Exhibitions 2023

Daniel Boyd

RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION)

24 March to 9 July 2023

RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION) is the most comprehensive exhibition of Daniel Boyd’s artistic practice in Europe to date. It provided an overview of Boyd’s image-making that counters the colonial narrative of Australia’s history, engages transnational networks of resistance, Indigenous knowledge production and personal family histories, which he reflected in relation to the context and architecture of the Gropius Bau.

Indigo Waves and Other Stories

Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora

6 April to 13 August 2023

Taking the stories and histories of the Indian Ocean as its departure point, the group exhibition Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora brought together several contemporary artists, musicians, writers and thinkers to investigate, unpack and shed light on some of the smaller and bigger historical, cultural and linguistic links between the continents of Africa and Asia.

Soundshapes – In Between Frequencies

Volume I

31 July 2023 to 14 January 2024

Soundshapes – In Between Frequencies: Volume I activated the two entrances of the Gropius Bau with sound works by Kapwani Kiwanga and Janine Jembere, creating an acoustic connection between the central entrance portal of the neo-Renaissance building and the step-free entrance. Drawing from the potential of porosity, this architectural intervention challenged the monumentality and statics of the building in an attempt to destabilise the divide between interior and exterior.

Pallavi Paul

How Love Moves: Prelude

10 August 2023 to 14 January 2024

During her time as the Gropius Bau’s Artist in Residence 2023, Pallavi Paul further deepened her research on love and its embodied counterpart – the breath. From August 2023 to January 2024, the Gropius Bau presented a prelude to her major solo exhibition in later in 2024. In How Love Moves: Prelude, a scenography around the three-channel video installation Cynthia Ke Sapne / The Dreams of Cynthia (2017) transformed the historic Schliemannsaal into a twilight space between wakefulness and sleep. The installation was freely accessible.

General Idea

22 September 2023 to 14 January 2024

Challenging both the art world and society at large, General Idea remain a lastingly influential artist group whose groundbreaking practice spans 25 years. In the most comprehensive retrospective on the trio ever produced, the Gropius Bau presented more than 200 works from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.

Selma Selman

her0

11 November 2023 to 14 January 2024

From November 2023 to January 2024, the Gropius Bau presented her0, a presentation by visual artist Selma Selman. At its core lied the development of her performance Motherboards (2023–ongoing), in which Selman and members of her family dismantled electronic waste. Challenging oversimplified and racialised narratives, the performance offers palpable insights into dynamics of power around the notion of sustainability.

Ether’s Bloom

A Programme on Artificial Intelligence

10 August 2023 to 14 January 2024

Ether’s Bloom marked the first part of the Programme on Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the Gropius Bau. From 10 August 2023, the works Technologies of Care (2016) and Cleaning Emotional Data (2020) by Elisa Giardina Papa as well as These Networks in Our Skin (2021) and The Cloth in the Cable (2022) by Mimi Ọnụọha were showcased in freely accessible spaces of the Gropius Bau. The programme, which took place online and offline, focused on the utopian and poetic possibilities of artificial intelligence.