bauhaus
imaginista
●Edition 2: Learning From / ●Edition 3: Moving Away / ●Edition 1: Corresponding With / ●Edition 4: Still Undead
Traveling Exhibition

Collected Research Tour

  • Worldwide

bauhaus imaginista is a major international project that marks the school’s centenary. Focusing on the international dissemination and reception of the Bauhaus a touring exhibition is developed through four chapters that extend from Bauhaus education to its diverse history beyond Europe. The aim of ​bauhaus imaginista is to rethink the school from a global perspective, and to read its entanglements against a century of geopolitical change. Three chapters of a major exhibition variously travelled in 2018 to Hangzhou, São Paulo, Moscow, Kyoto and Delhi culminating in a major exhibition at the House of World Cultures (HKW) in 2019.

In order to bring this project to a wider network of Goethe Institutes not able to mount the full show, the ​bauhaus imaginista curators have conceived a smaller exhibition, which will be available to tour Goethe Institutes internationally from 2019. The overall project ​bauhaus imaginista departs from 4 Gegenstande, key objects from Bauhaus history used to explore different themes linked to the school, including reform pedagogy, design debate, non-western material cultures, and experimental visual practice. These gegenstande include the ​Bauhaus Manifesto by Walter Gropius (1919) ​ein bauhaus film collage by Marcel Breuer (1926) ​Carpet a drawing by Paul Klee (1927) ​Reflektorische Lichstpiele by Kurt Schwerdfeger (1922) (film).

For the ​bauhaus imaginista touring exhibition, the artist Luca Frei has been commissioned to design a structure, which is part sculpture part exhibition architecture, that will function as a reading space within which visitors can engage with ​bauhaus imaginista.​ Central to this will be a computer terminal where people can browse the ​bauhaus imaginista online journal, print out visual and textual material and compile it in folders provided. The installation will also include a graphic presentation of the 4 gegenstand, information about the chapter themes, curatorial research undertaken in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, as well as still and moving image documentation of ​bauhaus imaginista international events and press reports.

A film programme will feature newly commissioned works on Bauhaus themes and histories by contemporary artists and researchers including from: Zvi Efrat who examines the Ife/Ile Campus in Nigeria designed by Arieh Sharon, the Otolith Group who look at Rabindranath Tagore’s pedagogy and Japonism at Santiniketan and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, who will research the life and work of architect Lotte Stam-Beese in Moscow and Rotterdam.

bauhaus imaginista is a common project by the ​Bauhaus Kooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar, Goethe-Institut and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Federal Cultural Foundation, on occasion of the centenary ‘100 years of bauhaus’. The project is curated by Marion von Osten and Grant Watson in collaboration with an international team of researchers.

All Locations of the collected research tour:

Ankara (May 2019)
Athens (March–April 2019)
Bangkok (January 2020)
Belgrade (July 2019)
Brașov (September 2019)
Bucharest (October)
Chișinău (August 2019)
Dhaka (March 2020)
Guadalajara (March 2019)
Havanna (November 2019–January 2020)
Indianapolis (April–June 2019)
Livorno (July 2019)
Mexico City (September–Oktober 2019)
Monterry (July–August 2019)
Nikosia (March–April 2019)
Novosibirsk (October–November 2019)
Panama (February–May 2020)
Podgorica (October 2019)
Pristina (6–27 June 2019)
Riga (October–November 2019)
Rijeka (September 2019)
Rotterdam (August/September 2019)
San Luis Potosi (June–July 2019)
Sarajevo (June 2019)
Seoul (September–October 2019)
Singapur (November–December 2019)
Skopje (November 2019)
Sofia (May 2019)
Tampere (January–February 2020)
Theheran (April 2020)
Thessaloniki (November–December 2019)
Vilnius (June–July 2019)
Zagreb (September 2019)

●Documentation
●Related Articles
●Article
Josef Albers and the Pre-Columbian Artisan

In his inaugural manifesto for the Staatliche Bauhaus, Walter Gropius proposed a new artistic agenda and pedagogical practice based on craft and artisanal principles. This article analyzes how prominent Bauhaus teacher and artist Josef Albers, entered into dialogue with a very specific kind of artisanal aesthetic: the pre-Columbian crafts he encountered on his many trips to Mexico. Revisiting his lecture “Truthfulness in Art” delivered in 1937, after his third trip to the country, the article studies the way in which Albers learned from the abstract tradition of pre-Columbian artisans, incorporating their knowledge into his own artistic and pedagogical practice. → more

●Article
Connecting the Dots — Sharing the Space between Indigenous and Modernist Visual Spatial Languages

Ever increasing numbers of design institutes note the merits of cultural diversity within their pedagogy and practice. Rather quixotically, however, Eurocentric modernist ideals remain dominant within design curricula. This ambiguity results in non-Western social, cultural and creative practice, remaining side-lined, albeit while still being lauded as of great value. Critical of this duplicity, this paper introduces three Indigenous visual spatial languages, identifying a number of correlations and contradictions these offer to the establishment and implementation of Bauhaus pedagogy and subsequent examples of modernism adopted beyond Europe. → more

●Article
Biology and Educational Models in the Pacific Southern Cone

The Chilean encounter with second-order cybernetics in the early 1970s was an essential part of the modernization project the state had been promoting since the 1920s, a project which also encompasses the 1945 reform of the architecture school. But if one reviews the history of this project with greater care, one can identify the reform of the new art school of 1928, which was the product of a social movement that began after the First World War, and that was able to implement in the main school of art of the country, a “first year of trial” similar to the methodology of the Bauhaus preliminary course, influenced by the trends of the “Active” or “New” school of the time. → more

●Article
Selman Selmanagić at the Crossroads of Different Cultures — From Childhood Years in Bosnia to Bauhaus Education and Travels

Selman Selmanagić’s childhood years in Bosnia, on the eve of the First World War, as well as his education in Sarajevo, Ljubljana and at Bauhaus Dessau between the two world wars, together with his work in Palestine and Berlin, shaped his worldview and experience with different cultures and traditions. Throughout his career, he perpetually strove to find contemporary answers for the challenges of the time he was living in. → more

●Article
For the Faculty of Architecture at METU — Bauhaus was a Promise

“ARCH 101 Basic Design” is the title of the introductory course offered to the first-year students in the METU Faculty of Architecture (Middle East Technical University, Ankara). Since the establishment of the school, this course has been conducted with a very strong Bauhaus impact. → more

●Article
In the Footsteps of the Bauhaus — Its Reception and Impact on Brazilian Modernity

Through the strong German-speaking minority and its active work in the creation and mediation of culture in the spirit of modernity, the application of Bauhaus formal language, especially in the first phase of Brazilian modernity, has played a considerable role. It was only with the equation of German culture with National Socialism and the ensuing intolerance of German protagonists that these architectural and cultural activities were severely disrupted. In Brazil during this period, a style of modernism based on the principles of Le Corbusier finally gained acceptance. The impulses of the Bauhaus, however, which were not perceived for many years, were also reinterpreted and further developed within Brazil, although they remained occulted in comparison to the public reception of Corbusier. → more

●Article
The “Hungarian Bauhaus” — Sándor Bortnyik’s Bauhaus-Inspired Budapest School Műhely 1928–1938

One of the many Hungarians associated with the Bauhaus, painter and graphic designer Sándor Bortnyik (1893-1976) opened his art and design school, Műhely, in Budapest in 1928 to bring the Bauhaus’s sprit and some of its teaching methods into Hungary. Even if Bortnyik’s school did not have the scope of the Bauhaus, it was an efficient experiment in an independent form of institutionalized education in the field of modern graphic design and typography. → more