bauhaus imaginista

The Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919 after the end of the First World War, emerged from the November Revolution as a school for a new kind of design. The Bauhaus brought together a generation of students and teachers whose stated desire was to put an end to Europe’s nationalistic, militaristic and authoritarian past. An artistic avant-gardes, along with the radical pedagogical ideas such as those promoted by the Bauhaus, shaped the Weimar Republic, which was the first fully democratic society in Germany. By transforming the educational environment and by combining art, handicraft, design and architecture, the Bauhaus founders thought existing social conditions would also be reformed. The new creative practices, ways of working and ways of living developed at the Bauhaus were all aimed at liberating people from the past. 
The Bauhaus was a cosmopolitan project from its inception. Bauhauslers* forged connections across the globe. The research and exhibition project bauhaus imaginista proposes a new interpretation of the Bauhaus as a globally connected institution and as part of a modernity that drew its impulses from encounters and exchanges with different cultures. In this respect, the transfer of ideas which the Bauhaus participated in is not a story of influence and effect but of international interdependence. The exhibition explores this history of transnational relationships, correspondence and migrations, one that continued even after the school’s closure by National Socialists in 1933. We place the Bauhaus in an international context of like-minded projects, discussing avant-garde art schools in India and Japan as parallel histories of modern educational reform. At the same time, the exhibition addresses the study of pre-modern crafts at the Bauhaus, of the Bauhaus women* exiled in North and Central America, as well as the politicization of Bauhaus ideas in post-revolutionary Mexico and postcolonial Morocco and Brazil. The show also highlights cases where Bauhaus design approaches were translated within particular local contexts, such as occurred in China, Nigeria and the Soviet Union, and shows how the innovative use of media at the Bauhaus continued to influence contemporary art and popular culture in recent decades. 
Four individual chapters developed over the past two years in various formats (exhibitions, workshops and conferences) in Hangzhou, Kyoto and Tokyo, São Paulo, Lagos, Delhi, New York, Moscow and Berlin are each based on a concrete Bauhaus object: the Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919, an advertisement by Marcel Breuer, a drawing by Paul Klee and Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s Reflektorische Farblichtspiele (reflective colored light plays). These objects all serve as starting points for thematic and conceptual chapters, which explore different genealogies of Bauhaus reception and address specific questions relevant to contemporary artistic, cultural and social debates. 

bauhaus imaginista is a collaboration between the Bauhaus Kooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar, the Goethe-Institut and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. The research project, with its various exhibition stations, coincides with the centennial anniversary of the Bauhaus’s founding. bauhaus imaginista was made possible by funds from the German Federal Government Commission for Culture and Media. The German Federal Cultural Foundation supported the exhibition in Berlin, while the Federal Foreign Office has supported projects staged abroad. The exhibition has now been extended to include the Zentrum Paul Klee.

Exhibition Design: Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik, Berlin