John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin
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info@hkw.de
In 2022, HKW is devoting itself to in-depth examinations of an era that to us appears primarily as a crisis. HKW confronts our fragmented here and now with creative forms of contemporary research.
Pathways to planetary collapse
Our societies are being shaken by climate change, the decline in biodiversity and scarcity of resources. Since 2019, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) has been searching various sites around the world for stratigraphic evidence indicating when the planetary transformation process of the Anthropocene began. With Evidence & Experiment, a series of events, online publications and installations, HKW takes a look at these geological signals and asks what consequences the material shockwaves of our world have for the political, economic and social dimensions of our coexistence.
Pathways to new alternatives
In their book The Dawn of Everything (2021), David Graeber and David Wengrow outline a new human history. They unmask the linear model of civilization established over the last three hundred years to legitimize Western violence as a mind trap of modern-day enlightenment. The conference Die Zivilisationsfrage takes these considerations as a basis for a radical questioning of existing models of civilization. In this way we can recalibrate Western discourses that are entangled in their own logics by incorporating new insights from the sciences and global approaches to thinking and practice.
Can archives enable alternative ideas of the future?
Based on various artistic positions, the Whole Life Congress Berlin reflects on archives as places for counternarratives and illuminates the many links between archives and society. Can archives be decolonized and can they enable alternative ideas of the future? As part of the congress, the international Whole Life Academy will engage with collaborative methods and formats that relate different collections and archival holdings to one another, test new ways of interpretating archival contexts and archived objects and create contemporary approaches to historical narratives.
Colonialism and histories of representation
The exhibition The Children Have to Hear Another Story – Alanis Obomsawin presents works from five decades of activist filmmaking by one of Canada’s most respected artists. Alanis Obomsawin is a member of the Abenaki Nation. Her work challenges the core assumptions of the world system determined by colonialism. This exhibition and accompanying book contribute to the current discourse in Europe on histories of representation.
Feminism and film
What might a transnational history of nonfiction cinema by and about women look like? Bridging the fields of documentary and artists’ film, the exhibition No Master Territories assembles a plurality of practices to offer an expansive, intersectional account of underappreciated encounters between feminism and the moving image. Across a polycentric, global geography, it delves into how artists and filmmakers have explored the nexus of gender and power, often charting sites at which feminism connects to other struggles for justice.
What does science fiction sound like?
Time travel and space travel, cyborgs and escapism – the Cosmic Awakening festival asks how visions of the future are transformed into utopian sounds. The festival aims to make science fiction resound, but also to deal with its theories and criticism. It includes concerts, installations, films, lectures and discussions.
Cosmology Project combines research and theoretical approaches
At the end of the year, the various projects will culminate in the Cosmology Project, in which the origin narratives, thought patterns and notions underlying our Western systems of order will be confronted with alternative cosmogonies and cosmogrammatics.
Using the means of the arts and sciences, HKW probes, communicates and presents planetary interrelationships as well as microscopic shifts. Bernd Scherer, director of the house since 2006, bids goodbye to HKW with the 2022 program. It concludes a cycle of programs, publications and projects that have been developed over more than ten years.
You can find an overview of the annual program for 2022 here.
Press contact:
Jan Trautmann, Haus der Kulturen der Welt: T +49 (0)30 39787 192, jan.trautmann [at] hkw.de
