Schattenmuseum

The Schattenmuseum (shadow museum) understands itself as an alternative approach to conceptualizing a museum, and as a network it develops proposals to assist institutions in engaging with communities, collections, and educational possibilities. Content, methods, and artistic formats are generated and implemented collaboratively with young people and adults. The Schattenmuseum is oriented towards the concrete structures, needs, and goals of the respective institution. In the process, it opens up a testing ground that enables questions to be asked, providing space for dialogue or an experimental set-up that involves various visitor groups and integrates their perspectives. 

The Schattenmuseum is steadily growing as an experimental set-up. Since 2021 it has observed the language(s) and social phenomena of the city from the perspective of aliens and explored its possibilities. A research object is HKW itself. Together with the artists’ collective sideviews e. V., the Schattenmusuem embarks on an artistic research expedition, exposing social barriers, hierarchies, and meanings and develops artistic-performative and interactive formats based on this research. 

Based on the contributors’ own family biographies, young people’s life situations, interviews, and intensive research, the Schattenmuseum examines the mutability and possibilities of language and society against the background of Berlin’s migration history. The HKW offers a wealth of languages, movements, gestures and stories to inspire a wide variety of project participants. The Schattenmuseum offers a wide range of interactive artistic forms of play that are based on the further development of HKW’s programme. The endeavours venture beyond the building itself as an exhibition site into Berlin’s urban space, schools, and other locations. As a collaboratively developed, continually growing project structure, it can incorporate different programmes, creating corresponding artistic settings that are interactive, cross–generational spaces, within which and from which all participants can learn from each other. 

The Schattenmuseum has been in existence since 2018 and, in addition to HKW, has also cooperated with other institutions including: Jewish Museum Berlin; Berlinische Galerie; the First Children’s Biennale (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden); KW Institute for Contemporary Art; the Berlin Biennale; the Deutsches Historisches Museum, the Alice-Museum für Kinder im FEZ, and Hamburger Bahnhof. 

The Schattenmuseumis accompanied by changing artists from sideviews, depending on the project.