100 years of bauhaus

From 16 to 24 January 2019, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, one of the outstanding cultural events of the coming year, will be celebrated with an international opening festival at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has assumed the role of official patron, and on 16 January he will ceremoniously launch the festival, which forms the prelude to numerous events and festivities all across Germany and around the world.

The programme for the nine-day opening festival has been assembled under the artistic direction of Bettina Wagner-Bergelt, who has invited numerous international artists to the capital to reanimate the spirit of the Bauhaus with concerts, installations, spoken theatre, dance and film, as well as workshops and lecture demonstrations, all in the tradition of Schlemmer, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Klee and many others. The programme will span an arc from the avant-garde of today – from highly technological, digital and virtual aesthetic works – to historical projects in which art and technology, light, colour, sound and movement form a new unity.

Inspired by the Bauhaus Week of 1923 and the legendary Bauhaus festivals, the intention is to enable a "creative atmosphere of experimentation, of teaching and learning, to emerge; a vibrant organism of diverse formats that arouse delight and curiosity about the many facets of the Bauhaus", says Wagner-Bergelt about her concept. "To pursue divergent lines up to the present and to continually involve the public and allow them to contribute, that is a goal."

The programme for the opening festival will be announced at a press conference in autumn. An interview with the curator can be found at www.bauhaus100.de.

For 100 years of bauhaus, the three Bauhaus institutions that maintain collections – the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar – have joined with the Federal Government, represented by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, along with eleven federal states to form a strong community – the Bauhaus Association 2019.