bauhaus imaginista in Bern (CH)

The Bauhaus was a cosmopolitan project from its inception. Bauhauslers* forged connections across the globe. The research and exhibition project bauhaus imaginista proposes a new interpretation of the Bauhaus as a globally connected institution.

In this respect, the transfer of ideas which the Bauhaus participated in is not a story of influence and effect but of international interdependence. The exhibition explores this history of transnational relationships, correspondence and migrations, one that continued even after the school’s closure by National Socialists in 1933. We place the Bauhaus in an international context of like-minded projects, discussing avant-garde art schools in India and Japan as parallel histories of modern educational reform. At the same time, the exhibition addresses the study of pre-modern crafts at the Bauhaus, of the Bauhaus women* exiled in North and Central America, as well as the politicization of Bauhaus ideas in post-revolutionary Mexico and postcolonial Morocco and Brazil. The show also highlights cases where Bauhaus design approaches were translated within particular local contexts, such as occurred in China, Nigeria and the Soviet Union, and shows how the innovative use of media at the Bauhaus continued to influence contemporary art and popular culture in recent decades. 
Four individual chapters developed over the past two years in various formats (exhibitions, workshops and conferences) in Hangzhou, Kyoto and Tokyo, São Paulo, Lagos, Delhi, New York, Moscow and Berlin are each based on a concrete Bauhaus object: the Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919, an advertisement by Marcel Breuer, a drawing by Paul Klee and Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s Reflektorische Farblichtspiele (reflective colored light plays). These objects all serve as starting points for thematic and conceptual chapters, which explore different genealogies of Bauhaus reception and address specific questions relevant to contemporary artistic, cultural and social debates.