Illiberal Arts

What roles do property and power play in supposedly free art? The exhibition, performances, workshops and publication search for form in art as a life’s work and juxtapose it with the illiberal core of the liberal world order: the unfreedom of the dispossessed and the violence of the propertied.

Archive of Refuge: Opening Days

Preserved from oblivion: The memories of people who migrated to Germany are an integral part of German post-war history. For the Archive of Refuge, theorists and activists trace the history of migration since 1945 and look at the possible futures of immigration societies.

Redefining the Power / After Dürer

What significance do slavery and racism have in the modern culture of memory? With Redefining the Power, Kiluanji Kia Henda presents photography works on the fate of colonial monuments in Luanda. Alongside it, Andreas Siekmann’s work After Dürer explores the dispossession of the poor population within Europe, based on Albrecht Dürer’s Monument to the Vanquished Peasants of 1525.

Surviving

How is life in Gaza strip affected by the pandemic? In his essay, Mahmoud Al-Shaer, co-curator of the #Transmitting edition, attempts to transmit his feelings in light of the spread of Corona virus around him.

Statement by the “Initiative GG 5.3 Weltoffenheit”

As representatives of public cultural and research institutions in Germany, we share a mandate from the state to promote arts and culture, historical research and democratic education and to make these accessible to the general public. Toward this end, we rely on a public sphere that welcomes controversial debates in accordance with the norms of the German constitution. At the center of our initiative lies a common struggle against antisemitism, racism, right-wing extremism and any form of violent religious fundamentalism.

The Berlin Declaration of The Many

Freedom for the arts! With the declaration, the association Die Vielen e.V. distinctly articulates unity and solidarity in the arts and culture as parts of civil society standing against right-wing populist and nationalist leanings. Haus der Kulturen der Welt has signed the Berlin Declaration of The Many and, together with many other cultural institutions, stands up for unity.

New director: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

HKW warmly welcomes Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung: The supervisory board appointed Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung as the new director at the HKW. He will take over from Bernd M. Scherer on 1 January 2023.

Forensis

Education Shock

New Alphabet School

The Whole Life: An Archive Project

Looking at Music

What role does visibility play in the experience of music? How important is live playing for the future of music performance? From laptop performances to algoraves and virtual reality shows, this volume explores how new forms of production and performance are changing the perception of music.

Making

Alphabets can be used not only as representations, but also as tools. What possibilities open up beyond known bodies of knowledge? In artist contributions and essays, the volume looks at the practices and politics of production.

Politics of Learning, Politics of Space: Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s

Many of the current debates concerning learning and teaching environments, physical and virtual, echo those of the 1960s and 1970s, the “Education Shock” era. The English volume  is a collection of four texts by curator Tom Holert complementing the German publication.

Carrier Bag Fiction

How is the world of symbols connected to the world of things and actions? In the latest volume, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction serves as a means against alienation. The articles by Jenna Sutela, Enis Maci, Sophia Al-Maria and others accompany Le Guin’s essay and form an experimental laboratory for new alphabets.

New Alphabet School

How does language influence thought? How can we develop other forms of learning and acting? From the politics of translation to practices of weaving: Speakers and workshop participants from the New Alphabet School share their questions, observations and studies on solidary practices of knowledge production on the blog.

Anthropocene-Curriculum.org

The research platform Anthropocene Curriculum explores novel epistemic, aesthetic and educational challenges of the age of humankind. The global network of initiatives is engaged with developing experimental and experiential approaches to co-learning and co-producing knowledge in a rapidly changing planetary situation.

The Broken Archive

What narratives do justice to the problems facing the Mediterranean region? Villa Romana’s web platform Broken Archive compiles artistic projects and films dealing with the past and present there and researches archives in the Mediterranean region.

Wörterbuch der Gegenwart

What comes after universalism? The volume uses key words such as Thing, Justice and Body to ask about ways to redesign the world linguistically and visually. With new and historical contributions by, among others, Philippe Descola, Nikita Dhawan, Liz Johnson Artur, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Sharma and Wole Soyinka.