Projects 2014

The Anthropocene Project

Basic Cultural Research using the Means of Art and Science

Our notion of nature is now out of date. Humanity forms nature. This is the core premise of the Anthropocene thesis, announcing a paradigm shift in the natural sciences as well as providing new models for culture, politics, and everyday life. In a two-year project (2013/2014), HKW explored the hypothesis’ manifold implications for the sciences and arts. Cooperations and events in Berlin and all over the world continue the debate on the Anthropocene.

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?

Aernout Mik: Speaking in Tongues

Video Installation

The new religious movements around the world are characterized by promises of salvation - but also of economic prosperity. These movements operate according to the model of international corporations.

transmediale 2014

Festival

Between shiny high-tech, e-waste dumps, big data businesses and mass surveillance schemes: In the festival the image of afterglow is used as point of departure to explore our present post-digital moment as one where media technologies and mediatic practices that once were treasure(d) are turning into trash.

Berlinale at the HKW 2014

GENERATION – Premiers and Repetitions

Generation integrates children and youth into the festival’s film-aesthetic discourse. At the same time the section is a place for encounters between people of all ages.

Narrating War

Theme Days

How can we narrate war at the start of the twenty-first century? What is it about experiences of extreme violence that makes it so difficult to comprehend and to narrate? What is the importance of describing the indescribable for the survivors and for the spectators?

Algeria after 1954

Film Festival

In a selection by film and culture scholar Ahmed Bedjaoui, president of the Algerian Film Fund, follows feature films and documentaries along Algerian cinema’s political and artistic lines of development.

City - Religion - Capitalism

Films, Talks

City, Religion, Capitalism – without these three structures, today’s Western societies cannot be comprehended. The filmmaker Alexander Kluge and the sociologist Richard Sennett (London/New York) trace decisive turning points in these three areas as they look back over the history of humanity.

Korean Cinema Today 2014

Film Festival

Launched with great success in 2012, Korean Cinema Today features outstanding films from the Busan festival’s section of the same name. HKW has responded to the growing significance and popularity of new Korean cinema with this series.

Stupid Music

Concerts, Performances, Talks, Films

Theme of Stupid Music is escapism: the flight from everyday life, from reality, from bad news, and the role music can play in this – music that dulls our senses, deafens and numbs us, and makes us “stupid.”

Berlin Documentary Forum 3

Festival

This third edition of Berlin Documentary Forum investigates the inherent tensions and paradoxes involved in the production of narratives and the role such narratives play in the fabrication of social reality and the shaping of lived experience.

Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid 2014

In Cooperation

With a selection of more than one hundred previously unreleased films from forty countries, many appearing in Germany for the first time, RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES will open a critical and future-oriented examination of the contemporary culture of images.

Copa da Cultura 2.0

Concerts, Public Viewing

The HKW is showing all World Cup matches on a big screen, with more than 1,000 all-weather seats, expert analysis of selected matches and concerts at the weekends.

International Literature Award - Haus der Kulturen der Welt 2014

The INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE AWARD – HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT honors the author and translator of an outstanding foreign-language work of contemporary international fiction which has been translated into German.

School

Installation

School is a large-scale audiovisual installation immersing the visitor in the life of Tel Aviv secondary schools.

Wassermusik: Lusofonia

Concerts, Films

Following the themes “Deserts” (2011), “South-South” (2012), and “The New Pacific” (2013), the seventh edition of the summer festival WASSERMUSIK will be held under the title “Lusophony.”

20 Years of Democracy in South Africa

Concerts, Films, Talks

In 2014, the Republic of South Africa celebrates the 20th anniversary of the first democratic elections. The end of apartheid gave millions of previously disenfranchised people a new life horizon. Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the South African Embassy celebrate this jubilee by hosting a critical appraisal of the developments since 1994.

Salon of Aesthetic Experiments / Graduale 14

In Cooperation

The Salon of Aesthetic Experiments devotes its second season to different approaches to artistic research, and in so doing brings various artistic genres and scientific disciplines into conversation with one another.

The Anthropocene Project. A Report

Exhibitions, Discourse, Publications, Workshops, Media Competition

With the traditional methods of knowledge acquisition mankind has reached a limit. What can we do, how can we know? With what means, methods and senses can we encounter the world of our own creation? In A REPORT, an extensive program of events in conclusion to the Anthropocene Project, the HKW will be exploring precisely these questions.

Anthropocene Curriculum

Demanding structurally novel commitments, the Anthropocene predicament offers the opportunity to make previously uncharted, transdisciplinary connections visible and to experiment with new forms of higher education. A deep integration of cross-disciplinary thinking, mutual learning, new modes of research, and civic commitment seem key for the future of universities, academies, research platforms, and cultural institutions as situated spaces of knowledge production and its dissemination.

Adam Avikainen: CSI Department of Natural Resources

Exhibition

For the painter and author Adam Avikainen, all of nature becomes a crime scene in an ongoing story that subsumes all the elements of his life in an extended artistic process.

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.

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.

A Matter Theater

Positions, Roundtables, Dialogs, Screenings, Performances, Workshops

In the Anthropocene, it will be necessary to reformulate a variety of phenomena and processes of being in the world and making the world. Rapid climate change, biodiversity shrinkage, or the dispersion of anthropogenic materials take on a life of their own: what practices, knowledge-forms, and modes of participation are required within the Anthropocene?

Future Storytelling

Media Competition

The media competition FUTURE STORYTELLING challenges prospective journalists, media designers, directors, and media-savvy young adults to examine and explore the Anthropocene hypothesis in digital forms of narration.

Première Brasil 2014

Film Festival

This year’s World Cup at the latest made romanticizing Brazil obsolete. The issues that smolder under the surface of Brazilian society are also apparent in the choice of films for the sixth year of PREMIÈRE BRASIL.

Curatorial Things

In Cooperation

The question of what can become a “thing” in exhibitions, and when, how, and with what potentialities, stands at the center of this international conference.

Democracy Lectures

In Cooperation

In the Democracy Lectures, prominent intellectuals comment on key issues and challenges of our time.

Festiwalla 2014

In Cooperation

Is war really so far away? Is it relevant merely to the past or to other countries? Going beyond the remembrance marking the 100th anniversary of the start of the Great War, FESTIWALLA 2014 studies and questions acts of war from the point of view of young people

Fiktion

In Cooperation
The international model project Fiktion seeks to further develop the opportunities arising from digitization for the heightened public awareness and dissemination of quality literature.