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Your guide to the events marking 100 years of Bauhaus in Germany

Beginning in Berlin Wednesday, organizations across Germany are hosting events and exhibitions to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus art school. The event programme spans the entire year and will be, much like the strategy of founder Walter Gropius, all-encompassing.

Published: 16 January 2019 14:33 CET
Your guide to the events marking 100 years of Bauhaus in Germany
Souvenirs from the Bauhaus 100 press conference in October 2018. Photo: DPA

The Bauhaus centenary programme is “experimental, multifarious, transnational and radically contemporary,” the Bauhaus Association states.

This year’s celebrations will also include additions to Germany’s museum landscape. In April, the Bauhaus Museum Weimar will re-open and, in September, the new Bauhaus Museum Dessau will open its doors for the first time.

Also, because of the Bauhaus celebrations, publications like Smithsonian and Lonely Planet have placed Germany as one of their top destinations to explore this year.

SEE ALSO: Why Germany is one of Lonely Planet's top destinations to visit next year

The Federal Ministry of Culture and the Media (BKM) and the Federal Cultural Foundation are providing approximately €21 million for the programme comprising more than 700 events in Germany, according to a BKM statement. 

“[The programme] offers a great opportunity to inspire many people for the ideas of the Bauhaus and to show how relevant the ideas of the 'Bauhausers' are for a cosmopolitan and liberal society to this day,” Culture Minister Monika Grütters says in the statement. 

While communities worldwide will bid Happy Birthday to the Bauhaus movement in 2019, here is just a sampling of the events, exhibitions, and projects planned in Germany.

For the complete year-long programme, visit: Bauhaus 100 Programme.

SEE ALSO: 'Rethinking the World': Bauhaus celebrates 100 years

January 16-24th, 2019

100 Years: Opening Festival

Akadamie der Künste, Berlin

Festival patron and Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will give a ceremonial address on opening day at the Akadamie der Künste, but the nine-day long festival will feature 25 performances and more than 100 artists. Also on opening night, German jazz pianist and composer Michael Wollny will present BAU.HAUS.KLANG.

August 17th, 2018 – February 5th, 2019

Successor of the Bauhaus – Two Generations of Artists in East Germany

Henry-van-de-Velde-Museum, Haus Schulenburg, Gera

This exhibition focuses on the Bauhaus influence throughout Germany during the post-war years as the country grappled with the effects of Nazism and Communism.

November 9th, 2018 – March 10th, 2019

Bauhaus and America: Experiments in Light and Movement

LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster

This exhibition looks at light and movement through artists who, after Nazi pressure closed the Bauhaus school, emigrated to America.

March 15th, 2019 – June 10th, 2019

bauhaus imaginista: Still Undead

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

bauhaus imaginista, an international research project, will open its exhibition in Berlin in March and feature a series of events focusing on the global impact and relationships of the Bauhaus movement.

April 6th, 2019

Re-opening

Bauhaus Museum Weimar

After a three-year construction period, the Bauhaus Museum Weimar will reopen its doors in the Bauhaus birthplace.

April 7th, 2019 – January 5th, 2020

Design for Life – Bauhaus Design in the GDR

Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR, Eisenhüttenstadt

Using everyday items from former East Germany, this exhibit looks at the connection between attitudes towards Bauhaus there and the political developments from the time.

June 30th, 2019 – October 27th, 2019

Printing Arts 1919: The Bauhaus and Its Precursors in the Graphic Arts Industry

Museum für Druckkunst Leipzig

The exhibition – featuring posters, advertisements, magazines, books, and type faces — explores innovative post-World War I years of the printing industry and its influence on modern design, like Bauhaus.

August 31st, 2019 – September 8th, 2019

Bauhauswoche Berlin

Various locations in Berlin

Various outdoor events and store-fronts exhibitions will relay the Bauhaus’s history and impact during the week-long festival organized by Kulturprojekte Berlin.

September 8th, 2019

Bauhaus Museum Dessau

Holding the second largest collection of the Bauhaus movement in the world, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is opening a museum later this year to showcase its 49,000 catalogued exhibits.

September 26th, 2019 – October 10th, 2019

Triennale der Moderne

Various locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin

Over three consecutive weekends, the Triennale der Moderne will host tours, talks, and special events at the Germany’s three Bauhaus UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin.

Yearlong

The Grand Tour of Modernism

Various locations throughout Germany

The Grand Tour of Modernism encourages visitors to explore sites of Bauhaus and modernism beyond Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. “The Grand Tour of Modernism links significant and accessible buildings to guide visitors through one hundred years of the history of modern architecture from 1900 to 2000. Their broad spectrum spans individual buildings and settlements, icons and objects of debate, key buildings and unknown works,” the German project’s website reads.

Additional ways to celebrate the Bauhaus centenary

Stay overnight at the Bauhaus studio building in Dessau: From January onwards, Bauhaus enthusiasts can skip a traditional hotel stay in favor of one at the studio building in Dessau. Studios have been recreated in “meticulous detail” to mirror the floorplan and aesthetic of former inhabitants during the 1920s.

Visit a mini-clone of the Bauhaus workshop wing: The “Wohnmaschine,” a miniature version of the workshop wing of the Bauhaus building in Dessau, will visit Dessau and Berlin.  

 

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ART

African-born director’s new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

One of the rare African-born figures to head a German cultural institution, Bonaventure Ndikung is aiming to highlight post-colonial multiculturalism at a Berlin arts centre with its roots in Western hegemony.

Published: 8 July 2023 10:13 CEST
African-born director's new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

The “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (House of World Cultures), or HKW, was built by the Americans in 1956 during the Cold War for propaganda purposes, at a time when Germany was still divided.

New director Ndikung said it had been located “strategically” so that people on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in the then-communist East, could see it.

This was “representing freedom” but “from the Western perspective”, the 46-year-old told AFP.

Now Ndikung, born in Cameroon before coming to study in Germany 26 years ago, wants to transform it into a place filled with “different cultures of the world”.

The centre, by the river Spree, is known locally as the “pregnant oyster” due to its sweeping, curved roof. It does not have its own collections but is home to exhibition rooms and a 1,000-seat auditorium.

It reopened in June after renovations, and Ndikung’s first project “Quilombismo” fits in with his aims of expanding the centre’s offerings.

The exhibition takes its name from the Brazilian term “Quilombo”, referring to the communities formed in the 17th century by African slaves, who fled to remote parts of the South American country.

Throughout the summer, there will also be performances, concerts, films, discussions and an exhibition of contemporary art from post-colonial societies across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania.

‘Rethink the space’

“We have been trying to… rethink the space. We invited artists to paint walls… even the floor,” Ndikung said.

And part of the “Quilombismo” exhibition can be found glued to the floor -African braids laced together, a symbol of liberation for black people, which was created by Zimbabwean artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti.

According to Ndikung, African slaves on plantations sometimes plaited their hair in certain ways as a kind of coded message to those seeking to escape, showing them which direction to head.

READ ALSO: Germany hands back looted artefacts to Nigeria

His quest for aestheticism is reflected in his appearance: with a colourful suit and headgear, as well as huge rings on his fingers, he rarely goes unnoticed.

During his interview with AFP, Ndikung was wearing a green scarf and cap, a blue-ish jacket and big, sky-blue shoes.

With a doctorate in medical biology, he used to work as an engineer before devoting himself to art.

In 2010, he founded the Savvy Gallery in Berlin, bringing together art from the West and elsewhere, and in 2017 was one of the curators of Documenta, a prestigious contemporary art event in the German city of Kassel.

Convinced of the belief that history “has been written by a particular type of people, mostly white and men,” Ndikung has had all the rooms in the HKW renamed after women.

These are figures who have “done something important in the advancement of the world” but were “erased” from history, he added. Among them is Frenchwoman Paulette Nardal, born in Martinique in 1896.

She helped inspire the creation of the “negritude” movement, which aimed to develop black literary consciousness, and was the first black woman to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Reassessing history

Ndikung’s appointment at the HKW comes as awareness grows in Germany about its colonial past, which has long been overshadowed by the atrocities committed during the era of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

Berlin has in recent years started returning looted objects to African countries which it occupied in the early 20th century — Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon.

“It’s long overdue,” said Ndikung.

He was born in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, into an anglophone family.

The country is majority francophone but also home to an anglophone minority and has faced deadly unrest in English-speaking areas, where armed insurgents are fighting to establish an independent homeland.

One of his dreams is to open a museum in Cameroon “bringing together historical and contemporary objects” from different countries, he said.

He would love to locate it in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s restive Northwest region.

“But there is a war in Bamenda, so I can’t,” he says.

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