Exhibitions

Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

The Original
Exhibition

In the 1920s, the historian of art and culture Aby Warburg (1866-1929) created his so-called Bilderatlas Mnemosyne tracing recurring visual themes and patterns across time, from antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond to contemporary culture. His approach provides inspiration for today’s visually and digitally dominated world. At HKW all 63 panels of the Atlas will be recovered for the first time from Warburg’s original images.

A Slightly Curving Place

Exhibition, publication

Using ambisonic technologies, the sound artist Umashankar Manthravdi measures the acoustic properties of archaeological sites. For the exhibition, writers, dancers, musicians and sound technicians take his method as their starting point. On-site recordings at ancient and medieval ritual sites in India transport the acoustic properties of the places to HKW.

Nicholas Bussmann: Kosmoskop

Exhibition, performance

All politics and social practices are a continuation of music by other means. That is one way to describe the basis of artist and musician Nicholas Bussmann’s artistic practice. At HKW, Bussmann invites visitors to participate in his multi-layered experiments in societal composition, ritual and polyphony.

Education Shock

Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 70s
Exhibition, school project, publication

Education Shock revisits the decades following the “shock” of the “Sputnik crisis” when the sphere of education expanded on a global scale. As the exhibition and its accompanying publication demonstrate, the rethinking and replanning of learning environments – due to demographics, technology, the Cold War and the social movements culminating in 1968 – permanently changed the educational sphere.

Alanis Obomsawin: Lifework

Exhibition

The major survey exhibition and accompanying monograph offer insights into the rich and complex lifework of Abenaki artist Alanis Obomsawin. The project links history to the present in ways that do not efface the continued violence of colonization, while displaying the resilience and self-determination of Indigenous communities in the face of systematic racism and dispossession.

transmediale 2020 End to End

Festival, exhibition

Leaving behind a decade marked by a backlash against the Internet and the network society, transmediale 2020 End to End focuses on forgotten and potential futures and re-evaluates networks and their limits.

Love and Ethnology

The Colonial Dialectic of Sensitivity (after Hubert Fichte)
Exhibition

Can the ethnographic gaze be “given back”, restituted? Within the context of ethnology and the aesthetic avant-garde of post-war West Germany, the exhibition examines Hubert Fichte’s writing and takes it as the starting point for new artistic works on questions of representation and restitution, dissolution of boundaries and canonization, and updating colonial power relations.

Spectral-White

The Appearance of Colonial-Era Europeans
Exhibition

How were Europeans depicted in the art of the colonized? Starting from the collection of Cologne museum director and ethnologist Julius Lips (1895–1950), the exhibition addresses transcultural histories of the interconnectedness of colonial-era art.

Afro-Sonic Mapping

Installation, concerts, talks

What musical patterns have been preserved in the sounds of the African Diaspora, thus defying time and forced migration? What sonic affinities exist between Dakar and New Orleans or between Lagos, Kingston and New York City? How did post-colonial appropriations and transatlantic transfer processes become inscribed in contemporary rhythms?

Paris Calligrammes

A Landscape of Memory by Ulrike Ottinger

In Paris Calligrammes the filmmaker, photographer and collector of worlds Ulrike Ottinger links historical archival material with her own art and film works to create a sociogram of her time as a visual artist in Paris.

bauhaus imaginista

Exhibition and conference

bauhaus imaginista tells the transnational story of the Bauhaus for the first time on this scale and brings together an account of its reception in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Following exhibitions, symposia and workshops in Hangzhou, Kyoto and Tokyo, São Paulo, Lagos, Delhi, New York and Moscow in 2018, HKW will show all four chapters of the exhibition and research project.

Humanity at Work

By Romana Schmalisch and Robert Schlicht
Exhibition

How do we learn to work? What skills do we have to acquire in order to measure up to the demands of the labor market? In other words, how does human capital come about? With their solo exhibition Humanity at Work, Romana Schmalisch and Robert Schlicht draw a portrait of a society that measures wealth in terms of the labor expended.

The Most Dangerous Game

The Situationist International en route for May ’68
Exhibition

Between 1957 and 1972, the Situationist International (S.I.) first projected a “revolutionary front in culture” and then shifted its propaganda to the political field. Employing ludic methods, the movement offered a fundamental critique of the spectacle of a consumerist society. In an age in which the principles of the market economy are increasingly permeating all areas of life, The Most Dangerous Game instigates a new envisioning of the years in which the S.I. articulated its critique.

Radiophonic Spaces

Walk-in radio archive and platform for listening knowledge

What significance does listening knowledge have in our present-day shaped by visual cultures? How are the cultures, aesthetics and politics of transmission and reception changing? In a walk-in radio archive visitors can discover more than 200 works of radio art by John Cage, Friederike Mayröcker, Milo Rau and many others.

Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930

Exhibition and conference

Neolithic Childhood examines how the artistic avant-gardes reacted to the multiple crises of European modernity around 1930 – the “crisis of consciousness,” the revisions of early and pre-history, the imperialist struggle, the barbarism of technological mass war, the shock of capitalist industrialization, the failure of the Second (Socialist) International, the endgame of bourgeois humanism and the hypocrisies of colonial discourse.

Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War

Exhibition, conference

Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War is devoted to the global dimension of cultural politics in the Cold War and to the changing meanings and aims assigned to modernism. Departing from an examination of the interdependencies between the political and aesthetic struggles of the era, the exhibition further reflects the ideological foundations of the conflict lines of today’s global contemporary art.

Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism

Exhibition, conference

What is more immortal than the idea of eternal life? Russian Cosmism around 1900 imagined nothing less than an overcoming of death. An HKW-wide exhibition and a conference explore the ideas of this movement, which despite its great influence on Russian art, scholarship, and politics, has been almost entirely forgotten, and consider their contemporary relevance.

2 or 3 Tigers

Exhibition, discourse

2 or 3 Tigers is a group exhibition about colonialism, media and modernity, specifically in East Asia. The figure of the tiger itself is the medium through which mythological, colonial and modern histories are evoked and folded into the present, highlighting unstable identities and shifting ground, as well as structural continuities and modernization ideologies. Modernity is reflected as a colonial pattern inscribed in the history of nation states, militarization and financialization, but also as a an ontological revolution, as an order that fundamentally upsets social organization, cultural patterns and indeed cosmologies, and that in most societies in the past 200 years has led to a profound crisis of consciousness.

“Misfits”: Pages from a loose-leaf modernity

Tang Chang, Rox Lee and Bagyi Aung Soe
Exhibition, public program

The first 2017 exhibition as part of Kanon-Fragen in newly opened Exhibition Hall 2 will be devoted to three individuals of late modernism or proto-contemporary art from Southeast Asia: Tang Chang, Rox Lee and Bagyi Aung Soe. The oeuvres of these three artists are currently at the threshold of art historical canonization.

Nervous Systems

Quantified Life and the Social Question
Exhibition

Can our inner thoughts be transmitted by our eye movements? Can our future actions be predicted by our current behavior? Julien Prévieux’s film Patterns of Life enacts more than a century of evolving technologies in tracking human behavior, from reorganizing the factory floor to today’s “activity-based intelligence” in the “war on terror.”

Wohnungsfrage

Exhibition, publication series, academy

How can we create affordable living space? How do we provide opportunities for self-determination? Who are today’s new clients? What new answers can be found to the age-old housing question?

Ape Culture

Art Exhibition

The exhibition Ape Culture presents artworks and documents that wittily observe the relationship between humans and other primates.

The Otolith Group: Medium Earth

Exhibition

In their essay film MEDIUM EARTH, The Otolith Group explores the earthquake endangered geology of California as well as the spatialized unconscious of capitalist modernism in the form of parking lots.

Forensis

Exhibition, Conference, Workshops

How do mortal remains, DNA samples, and satellite images become forensic evidence? What role do imaging techniques and methods of representation play in the investigation of crimes or political acts of violence? How are objects made to speak?

After Year Zero

Exhibition, Conference

The realignment of the world after the Second World War is not recounted here with regard to the confrontation between the Cold War blocs, but with a focus on the interweaving of European and African history in the process of decolonization.

Anthropocene Observatory

Exhibition

This project by Armin Linke, Territorial Agency (John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog), and Anselm Franke develops film productions on questions and implications of the thesis of the Anthropocene.

The Whole Earth

Exhibition, Conference

The exhibition and the conference The Whole Earth are dedicated to the story of the image of the “blue planet” which has become one of the most influential images in history.

Animism

Animism is a multi-faceted exhibition project that addresses the reevaluation of modernity currently taking place along the lines of Bruno Latour’s “We Have Never Been Modern“. The exhibition’s starting point is the artistic-aesthetic process of animation, best known from cartoons and animation films, and examines its relationship with the categorial definitions and limits of the modern world-view.