “migration history” takes them to different locations, establishing new relationships. The media theorist Arjun Appadurai, the cultural theorist Tony Bennett, and the museologist Sharon MacDonald went in search of alternative ideas of things. They explored the protagonists and circumstances of migration, placing migrating objects in relation to migrating people, juxtaposing the immutability of objects with the mutability of their meaning. Ana Teixeira Pinto listened in and has drawn her own conclusions. To article...
What happens to objects, to things, in a museum? In his essay “Civic Laboratories”, published in 2005, the English cultural and social theorist Tony Bennett examined the simultaneous mutability and immutability of objects in museum contexts. To this end he focused on questions of identity formation, taking his readers on a journey from European theory and Baldwin Spencer’s staging of Aborigines in Australian museums to Franz Boas’s life groups at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. How do objects change as a result of their embedding in different regimes of objecthood? What forms of interiority do they trigger in the observing subject? And what forms do they require? To article...
