Projects 2018

100 Years of Now

What is contemporary? Diagnosing the present 2015–2018

World Politics – Dream States – Data Streams: 100 Years of Now combines diagnoses of our times with scopes of action. In its latest long-term project, HKW examines the interrelations between global conflicts, classification systems and technologies.

Kanon-Fragen

Resources are not only of a material nature; ideas and concepts, frame narratives and traditions of practical knowledge are also among the (immaterial) resources of a culture. What are the resources of cultural canonization processes? This year, the long-term project Kanon-Fragen is searching for answers with two exhibitions on site at HKW and further exhibitions in Portugal and Brazil.

Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930

Exhibition and conference

Neolithic Childhood examines how the artistic avant-gardes reacted to the multiple crises of European modernity around 1930 – the “crisis of consciousness,” the revisions of early and pre-history, the imperialist struggle, the barbarism of technological mass war, the shock of capitalist industrialization, the failure of the Second (Socialist) International, the endgame of bourgeois humanism and the hypocrisies of colonial discourse.

Anthropocene Lectures

The Anthropocene – the geological epoch of humans – has established itself as a key concept within a wider scientific and social discourse. In the midst of the dramatic and destabilizing changes wrought by it, new potential for human action upon the Earth demand exploration, asking: Which forms of cooperation could arise from a new awareness of the human role in interlacing nature and technology?

10. Internationaler Literaturpreis

Award for Translated Contemporary Literatures
Celebration of the Shortlist & Award Ceremony June 28, 2018

Fiction by all available means: What literary forms do current narratives assume? What multiplications and interrelations of texts and realities are set in motion by the processes of translation? Under which conditions does our imagining and thinking, our writing, translating and reading take place? How does the contemporary text negotiate the complexities and distortions faced by mobile and incessantly self-observant societies? Who writes the texts in which the world is present?

Wassermusik

Goodbye UK – and Thank You for the Music
Concerts, films, talks

In 2018, Wassermusik takes the Brexit as an opportunity to pay homage to the extraordinary musical creativity that made the United Kingdom the world’s leading pop nation, alongside the US, in terms of music as well as thought, fashion, style and other concepts. Entitled Goodbye UK – and Thank You for the Music, the festival traces the “Britishness” of pop music and investigates its mode of action.

100 Years of Copyright

Concerts, talks, films, installations, performances, publication

A titanic struggle is currently raging over copyright. Publishers, labels and production companies battle the representatives of the digital economy over exploitation and remuneration. In this conflict, where are the interests of the artists? What about those of consumers with their desire to use high quality cultural goods? 100 Years of Copyright investigates the evolution of copyright since the birth of the cultural industry, concepts of intellectual property and artistic freedom. Initially intended as a research project, it will culminate in the fall of 2018 with concerts, talks, films, installations and performances.

Radiophonic Spaces

Walk-in radio space, experimental archive, sound studio and stage

What does an archive of radio art sound like? How do we hear and how does hearing establish our knowledge, our experience of the present and the world? Based on the results of a multi-year research project, Nathalie Singer, a radio writer and professor of experimental radio at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and a team of radio researchers are producing a radiophonic room designed by the artist, architect and musician Cevdet Erek. Visitors can enter it to individually hear and explore more than 200 works of international radio art.

Mississippi. An Anthropocene River

A Collaborative Research and Public Outreach Project (2018–19)

bauhaus imaginista

The bauhaus imaginista series of exhibitions and events highlights the impact and reception of the Bauhaus in the context of major twentieth-century geopolitical changes.

Technosphärenklänge

The omnipresent, increasingly intelligent device-world is becoming networked to form ever larger infrastructures. How can music respond to the complex intertwining of natural, social and technical processes

Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology

The writer and ethnologist Hubert Fichte (1935–1986) is considered a poetic and documentarian realist precursor for new disciplines in Germany such as Queer Studies and Postcolonial Studies: In his writings, economic criticism, (homo-) sexuality and self-reflection become methodical tools. With exhibitions and translations of his novels into the languages of the places that Hubert Fichte traveled with his life companion Leonore Mau, the project attempts to stimulate reception of his work there for the first time.

Dictionary of Now

Series of events and publication

The changes and disruptions of the past hundred years have shaped our conception of reality, our thought, and our language. The Dictionary of Now series reflects on the capacity of language to both depict and create reality. Since the modern age this has gone hand in hand with the search for universal truths and codified usages. The Dictionary of Now confronts this assertion of linguistic universalism with specific contemporary positions.

100 Years of Beat

Concerts, DJ sets, talks, films, performances, installations

The first drum set came on the market in 1918 and triggered a musical revolution: It took over urban dance music and established the triad of bass drum, snare and hi-hat as the combination used the world over. While percussion in European music had long only had an embellishing function, now the drummed backbeat became the heartbeat of music. In others words, African diasporic beat practices in North America and the Caribbean completely realigned European-defined music.

Schools of Tomorrow

With the Schools of Tomorrow project, in 2017 and 2018 HKW will investigate the question of how schools today can become places where a desirable society is built.

Staat 1–4

Theater productions

How do intelligence agencies become power apparatuses with their own agendas? What do major construction sites reveal about today’s society? What significance does the digital space have for democratic processes? And how do economic elites influence world politics? In the four productions Staat 1–4, the writer-director collective Rimini Protokoll sets out to explore fields outside of what can be organized and controlled by the nation-state today.

Dangerous Conjunctures

Resituating Balibar/Wallerstein‘s Race, Nation, Class
Symposium

Racism articulates itself through class relations and intensifies in nationalist currents. A new understanding of this dynamic is needed in order to create emancipatory and solidary social models. That is the diagnosis of the seminal volume Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. Thirty years after it was first published - at a time when this sinister triad rises again - it is urgent to redefine the ambiguous effects of their relations.

Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War

Exhibition, conference

Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War is devoted to the global dimension of cultural politics in the Cold War and to the changing meanings and aims assigned to modernism. Departing from an examination of the interdependencies between the political and aesthetic struggles of the era, the exhibition further reflects the ideological foundations of the conflict lines of today’s global contemporary art.

Saving Bruce Lee – African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy

Film program, talks, lectures

Saving Bruce Lee will discuss the legacy of Soviet filmmaking on the film history of African and Arab countries based on, for instance, recordings, films and the personal memories of students enrolled at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow who took part in the program from the early 1960s to in the late 1980s.

transmediale 2018 face value

Things are what they are – but could they be different? Under the title of face value, in its thirty-first year the festival is probing the values and the processes of value creation that have contributed to our present moment of extreme political, economic and cultural divides.