bauhaus imaginista at Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Marion von Osten & Grant Watson

bauhaus imaginista culminated with a major exhibition at the House of World Cultures (HKW) in Berlin bringing together the chapters developed in the 2018 international programme and adding the new chapter ‘Still Undead.’

bauhaus imaginista traces the history of a twentieth-century transcultural exchange from the perspective of international correspondence, relationships, encounters, and resonances. Drawing on the bauhaus imaginista international programme in 2018, the anniversary exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) is divided into four chapters. Each chapter departs from a focal object selected from Bauhaus masters and students. What these four objects have in common is their propositional character and their material ephemerality. They include a copy of the Bauhaus Manifesto and first curriculum by Walter Gropius of 1919, the drawing Teppich (Carpet) by Paul Klee of 1927, the collage ein bauhaus-film by Marcel Breuer of 1926, and the “Reflecting color-light plays” by Kurt Schwerdtfeger of 1922.

From its inception, the Bauhaus was internationally oriented; students and teachers travelled from different parts of Europe and Asia to become part of the school. As curators of the bauhaus imiginista project we understand the global circulation of Bauhaus ideas not in terms of impact, but rather through its participation in international networks prior to 1933 and how this was mirrored in the school’s afterlife. The vision of the Bauhaus according to Walter Gropius—the school’s first director from 1919 to 1928—constituted a break with classical and academic training, including its separation between the fine and applied arts. This revision was equally important in other parts of the world where decolonizing education meant doing away with the arts/crafts hierarchies often imposed through European colonization.

The multiyear research (2016–19), which bauhaus imaginista was able to gather in collaboration with international researchers and cultural producers from Brazil, China, India, Japan, Morocco, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States and the United Kingdom, shows to what extent and under which local conditions new design ideas and Bauhaus pedagogy were taken up and developed further. In this way, the project opens up a perspective on a transnational history of modernist art and design, marked by wars and dictatorships, non-aligned movements, the Cold War, and by processes of decolonization.