The Sound of Distance

How do you perceive a sound in the air or under water? Is the space part of the composition? The festival The Sound of Distance explores new concepts of music, space and architecture. Concerts, Sound Walks, Talks, live performances and sonic installations with Alvin Lucier, crys cole, Andrea Belfi, Andi Toma, curated by Jan st. Werner.

Archive of Refuge

The oral history project Archive of Refuge brings together filmed interviews with 41 protagonists who came to Germany between 1945 and 2016. An installation in the lobby makes it possible to experience the archive collectively on the big screen. A work station allows users to selectively navigate through the film sequences and provides insights into the creation and dissemination of the Archive of Refuge.

Illiberal Arts

What roles do property and power play in supposedly free art? The exhibition, performances, workshops and publication search for new forms of art opposing the illiberal core of the liberal world order: the unfreedom of the dispossessed and the violence of the propertied.

Counter Gravity: The Films of Heinz Emigholz

Concrete between dynamic and static, the camera as a subject and the radical departure from narrative conventions: For the first time, the Counter Gravity retrospective shows the director’s collected architectural and recent narrative films. Sketchbooks, production notes and objects provide insights into the development of the films.

Recoding Alphabets: The DNA of the Book Series Das Neue Alphabet

Transferring the principle of constellation to sound, discourse and performance, Recoding Alphabets presents essays on the design DNA of the book series, feminist technological history, the connection between climate crisis and war and music programmed live. The series was awarded the 2021 Most Beautiful German Books prize by the Stiftung Buchkunst.

Beute

Where do the objects displayed in museums come from? The editors, including Bénédicte Savoy and Isabelle Dolezalek, present their volumes Beute, a pictorial atlas and an anthology on art theft and cultural heritage, and talk about racism, colonialism and their unbroken prevalence.

Europe is Failing

There are options besides deterrence and increased border protection. Gesine Schwan talks with Franziska Brantner and Till Rummenhohl about her book Europa versagt. Eine menschliche Flüchtlingspolitik ist möglich about dealings with refugees in the EU and proposals for tangible solutions.

Techno at the End of the Future

Around 1989, what were the promises of techno and its fictions? Two podcast episodes about the connecting lines leading from Detroit to London and Berlin, futuristic sounds and the relevance of today’s club culture.

Archive of Refuge: Educational program

Workshops for school classes, children, adults and educators explore the Archive of Refuge in performances, writing workshops, DJ sets or comics. Audience discussions set out to imagine new spaces for shaping society around the topics of home, exile and migration.

Statement by the “Initiative GG 5.3 Weltoffenheit”

As representatives of public cultural and research institutions in Germany, we share a mandate from the state to promote arts and culture, historical research and democratic education and to make these accessible to the general public. Toward this end, we rely on a public sphere that welcomes controversial debates in accordance with the norms of the German constitution. At the center of our initiative lies a common struggle against antisemitism, racism, right-wing extremism and any form of violent religious fundamentalism.

The Berlin Declaration of The Many

Freedom for the arts! With the declaration, the association Die Vielen e.V. distinctly articulates unity and solidarity in the arts and culture as parts of civil society standing against right-wing populist and nationalist leanings. Haus der Kulturen der Welt has signed the Berlin Declaration of The Many and, together with many other cultural institutions, stands up for unity.

Forensis

Schools of Tomorrow

New Alphabet School

The Whole Life: An Archive Project

Counter Gravity: The Films of Heinz Emigholz

Experiments in form, radical breaks, and notebooks: The first comprehensive overview of Heinz Emigholz’s films, Counter Gravity, will be published to coincide with the opening of the retrospective. With picture essays by the filmmaker, encyclopedic filmographies and essays by Anselm Franke, Ulrike Lorenz, Andreas Reihse and others.

Illiberal Arts

How does art depict social debates? The publication for the Illiberal Arts exhibition questions ownership, appropriation, colonizing containment and alienation. A practical attempt at collective forms of perception and critique with essays by keyon gaskin, Nicholas Grafia, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Anne Imhof, Jota Mombaça and many others. 

Looking at Music

What role does visibility play in the experience of music? How important is live playing for the future of music performance? From laptop performances to algoraves and virtual reality shows, this volume explores how new forms of production and performance are changing the perception of music.

Making

Alphabets can be used not only as representations, but also as tools. What possibilities open up beyond known bodies of knowledge? In artist contributions and essays, the volume looks at the practices and politics of production.

Politics of Learning, Politics of Space: Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s

Many of the current debates concerning learning and teaching environments, physical and virtual, echo those of the 1960s and 1970s, the “Education Shock” era. The English volume  is a collection of four texts by curator Tom Holert complementing the German publication.

New Alphabet School

How does language influence thought? How can we develop other forms of learning and acting? From the politics of translation to practices of weaving: Speakers and workshop participants from the New Alphabet School share their questions, observations and studies on solidary practices of knowledge production on the blog.

Anthropocene-Curriculum.org

The research platform Anthropocene Curriculum explores novel epistemic, aesthetic and educational challenges of the age of humankind. The global network of initiatives is engaged with developing experimental and experiential approaches to co-learning and co-producing knowledge in a rapidly changing planetary situation.

Wörterbuch der Gegenwart

What comes after universalism? The volume uses key words such as Thing, Justice and Body to ask about ways to redesign the world linguistically and visually. With new and historical contributions by, among others, Philippe Descola, Nikita Dhawan, Liz Johnson Artur, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Sharma and Wole Soyinka.