Projects 2018

2018–2019

Mississippi. An Anthropocene River

A research project on the novel epistemic, aesthetic, and educational challenges of the Anthropocene

How can the Anthropocene be made legible on a regional level without dismissing its inherent complexity? Mississippi. An Anthropocene River explores the environmental, economic and socio-political realities that have come to form the Mississippi River and its adjacent regions in its present state. Until November 2019, interdisciplinary groups of researchers, artists and stakeholders from civil society will investigate the river basin to develop local approaches to issues of planetary change.

2017–2020

Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology

Exhibition and research project

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. The exhibition and research project Love and Ethnology opens his works for a critical contemporary discussion.

2017–2019

Schools of Tomorrow

With the Schools of Tomorrow project, since 2017 HKW has been investigating the question of how schools today can become places where a desirable society is built.

Past Projects

The Situationist International en route for May ’68

2018, Sep 27 — Dec 10

The Most Dangerous Game

The Situationist International en route for May ’68
Exhibition

Between 1957 and 1972, the Situationist International (S.I.) first projected a “revolutionary front in culture” and then shifted its propaganda to the political field. Employing ludic methods, the movement offered a fundamental critique of the spectacle of a consumerist society. In an age in which the principles of the market economy are increasingly permeating all areas of life, The Most Dangerous Game instigates a new envisioning of the years in which the S.I. articulated its critique.

Walk-in radio archive and platform for listening knowledge

2018, Nov 01 — Dec 10

Radiophonic Spaces

Walk-in radio archive and platform for listening knowledge

What significance does listening knowledge have in our present-day shaped by visual cultures? How are the cultures, aesthetics and politics of transmission and reception changing? In a walk-in radio archive visitors can discover more than 200 works of radio art by John Cage, Friederike Mayröcker, Milo Rau and many others.

2018, Nov 16 — Dec 14
2019, Jan 09 — 13

Humanity at Work

By Romana Schmalisch and Robert Schlicht
Exhibition

How do we learn to work? What skills do we have to acquire in order to measure up to the demands of the labor market? In other words, how does human capital come about? With their solo exhibition Humanity at Work, Romana Schmalisch and Robert Schlicht draw a portrait of a society that measures wealth in terms of the labor expended.

2017–2018

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?

2018, Oct 18 — 21

100 Years of Copyright

Concerts, talks, films, installations, performances, publication

A titanic struggle is currently raging over copyright: Publishers and labels are battling over exploitation and remuneration with representatives of the digital economy. Where are the interests of the artists and consumers while the future conditions for creative work are being negotiated? How is cultural production impaired when copyright and artistic freedom are played against one another?

Goodbye UK – and Thank You for the Music

2018, Jul 27 — Aug 18

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.

2018, Apr 13 — Jul 09

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.

2018

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?

2015–2018

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.

2018, Apr 26 — 29

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.

2016–2018

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.

Resituating Balibar/Wallerstein‘s “Race, Nation, Class”

2018, Mar 15 — 17

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.

2018, Jan 19 — 21

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.

2017, Nov 03 — 2018, Jan 08

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.

2018, Jan 31 — Feb 04

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.