Sunday Oct 27, 4pm

Puppet theatre | Les Amis des Marionettes
 

Princess Chanterelle loses her voice and only a leaf from the Golden Tree, the Tree of Life, can bring it back. Mister Croche, the music instructor, suggests to our hero Malo to follow the music of Mozart that will lead him to the Tree. Along the way, he meets singing mushrooms, he thwarts the mischievous plans of the witch Brouhaha, all the while listening to compositions by Mozart.

Oct 21 + 22 | Two sessions per evening at 9:30 & 10:15pm

Performance by Mario Santanilla, commissioned for Home Works 8 | Ashkal Alwan

A monologue disguised as a broken dialogue addressing the viewers while flying through an intertwined landscape of personal, historical, and scientific anecdotes. Through this performance, Mario Santanilla explores the contingency of darkness, not as the absence of space, but rather its totality, while artificial light crashes into an amalgamation of temporalities and rationalities.

Mario Santanilla’s practice explores the optics of being. Guided by his research on architecture, screen-based technologies and storytelling, he explores how these devices condition behavior and represent social realities. 

Thursday Oct 24, 8:30pm 

Dr. Regina Bittner | Goethe Institut
 
The Bauhaus was one of the cultural responses to the advent of globalization. Whereas this ‘universal language’ pursued a political agenda: emphasizing the international as a reaction to the destructive forces of old nationalism unleashed during WWI, its claim of universality is deeply interwoven with western ideas of cultural superiority. The talk by Dr. Bittner discusses the ambiguities of such an agenda - its multiple translations and international appropriations in mid-century postwar modernism, torn between aesthetics and design politics of emancipation and independence on the one hand and its integration in neo-colonial and imperialist politics on the other.

Dr. Regina Bittner is head of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation Academy and responsible for the conception and teaching of postgraduate programs for design, Bauhaus and architectural research. Her work focuses on international architecture and urban research, modernity and migration, the cultural history of modernity and heritage studies. 

Thursday Oct 24, 7pm 

Documentary film by Niels Bolbrinker & Thomas Tielsch | Goethe Institut

Taking as their starting point Bauhaus as a social utopia, filmmakers Niels Bolbrinker and Thomas Tielsch weave together art and cultural history to investigate its evolution, transformation and enduring power to inspire. They question how ideas of the Bauhaus meet the challenges of global capitalism and its revolutionary reshaping of mobile lifestyles for modern urban nomads. The film takes us from the legendary Bauhaus building in Dessau to visionary projects in the favelas of Latin America, from the courses taught by Bauhaus masters Kandinsky, Klee and Schlemmer to Scandinavian schools without classrooms, from Berlin's Gropius-Stadt to the vision of a car-free metropolis.
 
Feature doc, 2018, 90”, German/English with EN ST
A lecture by Dr. Regina Bittner will follow the screening

October 16-27, 2019 | Opening Wednesday Oct 16, 6-9pm

Photography exhibition curated by Harald Theiss | Goethe Institut

The Bauhaus movement emerged in Germany a hundred years ago, a radical artistic utopia that set new standards worldwide for the art of liberated living and the design of living spaces. The artists and architects involved in the avant-garde movement, amongst them Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Mies van der Rohe, shaped a design concept that became the protagonist for social life change.

The photography exhibition curated by Harald Theiss is an attempt to visually represent the idea of Bauhaus and how it contributed to the modernization and renewal of a society, as manifested through the example of the Dessau Building. The contemporary photographic works of Stefan Berg are taken from the accompanying publication, inviting viewers to encounter light, proportion, surface, space and materiality through their compositional juxtaposition. They encourage the questioning of the definition of Bauhaus, its contribution to a model of new social life and the lessons of timeless relevance that inspire our contemporary realities.
 
Opening in presence of the photographer Stefan Berg and curator Harald Theiss.