Exhibitions

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.

Carceri d'Invenzione

Germany’s contribution to the Triennale di Milano, XXII International Exhibition
Milan

Has the Anthropocene turned the planet into a prison of human design? Carceri d'Invenzione is Germany’s official contribution to the XXII Triennale di Milano by Armin Linke in collaboration with Giulia Bruno and Giuseppe Ielasi, curated by Anselm Franke and hosted by HKW.

Paris Calligrammes

An exhibition by Ulrike Ottinger

In her Paris Calligrammes exhibition, Ulrike Ottinger, the filmmaker, photographer and collector of worlds, takes us back to the 1960s when she lived and worked in Paris as a freelance artist. Her films and research materials, enriched and commented on by objects from her personal inventory, are the basis of the exhibition: a walk-in collage installation that invites us to linger and to wander.

Love and Ethnology

The Colonial Dialectic of Sensitivity (after Hubert Fichte)
Exhibition

The writer and ethnologist Hubert Fichte (1935–1986) is considered a poetic and documentarian realist precursor for new disciplines in Germany such as Queer Studies and Postcolonial Studies: In his writings, economic criticism, (homo-) sexuality and self-reflection become methodical tools. Exhibitions and translations of his novels into the languages of the places that Hubert Fichte traveled with his life companion Leonore Mau have stimulated reception of his work there for the first time.

Spectral-White: The Appearance of Colonial-Era Europeans

Exhibition

How were Europeans depicted in the art of the colonized? In his book The Savage Hits Back or the White Men through Native Eyes (1937), Cologne museum director and ethnologist Julius Lips (1895–1950) compiled portrayals that show the Europeans as “exotics” and barbaric foreigners. In these objects Lips, who was driven into exile by the Nazis, discovered a subversive critique of the “colonial masters.” Given the current debates over colonial-era collections, Lips’ anticolonial and antifascist polemics seem highly up-to-the-minute.

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.”

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.

Ape Culture

Art Exhibition

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

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.