Open Call for the Bauhaus Residency 2021

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the GfZK – Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig are searching for artists working collectively for the Bauhaus 

Residency 2021 Gropius House || Fictional via a joint open call. They can live and work for three months in the Masters’ House Muche/Schlemmer. Closing date for applications is 30 October 2020. 

Bauhaus Residency 2021 – Gropius House || Fictional 

The focus of the Bauhaus Residency is on the Masters’ Houses, which are not just a reminder of the past but continue to serve as a starting point for contemporary debates and positions. New ideas, experiments and work developed during the residency are all accessible to the public through presentations, studio visits, discussions, concerts and more – even during their initial development. 

The programme is aimed at international artists whose work relates to the historical disciplines represented at the Bauhaus and the subsequent developments of these core disciplines – among them painting, product design, textile design, music, theatre, performance, architecture and photography. 

Artworks and artistic processes create specific new ways of seeing the world; in this sense, they are fictional. The meaning of fiction is revealing in this regard: originally derived from the Latin verb fingere, it means nothing other than to shape, form, invent. Fiction thus does not entail first and foremost the creation of a separate world, but can likewise denote shaping the existing world, the real. Fiction is thus also a way to gain distance, to interrogate realities, to see and recognize them anew. 

In their work, artists also explore how meaning and value are constituted in a specific present. What is narrated for what reason and in what way? And what differences, points of friction, and overlays arise when fictions are dedicated to the same topic, but realized by different artists with different means? With a focus on this examination, Gropius House || Fictional presents collective forms of artistic work in various disciplines.

A p p l i c a t i o n ( G e r m a n o r E n g l i s h ) 
> Curriculum vitae (of all members of the collective, if more than 2 applicants) 
> A portfolio (with examples representing each member’s work or group work) 
> A proposal of a concrete project that can be completed during the residential period and which has a relation to Bauhaus (maximum of two pages). Preferable is also a reference to the foundation’s topic for 2021 “Infrastructure” and a concept for how to include the production process in the presentation 
> Preferred time of residency (15 April – 15 July or 1 September – 31 November). 

C l o s i n g d a t e f o r a p p l i c a t i o n s 
> 30 October 2020 
> Email (pdf file, max. 5 MB) to opencall@bauhaus-dessau.de