bauhaus
imaginista
●Edition 4: Still Undead / ●Edition 2: Learning From / ●Edition 3: Moving Away / ●Edition 1: Corresponding With
Mar. 15–Jun. 10 2019
Exhibition

bauhaus imaginista, Berlin

  • Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
  • John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557, Germany

bauhaus imaginista is a narrative of the international histories of the Bauhaus. After its founding in 1919 the school was in contact with other avant-garde movements worldwide. Since March 2018, the research project has been tracing transnational relations, correspondences and narratives of migration going beyond the years the Bauhaus was active as a school and revealing its significance for the present-day. Now bauhaus imaginista culminates with an expanded overview at HKW. Its global interconnections and local manifestations have never been shown in this magnitude before.

Josef Albers, Detail of Loggia Wall, 1967, College of Science, Rochester Institute of Technology, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019, photo: RIT Public Relations Department.

The title bauhaus imaginista hints at the imaginative possibilities that were opened up by the Bauhaus and the multilayered interpretations that the term still denotes today. Between archival materials and contemporary contributions, the project translates historical perspectives into contemporary questions: How might culture be reimagined in the spirit of the Bauhaus as a social project today? What kinds of institutions would such a project need? And in what ways does the Bauhaus still stimulate visionary practices and discourses today

The exhibition discusses avant-garde art schools in India and Japan as parallel histories of modern educational reforms. It traces the study of pre-modern crafts at the Bauhaus and by Bauhaus students in North and Central American exile as well as their politicization in post-revolutionary Mexico, independent Morocco and Brazil. It shows translations of Bauhaus design approaches in China, Nigeria and the Soviet Union, but also the innovative use of media at the Bauhaus, which impacts art and pop culture even today.

Following exhibitions, symposia and workshops in 2018 in Rabat, Hangzhou, Kyoto and Tokyo, São Paulo, Lagos, Delhi, New York and Moscow in collaboration with the Goethe-Instituts and local partners, the first three chapters of the exhibition and research project will be brought together at HKW and, for the first time, the fourth and final chapter will be shown. Still Undead explores experimental work with light, film, photography and sound based on Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s Reflecting Color-Light-Play. The apparatus will be demonstrated at the opening of bauhaus imaginista.

Arieh Sharon and Eldar Sharon, University of Ife (Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile-Ife, Osun, Nigeria, 1960s, Arieh Sharon Digital Archive, Yael Aloni collection.

With works by Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Arthur Amora, Gertrud Arndt, Ruth Asawa, Kader Attia, Lena Bergner, Lina Bo Bardi, Farid Belkahia, Susie Benally, Nandalal Bose, Mohamed Chabâa, Ahmed Cherkaoui, Lygia Clark, Alice Creischer, Muriel Cooper, Zvi Efrat, T. Lux Feininger, Luca Frei, Walter Gropius, Brion Gysin und Ian Sommerville, Trude Guermonprez, Sheila Hicks, George Hinchliffe and Ian Wood, Kenneth Josephson, Renchinchirō Kawakita, György Kepes, Paul Klee, Kurt Kranz, Otto Lindig, Elisa Martins da Silveira, Doreen Mende, Hannes Meyer, Takehiko Mizutani, László Moholy-Nagy, Max Peiffer Watenphul, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Hélio Oiticica, The Otolith Group, Nam June Paik, Lygia Pape, I. M. Pei, Margaretha Reichardt, Geraldo Sarno, Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Schwerdtfeger, Ivan Serpa, Arieh Sharon,Soft Cell, Rabindranath Tagore, Paulo Tavares, Lenore Tawney, Frank Tovey, Edith Tudor-Hart, Stan VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol, Marguerite Wildenhain, Margarete Willers, Iwao and Michiko Yamawakim, and many more.

Two conferences will survey the critical potentials of the Bauhaus today: On March 16, political imaginista will discuss strategies of resistance against the neo-right as well as questions of Internationalism, cultural appropriation and the politicization of art, technology and pop culture.

With Kader Attia, Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan, Rustom Bharucha, John R. Blakinger, Beatriz Colomina, Alice Creischer, Iris Dressler, Kodwo Eshun, Thomas Flierl, Christian Hiller, Nataša Ilić, Susanne Leeb, Sebastian de Line, Doreen Mende, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Gloria Sutton, Mariko Takagi, and Paulo Tavares.

The second conference on May 11-12, A New School, discusses the Bauhaus based on examples from China, India, Morocco, Nigeria and the United States in the context of the development of experimental educational practices across boundaries of time and space.

bauhaus imaginista is curated by Marion von Osten and Grant Watson in collaboration with the researchers Elissa Auther, Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan, Regina Bittner, Gavin Butt, Helena Čapková, Anshuman Dasgupta, Tatiana Efrussi, Thomas Flierl, Erin Alexa Freedman, Anja Guttenberger, Christian Hiller, Yuko Ikeda, Maud Houssais, Eduard Kögel, Toni Maraini, Mariana Meneses, Jin Motohashi, Partha Mitter, Luiza Proença, Daniel Talesnik, and Hiromitsu Umemyia.

Takehiko Mizutani, Study on simultaneous contrast (class of Josef Albers), 1927. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

●Documentation
●Slide Show
Photo Documentation of bauhaus imaginista Exhibition Opening in Berlin

Photos: Laura Fiorio/HKW → more

●Slide Show
Photo Documentation of bauhaus imaginista Exhibition in Berlin

Photos: Silke Briel and Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik → more

●Artist Work
Sketch One: Lotte and Hermina — Script-Reading and Screening by Wendelien van Oldenborgh

The script that the artist Wendelin van Oldenborgh created for bauhaus imaginista: Moving Away. The Internationalist Architect as a public moment is an insight into the development of her larger film project which will premiere as a contribution to the bauhaus imaginista exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, March 2019. It features archive material around the personas Lotte Beese and Hannes Meyer, Hermine Huiswoud and Langston Hughes. → more

●Artist Work
To Philipp Tolziner

For the exhibition bauhaus imaginista: Moving Away. The Internationalist Architect at Garage Contemporary Museum of Art, the contemporary artist Alice Creischer has been invited to respond to the personal archive of Bauhaus architect Philipp Tolziner. She produced reading of material relating to the architect’s socialist backgrounds and his work in the Soviet Union.  → more

●Artist Work
Des-Habitat / Revista Habitat (1950–1954)

Des-Habitat interrogates the ways in which Indigenous arts and crafts appeared within discourses and imaginaries of modernity through the lens of Habitat, the arts and design magazine created by architect Lina Bo Bardi in 1950. Instead of the content shown in the images of Indigenous objects, the project interrogates the context from which they emerged as signifiers of modernity in Habitat, examining how Habitat itself, by virtue of its language and visual design, functioned as framing device that concealed that context and its inherent colonial structure. → more

●Artist Work
Research Project

Looking into the history of objects, into their original practical and social function as well as into the circumstances of their transition to European and other countries of Western civilization, the artist Kader Attia aims at conveying the full identity of the objects and to follow the traces of their disappearance that still can be discovered today and call for repair. → more

●Artist Work
Scenes from the Most Beautiful Campus in Africa — A Film about the Ife Campus

Zvi Efrat, 2019, film stills from the exhibition video projection, 25 min, color, sound, English.
Courtesy of the artist. → more

●Conference Program and Video Documentation
political imaginista — 12 March 2019

Starting from the historical materials and findings of the exhibition in Berlin, the panels of the conference aim to consider these in relation to the background of contemporary concerns, politics and action. International artists, researchers, journalists and activists will examine a series of political issues arising from the project’s research. These include reflections on nationalism and colonialism, the limits of internationalism and the politicization of digital cultures. → more

●Conference Program and Video Documentation
A New School — 11/12 May 2019

The conference A New School places the Bauhaus in the context of art and design schools in China, India, Morocco, Nigeria and the United States. Practitioners and theorists from academia, architecture and art discuss the influence of the school on experimental educational theory from a contemporary perspective. What kind of art and design training is needed today? → more

●Correspondent Report
A New School — Report of a Conference at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin – 11 May 2019

What is education; what are its means and ends; and when is it time to re-examine and re-imagine current educational practices? These are questions which the Bauhaus asked in its time and the exhibit bauhaus imaginista prompts us to ask of ourselves.

The conference A New School at Haus de Kulturen der Welt, Berlin on 11 May 2019 drew the intersecting contours of these questions and challenges through perspectives from Brazil, China, India, Germany, Great Britain, Nigeria, Rwanda and the USA. → more

●Location and Partners
Location and Partners of the Exhibition in Berlin

The exhibition bauhaus imaginista is open from 15 March until 10 June 2019 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. 

 

bauhaus imaginista is a collaboration between the Bauhaus Cooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar, the Goethe-Institut and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). → more

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●Translation
Letter from Asger Jorn to Max Bill — February 12, 1954

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This is a translation of one of the letters Jorn send to Bill. → more

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Weltkunstbücher der 1920er-Jahre — Zur Ambivalenz eines publizistischen Aufbruchs

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Communitas … After Black Mountain College

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The Latent Forces of Popular Culture — Lina Bo Bardi’s Museum of Popular Art and the School of Industrial Design and Crafts in Bahia, Brazil

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Reading Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture in North America, 1957

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“The Art!—That’s one Thing! When it’s there” — On the History of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst in the Early Weimar Republic

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Vernacular Architecture and the Uses of the Past

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●On-Site Report
Weaving Reflections — On Museology and the Rematriation of Indigenous Beings from Ethnological Collections

One primary question leading up to the bauhaus imaginista workshop and symposium had concerned the extent to which Bauhaus artists had been culturally informed by and subsequently appropriated Indigenous art. This essay examines ethnographic and natural history museology and how Indigenous cultures are perceived, translated and exhibited through Westernized perspectives that are informed by a philosophical subject-object divide. → more

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Modern Vernacular — Walter Gropius and Chinese Architecture

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