Bernd Scherer

Bernd Scherer has been director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt since 2006. The philosopher focused the program on the examination of transformation processes in our societies; post-colonial structures, ecological and technological upheavals. It began with projects such as The Potosí Principle (2009–2010) and Über Lebenskunst (2010–2011) and, starting in 2012, the multi-year research projects The Anthropocene Project, 100 Years of Now and The New Alphabet, which includes the event series Dictionary of Now (2015–2018). He thus advanced HKW from an institution that represented non-European cultures to a laboratory of ideas in the making for a world that is changing not only globally, but also planetarily. One chief curatorial approach taken by Bernd Scherer and his team is to interweave art and science, politics and technology. The program is developed collaboratively with international artists and researchers in the interests of a variety of perspectives. Scherer has been an honorary professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin since 2011. Before he became director of HKW, he headed the Goethe-Institut Mexico from 1999 to 2004 and then the Arts Department at the Goethe-Institut head office in Munich. He is editor of books including Das Anthropozän – Zum Stand der Dinge (with Jürgen Renn, 2015), Wörterbuch der Gegenwart (with Stefan Aue and Olga Schubert, 2019) and Das Neue Alphabet (The New Alphabet) (2021).

As of March 2021