Discourse and practice coalesce within the Curatorial Workshop. The idea of the workshop as a site and medium of design-related experimentation and learning was an essential facet of the innovative learning methodology at the Bauhaus. Today, it is being developed further in our department’s institutional practice.

The Curatorial Workshop acts and mediates between the contexts of research and the public. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the department combines different ways of making content public. Exhibitions, events, performative formats, workshops, and various digital offerings enable content-related access to the methods, working environments, and lifeworlds of designers, artists, and architects of the historic Bauhaus – and of the protagonists preceding and following them. This makes it possible to experience perspectives from the past, but also current and future discourses in which the approaches, ethos, and legacy of the Bauhaus are exposed to critical reflection.

We examine the politics of display and use prototyping for developing new approaches to design, narrative, and cultural mediation. This also includes experimental work in keeping with the tradition of the Bauhaus stage. Conventions of exhibiting are put to the test from the perspectives of multiple authorship, constructive ambivalence, inclusion, sustainability, and potentials of design mitigation.

The objective is to make inspiring and discerning narratives and exhibits accessible to all visitors – in diverse media and sensorial forms. We are expanding our inclusive activities in an attempt to enable the widest possible range of groups to become a part of the Bauhaus story.

The Curatorial Workshop activities are briefly summarised as follows:

Curatorial development and realisation,
the curatorial development, organisation, and realisation of exhibitions, events, and stage formats in collaboration with other departments of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and with external partners,

Development of design approaches,
the development of prototypical design forms, exhibition displays, translation and rendering strategies; contentfocused research contributions on current topics from the context of international design practice and visual culture,

Mediation and cultural education,
a broad mediation and cultural education programme reaching beyond the boundaries of the foundation, inclusion and outreach activities, guided tours and classes for individual visitors, pupils, and groups of all ages, dialogue structures that facilitate access and participation.