100 Years of Now

In Paris Calligrammes the filmmaker, photographer and collector of worlds Ulrike Ottinger links historical archival material with her own art and film works to create a sociogram of her time as a visual artist in Paris.

bauhaus imaginista tells the transnational story of the Bauhaus for the first time on this scale and brings together an account of its reception in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Following exhibitions, symposia and workshops in Hangzhou, Kyoto and Tokyo, São Paulo, Lagos, Delhi, New York and Moscow in 2018, HKW will show all four chapters of the exhibition and research project.

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.

The dilemma of global technology and its identity was the main theme of Technosphere. From 2015 to 2019 the explorative research project hosted four public events to spur conversations among scientists, artists, and the general public to explore the origins and future itineraries of the technosphere.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

The year 1948 serves as an aperture through which we can rethink the history of the now; the decisive moment when the heap of fragments left by the fury of two world wars began to reassemble into new forms of technological, scientific, and cultural order that inform our contemporary situation. With the atomic age, the digital age and the age of the "hydrocarbon man” taking off, 1948 represents an inflection point for many developments and path dependencies to come.

On the occasion of the centenary of the October Revolution in Russia and nearly one hundred years after Kurt Eisner declared Bavaria a Free State and a socialist republic at the Mathäser-Bräu in Munich, Haus der Kunst will convene Specters of Communism: A Festival on the Revolutionary Century. This festival will trace the multifaceted, partly contrary and partly astonishingly parallel manifestations of global communism.

When there are no more gaps in the system, negation is the last resort. No! Music is searching for dissent in music: artists who work counter to the music industry, musicians who explore discomfort in the face of market mechanisms, or who even experiment with the negation of sound itself; and sounds that are not allowed to be heard – censored and forbidden music.

Does the term readymade taken by Marcel Duchamp around 1916 for his ‘already made’ works of art need updating in the light of the global and digital transformations of the 21st century? Interpretations of the readymade in art history often concentrate on Duchamp himself. However, during the “readymade century” artistic practices working with the ‘already made’ have expanded enormously, forming a heterogeneous field of (post-)appropriation strategies.

How can the past be inscribed into the present not as a relict, but as lived experience “here and now”? Adania Shibli, Mohammad Al Attar, and Rabih Mroué investigate key discourses that have underlined political, social and cultural transformations over the past century in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean.

What is more immortal than the idea of eternal life? Russian Cosmism around 1900 imagined nothing less than an overcoming of death. An HKW-wide exhibition and a conference explore the ideas of this movement, which despite its great influence on Russian art, scholarship, and politics, has been almost entirely forgotten, and consider their contemporary relevance.

2 or 3 Tigers is a group exhibition about colonialism, media and modernity, specifically in East Asia. The figure of the tiger itself is the medium through which mythological, colonial and modern histories are evoked and folded into the present, highlighting unstable identities and shifting ground, as well as structural continuities and modernization ideologies. Modernity is reflected as a colonial pattern inscribed in the history of nation states, militarization and financialization, but also as a an ontological revolution, as an order that fundamentally upsets social organization, cultural patterns and indeed cosmologies, and that in most societies in the past 200 years has led to a profound crisis of consciousness.

How free can music be? Musicians, thinkers and artists dealt with this question in a variety of contexts in the twentieth century. Music should be free and should be freed again and again: freed of the restrictions that tonality or notational systems impose upon it, freed of the limitations of conventional instruments. Musical means and forms were radically expanded, for example by free improvisation, through experiments with sounds as musically malleable materials and innovative sound-makers.

The present moment is marked by one central political idea: the nation-state. It installs itself through a system of nation-states and a corresponding global framework that originated from a new world order after the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Since then, it has become so deeply embedded in our thinking that alternative forms of political organization have become practically unimaginable—even though serious alternatives, such as transnational anti-colonial movements and communist internationalism, existed at the time.

In their school lives, teens in particular are experts in the immigration society yet they rarely have a say about it. Since December 2016, students at the Staatliche Europa-Schulen in Berlin have been seeking new imagery, presentation formats and narratives that do justice to their points of view.

In January 2017, close to the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolutions, HKW invited HAU Hebbel am Ufer to investigate the topicality of the social and artistic developments that had been made possible for a few short years following that political transformation. This look back incorporates a look at the political form of today’s society as well. The aim is to survey our distance to the past in order to ascertain its position in the present. The beginnings of the Russian Revolution were not only ahead of their time, but also ahead of our own. Their aspirations and their reality are not only contemporary again, but also still of the future.

“Dialog on equal footing,” “lending a voice” – this kind of wording reveals positions of power. How can we bring ourselves to think differently? How is empowerment created within the host society? Following sound tracks, artists and activists, newcomers and long-time residents of Berlin work to politicize the act of listening.

One hundred years after World War I the violent conflicts of our age have assumed completely new forms. When individual militias, warlords and terrorist groups, as opposed to states, become the decisive players, then in many cases wars can now no longer be recognized as such. However, even World War I, as a global war, was already a complex formation composed of diverse parties and partisans, paramilitaries and warmongering intellectuals.

Can our inner thoughts be transmitted by our eye movements? Can our future actions be predicted by our current behavior? Julien Prévieux’s film Patterns of Life enacts more than a century of evolving technologies in tracking human behavior, from reorganizing the factory floor to today’s “activity-based intelligence” in the “war on terror.” This is but one example from over 30 works tracing the inversions that mark the relationship between man and machine.

When did popular music originate? Depending on the definition, it was somewhere between the years 822 and 1964. But, then, around a hundred years ago the decisive transition occurred: wax cylinders and, later, shellac records were able to preserve musical performances and radio was able to broadcast them, thus beginning the era of recorded music.

In an ongoing trans-disciplinary collaboration initiated by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), around forty scholars from around the world, working in the natural, environmental, and social sciences, as well as the humanities, arts, and architecture, jointly developed an Anthropocene Curriculum.

A new component of the Earth system is emerging today, comparable in scale and function to the bio- and hydrosphere. It is driven by the intertwining of natural environments with vast socio-technical forces and increasingly diverse technological species.

Refugees are also digital trailblazers; the use of smartphones and social media are essential both for their escape and for everyday life in their new homes. For voluntary refugee aids, digital tools are also of great importance. The Civil Society 4.0 congress aims to network the many initiatives and projects.

How do war and music go together? Or: Why do war and music go so well together? Music plays a decisive role in war propaganda and warmongering, and – most topically – in the soundtrack from bestial execution videos.

How can we create affordable living space? How do we provide opportunities for self-determination? Who are today’s new clients? What new answers can be found to the age-old housing question?

What does it mean to act ethically today? What responsibilities arise in the face of global crises? What perspectives, practices and discourses does a political community need? With Acting within a humane society, HKW tests the validity of terms of historical humanism.

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. The kick-off between September 30 and October 4, 2015 will gather artists, scientists, activists and observers of the times in unusual constellations.