// Exhibition
Bauhaus Museum Dessau, Black Box

In 2020, the artist Olav Westphalen (born 1963) initiated the Association for the Palliative Turn, a loosely connected group of international artists. Since then, its members have focused on the artistic potentials of dealing with death, palliation, and leave-taking in a range of media and event formats that make use of humour, generosity, delight, and reflection. In the practice of life, the human body is inevitably awarded the role of a medium. The various limitations that bodies impose on people are as much a part of this as all singular sensory perceptions and experiences.

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// Exhibition
Bauhaus Museum Dessau, Black Box

With clothes that can be transformed into prayer rugs, the project examines the idea of the mosque space, its formal boundaries and its relationship to the human body. While respecting religious rules, the Nomadic Mosque aims to redefine the traditional forms and functions of mosques in a contemporary context.

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// Exhibition
Bauhaus Museum Dessau, Black Box

The physical body as a kind of learning tool straddling play, sport, and performance “on demand” forms the focal point of this experimental research and cooperation project. In collaboration with the Curatorial Workshop’s cultural outreach programme, Corina Forthuber and students from the Gestaltung: Technik.Textil course of study at the Mozarteum University Salzburg address the ideational history of the “learning body” and carry out experiments to explore the ability to remember, physical action, and the physical sensor system.

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// Exhibitoin
Bauhaus Building, workshop wing

An artistic critique of the aseptic space of modernity.

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// Workshop, Ages: 8 – 14 years
Bauhaus Building
Admission free >> Registration required

How does a sheet of paper become a space? And, how can I enter this space with my body? Together we fold, find and create book spaces that are as big as we are or just like the nail of our little finger.

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// Workshop, Age: 14 – 114 years
Bauhaus Museum Dessau
Admission free >> Registration required

In the context of an architecture workshop, we will compare the ideas and floor plans of the house "Scheibe Nord" in the immediate vicinity of the Bauhaus Museum Dessau with the arcade houses by Hannes Meyer in the south of Dessau. Finding standardised – and thus cost-effective – solutions for housing was one of the central themes at the Bauhaus. Rents, designed furniture and interiors were to be affordable. The workshop will focus on the question: What are the needs of housing planning in 2023? As diverse as our society is today, so different can flats be designed. We want to investigate this on a self-built model on a scale of 1:20. As a result, we will show a variety of individual flats for different living scenarios in a constant structure.

Workshop leader: Heiko Gerdes Architect / Berlin

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// Object Talk
Bauhaus Museum Dessau, Open Stage

In the director’s room in the Dessau Bauhaus Building there is a replica of the famous desk designed in 1923 by Walter Gropius for the school building of the State Bauhaus Weimar. The desk was designed as part of a synthesis of the arts – a Gesamtkunstwerk – for the first public Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar in 1923. The original desk is today in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the American domicile of the Gropius family, who moved there in 1938. The heavy desk made of cherrywood has been subject to many removals, which is not hard to see. The glass top is missing, water and paint stains have left their marks on the cherrywood grain, and drawer knobs replace the lost keys. The centenary of the first Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar presents an opportunity to cast light on the journey made by this iconic piece of furniture. Regina Bittner (Bauhaus Dessau Foundation) invites you to trace the transatlantic peregrinations of the director’s desk.