Gropius Bau’s exhibition programme for 2022
“2022 at Gropius Bau sees us growing organically, becoming a unique site for gathering – physically, artistically, culturally. Our programme next year reflects this aim to be a shared space for common ground, with exhibitions and activities for people of varying backgrounds, interests, abilities and ages to meet. I invite you to consider ideas about kinship and belonging in the context of socially important topics, such as care, repair and healing, to be mesmerised by landmark retrospectives, or take part in our ever-expanding array of educational activities, events and workshops.”
Stephanie Rosenthal, Director, Gropius Bau
Gropius Bau are pleased to announce their exhibition programme for 2022.
Key topics include establishing common ground, making space for one another, rituals of individual and collective caring and healing, and sites of memory and repair.
In-depth retrospectives of Dayanita Singh and Louise Bourgeois, and an exhibition on trans-regional artistic life in Beirut’s “Golden Age”, culminate with a major group exhibition on Caring, Repairing and Healing. Together with their Artists in Residence, singing workshops by Ayumi Paul and the freely accessible Gropius Bau Journal, Gropius Bau will present an extensive discourse and educational programme with the Gropius Bau Friends and JuGroBa (Young Gropius Bau), film screenings at the Gropius Bau’s Revolverkino and reading groups by Kathy-Ann Tan.
Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.
18 March to 7 August 2022
Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera
Since the 1980s, Dayanita Singh has pioneered a genre-defying approach to photography that pushes the limits of the medium. Dancing with my Camera presents the major phases of the internationally renowned artist’s oeuvre, from her earliest works through today. Along with key past works, including her “museums”, the new project, Let’s See, is especially realised for the Gropius Bau exhibition.
Singh’s black-and-white photographs create archives and spaces, presenting people and architectures from distinct backgrounds and geographies in states of interconnection. In her works, the photograph is only the raw material.
By building mobile structures out of teak wood, her images are rearranged, recombined and re-experienced spatially; hers is a photography that both begins and ends with bodily experience.
Through a process of meticulous yet intuitive editing, Singh transforms her images into photo-architectures, montages and book objects – always guided by fluidity, music, choreography and movement.
With her portable “museums” and book-objects, Singh has pioneered a form that is simultaneously a book, a catalogue and exhibition in itself.
Singh shows how we can conceive of dynamic, mobile and accessible museums and exhibitions.
Dancing with my Camera is accompanied by an extensive catalogue with scholarly essays, published by Hatje Cantz. The exhibition will tour to the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Musée d’art moderne Grand-Duc Jean – MUDAM, Luxemburg; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto.
Curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Director, Gropius Bau.
25 March to 12 June 2022
Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility
Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility revisits a dazzling yet disconcerting chapter in Beirut’s modern history bookended by the late 1950s and the late 1970s, corresponding to the Lebanon crisis of 1958 and the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975.
The exhibition traces the complicated relationship between Beirut’s artistic cosmopolitanism and the surrounding trans-regional and political antagonisms.
In this period, Beirut was bursting at the seams, not only with people, but also with ideas, as a heterogeneous mix of artists from Lebanon and beyond articulated their distinct, sometimes conflicting visions of modernity. These artists’ drive for formal innovation was often as strong as the tenacity of their political convictions. With 230 artworks by 34 artists, and more than 300 archival documents from nearly 40 collections, this is the most comprehensive presentation to date of a pivotal period in Beirut’s history. In recognising the complex links between the past and the city’s current struggles, the exhibition questions the romanticising narrative of Beirut’s so-called “Golden Age”, which precipitated the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. This is the story of Beirut’s appetite for life, matched only by its on-going burden of irreconcilable ambitions.
Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, Associate Curators, Gropius Bau.
The exhibition is organised in cooperation with the 16th edition of the Lyon Biennale and the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon.
22 July to 23 October 2022
Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child
The Woven Child is the first major survey to focus exclusively on Louise Bourgeois’ fabric-based works.
The exhibition charts the artists’ lifelong connection to textiles, and the memories they conjure, through a diverse body of sculptures, installations, drawings, collages, books and prints.
Bourgeois’ fabric works, that she only began working on in her eighties, are among her most compelling and intimate creations.
The late decision to create artworks from her clothes and household textiles was a means of transforming as well as preserving the past.
Bourgeois incorporated these objects, which held memories associated with specific places and people, into sculptural installations that will be on display at the Gropius Bau, such as her Cells and free-standing “pole pieces”. This deeply-researched exhibition sheds a new light on Bourgeois by linking her fabric works to her material processes, her own biography, and themes of the body, memory, femininity, trauma and repair.
Curated by Ralph Rugoff, Director, Hayward Gallery, with Julienne Lorz, former Chief Curator, Gropius Bau.
16 September 2022 to 15 January 2023
On Caring, Repairing and Healing*
In autumn 2022, the Gropius Bau hosts a large-scale exhibition centering on caring, repairing and healing.
Through installation, painting, audio and an extensive performance programme, On Caring, Repairing and Healing is a call to change.
The ambitious exhibition aims to establish common ground on a matter whose relevance for individuals, communities and institutions is all the more acute in the pandemic age.
On Caring, Repairing and Healing is broad in its scope, showing how artists, healers and researchers suggest answers to urgent concerns: the material repair of objects, the care of all bodies and the environment, and the experiences of minorities, women and Indigenous people.
Topics include land and territory, kinship and chosen families, and the politicisation of health – historically and today. On the entire ground floor of the Gropius Bau, over twenty international artists will present works drawing on Indigenous and First Nations knowledge systems, challenging the foreign domination of female bodies, or charting changing notions of ability and disability. The exhibition shows the links between colonial, physical, psychological and material trauma. Building on Ámà: 4 Days on Caring, Repairing and Healing held in November 2021, the show invites us to reconsider art institutions and to ask what is accessible and for whom.
Curated by Brook Andrew, Kader Attia, Natasha Ginwala, Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz and Stephanie Rosenthal with Clare Molloy in collaboration with SERAFINE1369, In House: Artist in Residence at the Gropius Bau 2021.
On Caring, Repairing and Healing is realised in cooperation with Wellcome.
*Working title
Gropius Bau’s exhibition programme for 2022
Gropius Bau
- Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin
- Open from Wednesday to Monday, 10:00 to 19:00
Closed on Tuesdays
Info
www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/gropiusbau
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