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curator: Sylwia Narewska

The Bauhaus is the most significant avant-garde art school of the 20th century. Established in Weimar, in 1919, by the architect, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus revolutionised methods of artistic education, creating ‘the new covenant between art and technology.” Pressured by conservative politicians, the school moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925. There, it came to fruition and functioned until 1931, when its modernist building was taken over by the power-grabbing Nazi Party, which led to the school closing in 1933. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the Bauhaus staff and students realised its ideals, working both in Germany and as emigrées – in the Soviet Union, the US, Tokyo or Chile.

The exhibition proposes to dismantle a monolithic vision of the Bauhaus assuming the school engendered a homogenous style or a recipe for ‘the Modernist aesthetic’. It has been built upon a dialogue between invited artists, architects, designers and curators with historic works and documents as well as subsequent reminiscences of the school (exhibited in Poland for the first time). It is an experiment in a communal and critical reading of the Modernist tradition in the context of contemporary creative, educational and social practices.

Artists, researchers: Ivana Tomljenović-Meller, Aristide Antonas, Goshka Macuga, Karina Bisch, Post-Noviki, Salvatore Lacagnina, Wendelien van Oldenburgh, Zuza Golińska, and curators: Adam Przywara, Ewa Tatar, Karolina Matysiak working on archive materials by: Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizia, Katarzyna Kobro, Hannes Meyer, Lucia Moholy, Oskar Schlemmer, Władysław Strzemiński, The International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, among others, as well as those from the Building Research Archive Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Jewish Museum in Prague.