Manda
Isa Rosenberger
// Exhibition
1 June 2023 – 7 Jan 2024
Bauhaus Building
The dancer and ballet master Manda von Kreibig collaborated with Oskar Schlemmer from 1928 to 1929, but little is known about her life and work. She forms the starting point for the research conducted by Isa Rosenberger, the Bauhaus Dessau’s artist-in-residence 2022. As in her other work, Rosenberger examines historiography, with its abbreviations, omissions, and revisions.
For her new work, she went in search of traces in museum archives and publications. She frequently visited the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s museum storage, which now becomes the focus of attention. After all, storage and archives represent what is considered worth preserving and collecting and, at the same time, what is not collected, what is missing. But the museum storage is also a place of potential activation, which may bring the forgotten and neglected back into the light, to the public’s attention.
In association with the dancer Celia Millan, Rosenberger invokes the experimental mood of the historic Bauhaus in the storage of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, turning it into a stage to explore – through film and dance – (forgotten) Bauhaus histories and the neglected stories of the women of the Bauhaus. In the process, Rosenberger asks general questions about the memories of museums and their responsibilities in the process of writing history.
