Projects 2021

2021/2022

Bad Words

Audio Series

Based on Aichinger’s essay Bad Words, the audio series creates a place for a different way of speaking about language and literature. From conversations, readings, voice messages, field recordings and music, a polyphonic space is created with changing guests.

Partners and Team

2021/2022

Das Neue Alphabet – Publication series

Alphabets, binary code, DNA – the current explosion of knowledge relies on the world being divided into the tiniest of units. The functionalization of manipulable semiotic systems through political control and economic exploitation are countered in these 26 volumes with poetic discombobulations, sensuous recoding and creolization.

2021/2022

S.O.S. – Schools of Sustainability

Can Schools Save the Climate?

The climate crisis is the greatest challenge of our era. How can the experiences that young activists of the Fridays for Future movement gather outside of school can be taken back to school? Artistic approaches for a climate-neutral school.

2019–2022

New Alphabet School

The New Alphabet School is a collaborative self-organized school with the aim to explore critical and affirmative research practices. Over the course of three years, it will function as a colloquium to engage in discussions and develop new ideas in the fields of the arts, archives, poetics and activism.

2019–2022

Alphabet Readings

Literature series

Alphabet Readings is a series of unconventional gatherings about diverse literary topics and works. The series probes various genres, forms and writing styles for their particular ways of making the world readable.

Until 2022

On Music

Panels, concerts, DJ sets, podcast

Nuanced engagement with music rather than marketing-related product information; in-depth discussions, analyses and reflections instead of “thumbs up”: The HKW series wants to offer as much food for thought, inspiration and ideas as possible On Music. Among others, it raises questions about social justice, solidarity and participation in the club scene.

2021/2022

Cultures d’Avenir

Exchange and research program

Rethinking social issues: For Culture d’Avenir, 25 students used art to address the four pressing challenges of parity and gender, discrimination, the climate emergency, and knowledge transfer and inclusion. With the support of international experts, they developed digital creative projects.

Partners

2020–2022

The White West IV: Whose Universal?

Podcast: Since October 2020
Conference: Apr 22 & 23, 2022

Is fascism a negation of modernity or one of its constitutive features? Whose Universal? is a conference devoted to theorizing the poorly understood connection between settler colonialism and fascism, taking up Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.

2021/2022

The Whole Life Academy Berlin

Workshops: starting October 2021
Public program: March 2022

The second edition of the Whole Life Academy takes up the archive as a space for dialogue, collective knowledge production and mobilization in the midst of current social and political upheaval. How can digital and analogue tools re-open historical narratives and canons?

2021/2022

Investigative Commons

Exhibition and discourse program
Conference: Oct 9, 2021

What can civil society do when state institutions are involved in crimes? Reporters, artists, activists and others look at racist policing, border systems and cyber-surveillance, exploring new investigative practices and methods to collectively establish the truth.

Since 2019

Repeat After Me / Do Not Draw a Penis

Interactive installations on artificial intelligence by Studio Moniker

How does it feel to communicate with algorithms? On what moral principles are they based? Can they be outsmarted? Two permanent interactive installations by the Moniker art and design office, accessible at HKW during opening hours, activate both play instincts and resistance. Enter at your own risk!

Partner

Past Projects

2020/2021

The Broken Archive

Online series: Lectures, discussions

European historiography has produced a romanticized image of Italy. This limits the visibility of problems in the Mediterranean region. Online lectures and discussions will look at historical narratives that do justice to Italy’s complex present.

2021, Sep 30 — Dec 20

Archive of Refuge

Digital archive, installation, opening days, workshops

What forms of remembrance are needed in today’s societies shaped by migration? This oral history project concerns itself with the memories of people migrating to Germany as an integral part of German post-war history, seeking to protect them from being forgotten and suppressed. 41 documentary film interviews with people who migrated to West and East Germany over the last 70 years are being used to create a commemorative website.

The Films of Heinz Emigholz

2021, Oct 15 — Dec 20

Counter Gravity

The Films of Heinz Emigholz
Monographic show and publication, Screenings and conversations

A pioneer of experimental architectural and narrative film: Since the 1970s, Heinz Emigholz has used a unique cinematic formal language to explore the relationship between film time and spatial experience, remembrance structure and consciousness. In his work, the filmmaker, artist, author and producer radically departs from conventional representations of space, creating an alternative history of modern architecture.

2021

Illiberal Arts

Exhibition, performances, workshops, publication, podcasts

In the collapse of the liberal capitalist world order, its illiberal core is exposed – the unfreedom of the dispossessed and the willingness of the propertied to use violence. Art, too, is the venue for these forces. A project on artistic life’s work: Perhaps what became art doesn’t necessarily have to remain art?

2020/2021

Schools of Tomorrow 3

School projects, presentations, discussions

Schools are laboratories for the society of tomorrow. But how can they enable democratic, self-determined and sustainable action? At eleven Berlin schools, students, along with artists and everyday experts, explore the question of how schools can give them tools for actively shaping their lives.

May – October 2021

Redefining the Power / After Dürer

Kiluanji Kia Henda / Andreas Siekmann
Installations in the Mirror Pond

What significance do exploitation, oppression and colonialization have in the modern culture of remembrance? Can monuments not only be razed, but revised? Two works on historical remembrance and the monuments debate.

Partners

New conceptions of music, space and architecture

2021, Oct 21 — 24

The Sound of Distance

New conceptions of music, space and architecture
Concerts, sound installations, talks

If HKW were one big instrument, what would it sound like? The four-day festival The Sound of Distance takes this question seriously and seeks answers in the expanded resonance chamber of concerts, performances, talks and sonic activations, indoors and outdoors, in a radius that includes the carillon in the neighboring bell tower and the echo of the surrounding government buildings.

By Nicholas Bussmann

2021, Aug 27 — Sep 19

Kosmoskopien

By Nicholas Bussmann
Exhibition, performances

All politics and social practices are a mere continuation of music by other means. That is one way to describe the approach of artist and musician Nicholas Bussmann. At HKW, Bussmann invites visitors to participate in his multi-layered experiments in societal composition, ritual and polyphony.

The Self-Learning Robo-Taxi by Interrobang

2021, Sep 14 — 19

Soulmachine

Mobile Performance

In the future, who will be behind the wheel? What happens when competence is handed over to artificial intelligence? What ethical standards need to be developed and how will decision-making still be possible?

2021, Aug 19 — 22

transmediale 2021 out of doors

Films, music, performances, talks

A zombie that refuses to lie silent in the dirt, a road between Jerusalem and Jericho that an algorithm cannot navigate, a political dance that builds a resistance. Taking place across HKW’s Westgarten and the garden at silent green, transmediale out of doors brings together film, music, performance and talks that engage with the aesthetics and politics of refusal.

Events

2021, Jul 15 — Aug 15

21 Sunsets

Concerts, films, readings
Open air on the roof terrace

The festival on one of the city’s most beautiful roof terraces is back! On 21 summer evenings, HKW will gather music, literature and film art in a summery open-air atmosphere – but more importantly the people who want to experience culture together again.

Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s

2021, May 27 — Jul 11

Education Shock

Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s
Exhibition, school project, publication

Education Shock revisits the decades following the “shock” of the “Sputnik crisis” when the sphere of education expanded on a global scale. As the exhibition and its accompanying publications demonstrate, the rethinking and replanning of learning environments – due to demographics, technology, the Cold War and the social movements culminating in 1968 – permanently changed the educational sphere.

2020/2021

Education in Concrete

School projects, manifesto, audio walks
Audio walks: Starting beginning of June 2021

As part of Education Shock, students teamed up with artists ans engaged with their school buildings of the 1960s and 1970s. They devised a manifesto for the design of good learning environments. Starting in June 2021, the eight participating Berlin schools and the students’ visions can be explored on audio walks.

2021, May 27 — Jul 11

Potosí Principle – Archive

Reading room and exhibition

What is the correlation between extractivism and the inquisition? The city of Potosí, today in Bolivia, was once one of the most important silver mining regions in the world; emblematic of the first global economic power. The exhibition Potosí Principle – Archive builds on The Potosí Principle and, ten years later, probes the principle of global exploitation anew.

Award Ceremony June 30, 2021

Internationaler Literaturpreis 2021

Award ceremony on June 30, 2021

In times of crisis, it matters more than ever what kind of stories we tell, which scripts and plots we follow and whose voices we trust. In 2021, the Internationaler Literaturpreis will again be searching for books that do something with language – precisely because they reach us in translation.

Negotiating Context in the Anthropocene

2020, Oct 26 — 2021, Feb 28

The Shape of a Practice

Negotiating Context in the Anthropocene
Art, Discourse, Research

The Anthropocene as a global concept confronts planetary change with highly fractured and even contradictory local situations, conditions and experiences. It is therefore vital to share methods, contexts and ways of life to grapple with this transforming Earth.

Projects 2021

Bad Words

Das Neue Alphabet – Publication series

S.O.S. – Schools of Sustainability

New Alphabet School

Alphabet Readings

On Music

Cultures d’Avenir

The White West IV: Whose Universal?

The Whole Life Academy Berlin

Investigative Commons

Repeat After Me / Do Not Draw a Penis

Past Projects

The Broken Archive

Archive of Refuge

Counter Gravity

Illiberal Arts

Schools of Tomorrow 3

Redefining the Power / After Dürer

The Sound of Distance

Kosmoskopien

Soulmachine

transmediale 2021 out of doors

21 Sunsets

Education Shock

Education in Concrete

Potosí Principle – Archive

Internationaler Literaturpreis 2021

The Shape of a Practice

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