The three-year project began in October 2014 in cooperation with cultural institutions, a school, an art college and a socio-political association. Young people, students and artists explored the exhibition concepts and themes of the KW Institute for Contemporary through artistic research. KW made a separate room available for the project in their building complex. With the question of what art can be for young people today, the young people were able to take on the role of art mediators and develop ideas and concepts for two ongoing exhibitions a year. These formed the basis for workshops that were then offered to entire classes of the Heinz Brandt School in the exhibition rooms. Workshops were offered in the youth art school in Pankow. The workshops of the Kunsthochschule Weißensee were also involved, in particular letterpress and gravure printing processes were used. The results were presented in the rooms of KW, in the student club and in the art college.
The project was aimed at all students at the Heinz Brandt School and was divided into various modules that were linked by the content of the exhibitions in the KW. Seven modules are carried out in this way every six months.
During the numerous visits to the KW exhibition rooms with the various groups from the school, we often experienced “traditional” visitors as lost in the wealth of impressions. Young people, on the other hand, were reluctant to leave some exhibitions – such as Ryan Trecartin’s. “I feel like I’m the camera,” said a teenager* of her impression of the SITE VISIT installation. Many details that were not visible before became conscious in this way. The partially demanding works could also be made understandable to older visitors in a further dimension through artistic interpretations by young people and students.
An experimental space of the “in between” has emerged from the collaboration between art academy, school and cultural institutions. At the university, the project made it possible to combine practical experience with theoretical work. This experience contributed to making more conscious decisions for or against various fields of activity as a cultural worker and also to discovering “the museum” as a possible place for artistic work. In terms of content, the projects intervened in complex artistic discussions and artistic structures. Due to their positioning in a relatively protected space and supported by both systems (university and school), projects of this type enable process-oriented cooperation beyond legitimacy discourses.
Heinz-Brandt-School, youth art school Pankow, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the RAA Berlin (Regional Offices for Education, Integration and Democracy e.V.), Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.
Made possible by Arts Open Worlds, a program of the Federal Association for Cultural Education for Children and Young People (BKJ) as part of Culture Makes Strong of the BMBF.
The Hub participants / Magdalena Beger, Mona Jas, Alexandra Kersten, Alexia Manzano, Julia Schramm
