Bauhaus Residency

Contemporary Artists in the Masters’ Houses

In the 1920s, the artists of the international avant-garde lived next door to one another in the complex of Masters’ Houses. In 2016, contemporary artists returned to the scene. The Bauhaus Residency enables artists from all over the world to live and work in the Masters’ Houses.

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House Gropius || Fictional 2020 – 2022

Artworks and artistic work processes create specific new approaches to the world and are fictional in this sense. The meaning of fiction is revealing here: a term derived from the Latin verb "fingere", which means nothing other than "to create, to form, to invent".
In their work, artists repeatedly explore how meaning and value are constituted in a specific present. What is told why and how? And what differences, points of friction and overlaps arise when fictions are dedicated to the same subject, but are realized by different artists with different means and perspectives?
Focusing on this investigation, Haus Gropius || Fictional from 2020 onwards presents collective forms of artistic work in the various disciplines: two-part, polyphonic, contrapuntal.

Bauhaus Residency 2020 – Habitat

After the Second World War, a young generation of architects moved away from the functionalist understanding of the city and living: Ideas such as living as a cultural practice and the relationship between people and the environment now came into focus. The architects and designers thus took up concepts from the 1920s, as they had been developed and discussed at the Bauhaus.
At the latest with the talk of the Anthropocene and the global warming of the last decades, the environment is no longer understood as a silent resource to be built upon. House and world, human being and nature are no longer opposites, but intertwined and interdependent.
In their works, exhibitions and events, the artists* of the Bauhaus Residenz programme devote themselves to these and other aspects of the Habitat.

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Bauhaus Residency 2018 – Standard

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s annual theme for 2018, Standard, will focus on the conversation about types, norms and comparability. How do standards determine artistic production and perception? What about the presumed duality of the clarity of architecture and design on the one hand, and the ambiguity and provocative nature of art on the other? What opportunities and options, but also restrictions, does standardisation present for art production today? The Bauhaus Residency artists will pursue these questions during their time in the Masters’ Houses.

As part of the Shared Residency with Florida International University, Markus Hoffmann, Bauhaus Residency Artist 2017, will be in Miami as a guest from September to December 2018.

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Bauhaus Residency 2017 – Substance

“First we seek contact with material…” stated Josef Albers, looking back at his pedagogical work at the Bauhaus. In his preliminary course, students worked freely with all kinds of materials in order to develop a new approach to form and design. He had students actively refine their senses through tactile experiments in order to discover the world anew.

In 2017 the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation focuses on the dialogue between material and design in its approach to the theme Substance: It addresses the substance of ideas, substance as matter and material, substantial forms, the conservation of substance and the substance of the Bauhaus as an institution. Each Bauhaus Residency takes an artistic-investigative approach to substance in the current digital age.

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Bauhaus Residency 2016 – Movement

At the Bauhaus everything and everyone was in motion – always motivated, after the devastation of war, by the aim of shaping a modern social and economic age that would deny the possibility of a similar tragedy. Whether through László Moholy-Nagy, who devised the artistic technique of “vision in motion” or through Oskar Schlemmer, who set the stage itself in motion in order to define the mechanised processes of the industrial age – the phenomena of speed and acceleration had thoroughly positive connotations and were brought to life at the Bauhaus, too, in many and varied ways.

What is the significance of movement in 2016? Does the word still stand for change, departure and progress, or has it lost its aura, has its meaning now changed? In the Bauhaus Residency programme, artists have addressed the current and future relevance of this essentially modern idea.