2019 marks the centenary of the birth of the Bauhaus

The most influential design school in the world celebrates this 2019 the 100 years since its birth. Although it was only active 14 years, from 1919 to 1933, moving from Weimar to Dessau and from Dessau to Berlin, its legacy is still tangible in the world of visual arts today. This is evident by the extensive Bauhaus 100 program, organized by the three Bauhaus institutions that hold collections: the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, which have founded the Association Bauhaus 2019. We have put together a selection of exhibitions and events that will revive the spirit of the school in 2019 and we recommend you to review this brief history of the school compiled for the commemorative website.

The Inaugural Festival: 16-24 January 2019
Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, Berlin
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The Bauhaus-Archiv has organised a one-week festival to celebrate the centenary from 16 to 24th January at Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, Berlin. The museum will offer a series of performance art, music and new music showcases by contemporary artists, showing that the aesthetic issues and experimental configurations of the Bauhaus artists continue to be inspiringly contagious. The programme will examine the relationship between body, space and movement, as well as between man and machine.

Das Totale Tanz Theater 360º: Bauhaus stage VR experience
Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, Berlin
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One of the highlights of the festival is “Das Totale Tanz Theater”, a VR installation that makes the Bauhaus dream of “total theatre” a reality. The piece is a three-dimensional audio and visual experience that lets body and space blend together and brings Walter Gropius’ and Oskar Schlemmer’s stage experiment into the digital age using virtual reality. A dance video with choreography by Richard Siegal and music by the band Einstürzende Neubauten, will be also available in the ARTE 360° app from 17th January.

Bauhaus Imaginista: the school’s legacy in 9 cities around the world
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The Bauhaus was in contact with institutions in many countries, where it encountered similar movements that had arisen independently of it, and that lent the Bauhaus itself strong stimuli.

Since March 2018, the international exhibition and research project bauhaus imaginista is exploring these interconnections through a series of exhibitions curated and art directed by Marion von Osten and Grant Watson and complemented by a program of satellite events, workshops and panels with cultural professionals in the US, India, Morocco, and Nigeria.

Bauhaus imaginista is divided into four chapters that depart from one specific Bauhaus object (A copy of the 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto by Walter Gropius, the 1927 drawing Teppich (Carpet) by Paul Klee, the collage ein bauhaus-film by Marcel Breuer from 1926 and ‘Reflecting colorlight plays’ by Kurt Schwerdtfeger from 1922):

“Chapter I: Correspondence” was staged at the National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto from August 4 to October 8, 2018. The show examined the educational approaches of the Bauhaus and compared them with two avant-garde art schools that were working simultaneously in Japan and India. These schools included the Kala Bhavana at Shantiniketan in West Bengal and the Seikatsu Kosei Kenkyusho (Research Institute for Life Configurations; later renamed as Shin Kenchiku Kogei Gakuin, School of New Architecture and Design) in Tokyo.

“Chapter II: Moving away” was at the China Design Museum in Hangzhou from April 8 to July 8, 2018, and at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow from September 11, to November 30, 2018. Moving Away focused on how universal design principles were developed, adapted, expanded or renewed by designers and architects in different cultural and political contexts such as in the USSR, Chile, Mexico, India, China, Israel, and Nigeria.

“Chapter III: Learning From” is currently being staged in the SESC Pompéia in São Paulo, Brazil, running until January 10, 2019. Learning From places the Bauhaus study of pre-modern craft techniques, materials and practices at the center of an examination of diverse transcultural translations. The preoccupation with the pre-modern extends throughout the work of Bauhaus instructors and students, beyond their work in Germany. In North Africa, as well as in North and Latin America, contact with local craft practices led to the development of a modern idiom of forms, abstraction, and industrial design, as well as to the introduction of new methods and techniques based on local and sometimes indigenous knowledge.

“Chapter IV: Undead” will open at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin between March 15 and June 10, 2019. As the fourth and final exhibition chapter, Still Undead, will bring together the previous chapters in a landmark exhibition that will explore the experimental work with light and sound, film and photography and their repercussions in expanded cinema, visual and popular culture and in electronic music.

Bauhaus and America: experiments with light and movement
9 November 2018 – 10 March 2019,
LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster
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The exhibition focuses on artists who, after the Bauhaus was closed in 1933, emigrated to America to carry forward their ideas there. Starting with the Bauhaus stage as an interdisciplinary laboratory for experiments in light and movement, the diverse controversies

in this field are examined for the first time. Ranging from light and kinetic art to experimental film and dance and performance art, this epoch spanning exhibition shows the far-reaching influence of these interactions. As early as in the 1950s the ideas were having a reverse influence from America on Europe and are still reflected in contemporary art today. That is why the exhibition not only concentrates on the positions of the Bauhaus and its American successor institutions, but spans developments right up to the present.

Bauhaus and photography
7 December 2018 – 10 March 2019
NRW Forum, Dusseldorf
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The exhibition “Bauhaus and Photography—On New Visions in Contemporary Art” brings together works that represent the new vision of Bauhaus practitioners like László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Marianne Brandt, Erich Consemüller and Walter Peterhans with contemporary artists including Antje Hanebeck, Daniel T. Braun, Dominique Teufen, Doug Fogelson, Douglas Gordon, Kris Scholz, Max de Esteban, Stefanie Seufert, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Thomas Ruff, Viviane Sassen and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Oskar Schlemmer: The Bauhaus and the Path to Modernity
28 April 2019 – 29 July 2019
Herzogliches Museum Gotha
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This exhibition will focus on the life and work of avant-garde artist Oskar Schlemmer, who is recognised for his cross-disciplinary contributions as a painter, draughtsman, graphic artist, sculptor, stage designer and muralist.

Republic of Spirits – The Bauhaus Festival of the Weimar Universities
12 April 2019
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The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar will celebrate the founding day of the Bauhaus – 12 April 1919 – with a festival and Bauhaus-themed parties, elaborately designed, loved and celebrated by masters and students alike. Entirely in keeping with the Bauhaus spirit, students from the two universities will stage a multimedia spectacle on the evening of 12 April 2019.

Twenty rooms in the Fürstenhaus and in Henry van de Velde’s buildings will be transformed into stages for architecture, music, sound, projections and performance. Interdisciplinary student teams will create walk-in light-sound-space installations, offering entirely new interpretations of the Bauhaus history.

Bauhaus Museum Dessau Opening
8 September 2019
Bauhaus Museum Dessau, Mies-van-der-Rohe-Platz 1, Dessau-Roßlau, 06844
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A new museum is set to open at the Bauhaus’ school building in Dessau. Bauhaus Museum Dessau, designed by Barcelona-based studio Gonzalez Hinz Zabala, will present the second-largest Bauhaus collection in the world. It is designed in the Bauhaus spirit. The design was selected from 831 submissions in an open international competition held in late 2015. The jury was convinced by the museum concept – a building within a building – comprising a soaring steelwork block in a glass envelope. On the upper floor, a hermetic ‘Black Box’ will enable the presentation of the collection. The museum tasks of collecting, preservation and conservation will be performed here. The transparent ground floor, the museum foyer, will serve as an open platform offering among other things curatorial freedom for temporary exhibitions of contemporary works and events.