Dear readers,

Our preparations for the “Rundgang – Open Days“ are in full swing and we are looking forward to an open and full house! With the photos by Andreas Rost, we already open a few selected doors to show you where our students work. And on 09 and 10 July, the studios, workshops and laboratories will be transformed into an exhibition space of 2000 square metres. Around 800 designers and artists present what emerged from there in the academic year 2021/22. Please join us to celebrate the end of the academic year. A multifaceted programme with performances, live demonstrations, talks and guided tours awaits you.

What you can also expect to see in summer is outlined in our newsletter below. We hope for many inspiring encounters – at the school of art and design, the KühlhausBerlin, the documenta fifteen and all the other venues where the weissensee school of art and design berlin will be present in July.

Your weissensee school of art and design berlin

Students from the departments of Sculpture, Stage and Costume Design, Painting, Fashion Design, Product Design,Textile and Surface Design, Visual Communication, Foundation Course, and Spatial Strategies present their forward-looking projects and end-of-course assignments from the academic year 2021/22. The school of art and design berlin, Concordia next door and the Kunsthalle at Hamburger Platz are open to the public on Saturday, 09 July and Sunday, 10 July between 12 pm and 8 pm. Together with the exhibitions, the artists and designers present a lively and multifaceted programme with performances, live demonstrations, talks and guided tours. Please click the button to learn more.

When art studies come to their end and an artist’s career begins, it is a time often associated with a feeling of waiting, uncertainty and precarity, but also with the opportunities and the potential for artistic action. With their exhibition title “Yet, Yet”, the 40 graduate master students and diploma students from the departments of Sculpture and Painting want to refer to both aspects in equal measure. With paintings, drawings, photos, video productions, sculptures, textile works and multimedia installations, the show curated by Ayşe Güngör und Marit Lena Herrmann represents a wide range of artistic practice and topical themes. These works create a space for exchange, reflection and for a lively discourse.

*foundationClass was founded as an art educational platform and resistance toolkit at the weissensee school of art and design berlin in 2016 to facilitate access to art academies for people who have migrated to Germany and are faced with racism. The group of artists *foundationClass*collective has formed there and has been committed to working against the isolation faced in the art world because of its exclusion mechanisms. At the documenta fifteen, the collective presents three projects: A mobile audio sculpture has migrant communities in Kassel as its theme. A spatial laboratory enables the viewers to imagine a future project space (in Berlin). And the idea behind an installation with banners is to make the *fC*’s art education practices accessible to the audience.

5000 – that is the approximate number of pages that Edvard Munch allegedly produced and left to posterity in fragmented form, writing, drawing and painting on them or using them for other purposes during his time in Warnemünde in 1907/08. It is said that each morning, he produced innumerable amounts of pages, including letters to relatives, acquaintances, friends and colleagues, loose-leaf notes, sketches, scribblings and gestures. Using the 5000 pages as a concept and formal guideline, students from the department of Sculpture under the direction of Albrecht Schäfer and Antje Engelmann find a way to approach Munch’s spirit in a certain way. With a graphite pencil on the blank page, with the camera, with mâché, with small or grand gestures, through a descriptive act – asking the question: How do we handle this spirit, how do we succeed him?

How to capture the characteristic features of a face on canvas? What are the potentials of the versatile and timeless technique of the collage? How can we reinvent souvenir photos with analogue artistic means and what are the creative opportunities offered by plant-based colours? After a two-year break caused by the pandemic, the weissensee school of art and design berlin and boesner Berlin continue their successful cooperation and offer five workshops in the course of the Summer Academy that provide fascinating insights into experimental artistic work. Young designers and artists who studied at the weissensee school of art and design berlin present familiar as well as new and unusual innovative techniques, coupled with impulses for the creative handling of materials. 

“Algorithms and artificial intelligence are here to stay. Yet what do humans know about them and how do they perceive the impact of these digital technologies on their lives and on society?” This question by Markus Overdiek of the platform Ethics of Algorithms is also something that Hannes Brunner considers for his mise-en-scène of earlier models – games, scores and exercises that he wants to use to facilitate “references to what can be experienced mentally in a symbolic, metaphorical or synonymous translation”. Together with former lecturers from Dubai and the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), students form the weissensee school of art and design berlin also participate in one of the intervention in the public space “T+V – Trash and Value”.