To the Core. Bauhaus Dessau 100

Centennial Opening / Festival
4 Sep – 7 Sep 2025

The public programme for the anniversary opening begins on Friday, 5 September 2025 in the Bauhaus building.

For the celebratory opening, internationally active artists will translate Oskar Schlemmer’s historical material dances, which experimented with the performative potential of materials, into the present. Interpretations by Isabelle Schad, Joana Tischkau and Mike Dele Dittrich Frydetzki will be premiered on the historic Bauhaus stage. The Italian composer and musician Piero Mottola will première Voices of Bauhaus, a complex orchestra of voices. Performers: soloist Marina Drobyshevskaya, baritone Alexander Argirov and the Extra-Choir of the Anhalt Theatre Dessau under the direction of Sebastian Kennerknecht.

On Saturday and Sunday, the anniversary celebrations will be moved to Dessau Zoo, where the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Anhalt Theatre will celebrate together. The evening programme begins with a concert by the Anhaltisches Theater Dessau and has much more to offer. You can look forward to a rich and varied Bauhaus programme.

A highlight of the weekend are the concerts in the series Pop Around @ Bauhaus by zdf/3sat. A total of four concerts with international artists will take place on Saturday and Sunday in the intimate setting of the Bauhaus Museum Dessau. The concerts will be live-streamed on Saturday, 6 September.

The big anniversary kick-off will be complemented by various educational programmes, including special guided tours on the materials of the Bauhaus and creative workshops to join in and try out.

Tour
26 Sep 2025 > ongoing
City of Dessau

In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau. But where did the teachers and students live, work, and celebrate during the first months? What influence did the city of Dessau have on the Bauhaus and its work? And where did Paul Klee go for a walk to find inspiration for his paintings?

The digital tour Invisible Bauhaus Dessau explores places that are largely no longer visible today but that were closely connected with the period when the members of the Bauhaus arrived in Dessau in 1925/26, when the Bauhaus Building and the Masters’ Houses did not yet exist. A separate walking tour through the Georgium follows the traces of Paul Klee. Users can scan QR codes to call up the videos at the places in question and watch them on their smartphones. The website of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and an analogue folding map show the path through the city to the specific sites.

Avant-garde film in the Bauhaus Museum
22 Oct – 12 Nov 2025
Part of the Bauhaus Filmakers film series and in cooperation with the
Kunsthalle Dessau + KIEZ repertory cinema

According to the latest scholarship, 29 members of the Bauhaus shot circa 150 films. The film series shows a selection focusing on the themes “Does Gender Matter?” and “Modern Materials in Films”. On 6 Nov 2025, the Bauhaus Museum focuses on the art of the experimental film under the title Nitrate | Silver | Light. Important features include projected light, material-graininess, chemical development, and scratching the film stock.

Exhibition
4 Dec 2025 – 31 Jan 2027
Bauhaus Museum Dessau

In the Bauhaus Museum Dessau, amidst the exhibition of the collection, important gifts from the period from 2019 to 2025 will be shown, including works by Christian Dell (Matthias Mynett), Friedrich Engemann (Christine Engemann), and Gunta Stölzl (Ariel Aloni). In a series of conversations with the donors, who are often the children or grandchildren of Bauhaus artists, biographical backgrounds become evident and the motivations for donating these works to the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation are explained.

Conference
29 Jan – 31 Jan 2026
Bauhaus Building + digital

By examining the materials of the Bauhaus, this international conference will contribute to new perspectives on the stories of modern architecture. The conference proposes new looks at the material artefact of the Bauhaus that can not only provide exemplary lessons for how to deal with this building in the future but also invite scholars to negotiate current architecture in a dialogue with the modern architectural heritage of Bauhaus approaches.

12 Feb – 12 Jul 2026
Soda | Lentils | Fluff
Bauhaus Museum Dessau + diverse locations

In 2025/2026, Antje Schiffers and Thomas Sprenger will travel to selected places where raw materials are extracted as well as places for the production and sale of cement, bricks, glass, and so on in Saxony-Anhalt as well as to Cuba and Turkey. They will visit a broad spectrum of places, associations, and businesses. Their travels will end with an exhibition at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau and various presentations and events at the places in question.

The historical production facilities represent an opportunity to see what remains today, what people are doing with these remnants, in what forms they remember them, how they produce today, and what has replaced the past. The work of Schiffers/Sprenger is thus also very essentially about structural transformations and their effect on local people.

Exhibition
28 Mar 2026 – 10 Jan 2027
Bauhaus Building

In a phase of planning and building that lasted just one year, the Bauhaus Building was completed in 1926. Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors to Dessau annually, but it was then an experimental building that anticipated the future of a society marked by industry and mechanisation. The materials of which the Bauhaus is composed and with which the school’s workshops grappled with designing are visible expressions of this commitment. Rising industry
in central Germany offered the ideal conditions for it.

Work at the Bauhaus was closely intertwined with the history of industry in the early twentieth century and that is the subject of the three-part exhibition Glass | Concrete | Metal in the historical Workshop Wing. It will explore the material, economic, and technological bases of the iconic building and its workshop production, which have thus far received little attention in the history and reception of the Bauhaus. The exhibition asks about the formats of this modern aesthetic of the everyday, about production processes and locations, working conditions, and obtaining raw materials that are hidden behind the smooth, clean surfaces of tubular steel and glass façades. It follows trade routes, supply chains, and resource streams that were entangled with the profoundly unequal conditions of the colonial and imperial economy and geopolitics and will address the frustrations and upheavals but also the revolutions associated with innovations in materials in the early 1920s. And it shows the dirty and dark sides of these flights of fancy with materials. It literally gets to the core!

Exhibition
28 Mar 2026 – 27 Sep 2026
Former Zeeck department store

The exhibition Algae | Debris | CO2 in the former Zeeck department store in central Dessau asks about the possibilities for design today and argues for considering together raw materials, disciplines, practices and knowledge, and dismantling, use, and consumption as well as users as engaged parties. It shows alternatives in the concrete, steel, and glass sectors as well as renewable raw materials, materials from anthropogenic sources, and concepts and practices of preserving and maintaining.
The exhibition is part of Programme Zero, supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. It is intended to be a climate-neutral exhibition that not only addresses alternatives in building today but also implements them using the example of the exhibition itself and thus makes them visible.
In addition, projects will be examined in terms of their applicability to the city of Dessau-Roßlau. The building – the former Zeeck department store – stood empty for two decades. Opened in the centre of the city in 1908, it was expanded in the 1920s, became a Handelsorganisation department store in 1945, and later a Magnet department store. Currently, a future new use for it is under discussion. To that end, its owners are involved in discussions with the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.

Exhibition
28 Mar 2026 – 27 Sep 2026
Historical Employment Office

The pioneering architecture of the Bauhaus is inconceivable without brick. One of the most prominent Bauhaus buildings with unplastered exposed brick is the historical Employment Office in Dessau based on a design by Walter Gropius. As with other materials, with brick too the question arises how it will be used in the future. In its current form, brick is an energy- and resource-intensive mass product of the industrial age with lasting consequences for the environment.
Tours, workshops, and artistic and cultural interventions will be held in a building that will remain empty until 2027 as part of a forensic search for clues. The Copenhagen artists’ group Superflex is search for answers to the drastic interventions in the ecosystems that people left behind after the industrial age and its infrastructures and that continue to be produced.

Exhibition
28 Mar 2026 – 28 Feb 2027
Steel House

In parallel with the Steel House by Georg Muche and Richard Paulick, the exhibition will present Hugo Junkers’ thoughts on building with sheet metal. It will focus on contemporaneous activities to develop a standardised, modular system for building with metal. This basic research led to numerous designs for types of metal houses and to patents such as one for panel construction. Only a few prototypes were realised, however. Their development was about questions of producing building elements in series but above all about an approach that would consider in an integral way the general and structural conditions for building houses (protection from weather, thermal insulation, noise protection, sealing, interchangeability). The house was understood as a technical apparatus, as a machine for living in. One important theoretical impulse was provided by the 1926 book Der Raum als Membran (translated as Space as Membrane) by Siegfried Ebeling, an employee of Junkers research into residential buildings. He formulated a vision of the future in which the house was grasped and designed as an organism, as, among other things,“its own source of energy”. He was anticipating an autarchic architecture.

Open-air Exhibition
28 Mar 2026 – 28 Feb 2027
Boathouse of the Junkers Paddle Club Dessau e.V.

The steel slat hall, which is still used as a boathouse today, was built in 1930. It is one of three historical halls still preserved in Dessau based on the system that Hugo Junkers had patented in various designs from 1924/25. Its pointed arched steel roof consists of a modular system that was marketed worldwide due to its high degree of prefabrication, transportability, simple assembly and robustness.

The open-air exhibition sheds light on the history of the building and other slat halls in Dessau. In addition, the worldwide sales success of the Junkers steel slat halls is presented using the example of a major order from the Junkers company: From 1926, a complete aircraft factory, consisting of slat halls, equipment, machinery, materials and know-how, was exported from Dessau to Kayseri in central Turkey. The adventurous transport of the components and materials by ship, railway, wagon and pack animal to the Anatolian highlands was captured in photographs and is retold in the exhibition.

Bauhaus Festival 2026
4 Sep – 5 Sep 2026
Bauhaus Building + Bauhaus Museum Dessau + City of Dessau

The Bauhaus Festival 2026 focuses on the connections members of the
Bauhaus had to the circus, dance, performance, and the visual arts. A large parade through the city is being planned.

Exhibition
4 Sep 2026 – 29 Mar 2027
Bauhaus Museum Dessau

For the Bauhaus Festival 2026, the exhibition at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau is opening with a spatial presentation and new cinematic works by the duo of women artists Astrup & Bordorff. For the Spatial Stage of the Bauhaus Museum Dessau, they are developing a work that celebrates and updates the revolutionary intertwining of artistic disciplines at the historical Bauhaus. In their work they challenge themselves and the audience to rethink: the biographies of the Bauhaus artists and their ideas about their work, their roles, and gender, about the wonderful bold and free performances on the historical Bauhaus stage, and the social presentation, coexistence, and celebration in this special place.

Exhibition
4 Dec 2026 – 29 Mar 2027
Bauhaus Museum Dessau

The opening of the Bauhaus Building in Dessau on 4 December 1926 was a meticulously planned large-scale media event sustained by transparency and openness – the avant-garde school shared that spirit as well. New media and information channels played a crucial role. The opening with more than 1,500 guests, a festival week, exhibitions, film
screenings, and publications added up to an event that, like the popular
culture of the exhibition in the 1920s, sought to communicate to a broad public in an educational and didactic way achievements in social, housing, and educational policy. The public response was powerful.
In 1976, the Bauhaus became visible again and the Bauhaus heritage took on new relevance in the context of transformed economic and social
policy in East Germany.

Series of readings
1925 – The Bauhaus Comes to Dessau
Kulturamt, Stadtarchiv Dessau-Roßlau in cooperation with the Bauhaus
Dessau Foundation
From 28 Jan 2025 monthly

In 1925, the Bauhaus comes to Dessau. In 2025, we look back at that year – month by month, examining the ordinary and unusual reports from historical daily newspapers and other sources. We will look at the aesthetic and political currents of the time, and the Bauhaus will seem like both a utopian community and a controversial case.

The cycle will start on 28 January at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau and return repeatedly to this central place; in alternation, other venues of is history will be explored as sites for readings. Flanking the series 1925 –The Bauhaus Comes to Dessau, the Museum für Stadtgeschichte (Museum for the History of the City) will present an exhibition of historical photographs. A publication on the series of readings will be presented as part of the Triennale der Moderne in Dessau (26–28 Sep 2025).

School project and exhibition
Cacti for Walter
Anhaltischer Kunstverein e.V. and Philanthropinum
From February 2025

The fact that Walter Gropius was an enthusiastic collector of cacti is well documented in photographs – and it is now the occasion for a school project designed by the Anhaltischer Kunstverein in collaboration with the Philanthropinum secondary school. Under the title Cacti for Walter, it is connected by a table of presents on the birthday of the director of the Bauhaus in 1926, for which students made prickly plants from various materials in the manner of the preliminary course. The workshops in February 2025 will be headed by Katrin Zickler and be supported by the Berufsverband Bildender Künstler (Professional Association of Fine Artists). They will be followed by a presentation of the works.

Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie Dessau
Anhaltischer Kunstverein e.V./ Gymnasium Philanthropinum
Anhaltisches Theater Dessau
Ferropolis Stiftung Industriekultur gGmbH
Fliegerclub Hugo Junkers Dessau e.V.
Hochschule Anhalt
KIEZ e.V. Dessau
Kulturamt Dessau-Roßlau
Museum für Stadtgeschichte Dessau
Reallabor ZEKIWA Zeitz
Stadtarchiv Dessau-Roßlau
Stadt Dessau-Roßlau
Stadtmarketinggesellschaft Dessau-Roßlau mbH
Technikmuseum Hugo Junkers Dessau
Tierpark Dessau
Umweltbundesamt

Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle
Landesarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt (LASA)
Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin