HKW is turning 30

Bernd Scherer on the HKW jubilee 2019

In the last 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world has changed fundamentally. In these 30 years, HKW has consistently developed new formats and content that deal with these changes – often as a trailblazer.

In the 1990s, HKW opened the public’s eyes to the non-European world and confronted them with worldviews and problems that were little-known in Germany. It reacted to criticism that its responsible curators were chiefly German in the late 1990s by commissioning curators such as Okwui Enwezor, Paul Gilroy and Yu Yeon Kim. The shift in curatorial representation was accompanied by an examination of the colonial pasts of Europe. This is still highly relevant today as the current discussions about the Humboldt Forum demonstrate. read more