New director: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

HKW warmly welcomes Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung: The supervisory board appointed Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung as the new director at the HKW. He will take over from Bernd M. Scherer on 1 January 2023.

Investigative Commons

Racist policing, border systems, cyber-surveillance, ecological violence and the ongoing violence of colonialism: The exhibition looks at current human rights violations and the involvement of state institutions. With collaborations by Forensic Architecture, ECCHR, Bellingcat, Laura Poitras/Praxis Films, Mnemonic and many more

Education Shock

Rethinking spaces for learning: The Education Shock exhibition and two publications take a look at the unparalleled utopias and global developments of the 1960s and 1970s and rediscover them as resources for current debates.

Potosí Principle – Archive

European capitalism would be inconceivable without the colonial-era exploitation of Latin America. Forced labor made the city of Potosí a global economic power. Potosí Principle – Archive ties into the exhibition The Potosí Principle and, ten years later, examines the principle of global exploitation.

Potosí Principle: Readings & Open-Air Cinema

Back-stabbing in Albrecht Dürer, tree occupations in Hambach Forest, requests of a deity from the Andes: As part of the exhibition, readings, presentations and film screenings explore the connections between the present and art in the 16th century or greed and exploitation.

Internationaler Literaturpreis 2021: Award Ceremony

Six books that can take on the present are on the shortlist. Which author and translator duo will receive the 2021 Internationaler Literaturpreis? The winners will be announced on the roof terrace of HKW and online. 

Education Shock: Explorations

An interactive journey to places of learning around the world: During the digital walking day for the Education Shock exhibition, school classes explore the buildings and histories of schools in Germany, Canada and Nigeria live. In telephone conversations, the audience can discuss equitable education and schools as contested places with art educators.

New Alphabet School

Social improvisation and collective action are the focus of the workshops in the #Instituting edition held in Athens, Berlin and online. The online #Survivance workshops aim to consolidate personal resiliencies into a resistant force, to create counter-monuments or discover a transnational cinema of solidarity.

Berlinale Summer Special

Berlinale in the open air: In HKW’s Westgarten, the festival sections Forum and Forum Expanded will show international productions of feature films, documentaries and short film programs opening new perspectives on the world and on film itself.

Volume 6: Carrier Bag Fiction

How is the world of symbols connected to the world of things and actions? In the latest volume, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction serves as a means against alienation. The articles by Jenna Sutela, Enis Maci, Sophia Al-Maria and others accompany Le Guin’s essay and form an experimental laboratory for new alphabets.

Black (ante)heroism

Is the figure of the Black hero an oxymoron? Stefano Harney and Fred Moten take a famous Chicago mural as the starting point for considering Black (anti-) heroism in their blog entry. #Instituting will take place in Athens and online from June 24-26.

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.

Redefining the Power / After Dürer

What significance do slavery and racism have in the modern culture of memory? With Redefining the Power, Kiluanji Kia Henda presents photography works on the fate of colonial monuments in Luanda. Alongside it, Andreas Siekmann’s work After Dürer explores the dispossession of the poor population within Europe, based on Albrecht Dürer’s Monument to the Vanquished Peasants of 1525.

Werner Düttmann. Building. Berlin.

The architect and urban planner Werner Düttmann shaped the appearance of the city of Berlin. One of 28 satellites of the exhibition Werner Düttmann. Building. Berlin. spread throughout the city presents material on the history of the Congress Hall and Werner Düttmann’s participation in its design.

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.

Education Shock

New Alphabet School

Schools of Tomorrow

The Whole Life: An Archive Project

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.

Skin and Code

From violence in digital reality to intersectional pedagogy to algorithmic resistance, this volume examines the coding and decoding of bodily surfaces and interfaces.

Echo

How long is an echo? How have past ideas of life and form brought forth the technologies and lifestyles of our contemporary world? The volume experiments with a metaphorical, political and technopoetic concept of the echo.

Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War

During the Cold War, modernist art became a flagship of freedom in the West. The publication examines the cultural diplomacy of this period and how the activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) were a major force behind the culturalization of economic liberalism on an international scale.

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.

The Broken Archive

What narratives do justice to the problems facing the Mediterranean region? Villa Romana’s web platform Broken Archive compiles artistic projects and films dealing with the past and present there and researches archives in the Mediterranean region.

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.

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.