Studio Bonn – Archive

8 November 2023

Aïsha Devi is one of the most innovative musicians of today. She sees electronic music as a portal to collective consciousness. Zita Sebesvari annually publishes the most comprehensive study of interconnected environmental risks: the “Interconnected Disaster Risks Report” from the Bonn Institute for Human and Environmental Security at UN University. Together we face the many threats to life on our planet - and look for ways to deal with them, both practically and mentally. Because if all environmental risks are interrelated, what does that do to our ideas about ourselves and the world? And if everything is vibration, as quantum physics says, what can music move?

In cooperation with the United Nations University

4 May 2023

Fewer flights, less meat: Everyone knows the practical advice on how to mitigate climate change. But is the survival of the planet a purely technical problem – once solved, back to business as usual? Or do we first need to learn to really look the catastrophe in the eye and talk about what it is doing to us? The climate psychologist Rebecca Nestor describes how feelings of fear and shame paralyse not only people but entire organisations. The activist Zoë Ruge blocks motorways with the Last Generation to force a change in consciousness and politics. And the artist Lu Yang combines near-death experiences with Buddhist dance in flaming video installations, questioning man’s place in a thoroughly technologized universe. The second talk in the new STUDIO BONN series GLOBAL NERVE SYSTEMS is all about fear and how living with it makes us curious and capable of taking action again.

15 June 2022

Within a mere two hundred years, the capitalist way of running the economy has revealed itself as unsustainable: it is destroying its own ecological and social foundations. Indigenous economies, on the other hand, have worked for millennia – and are increasingly being discussed as solutions for coping with climate change. Studio Bonn presents three models of global cooperation that combine sustainability and social justice.

20 November 2021

What connects Renaissance princely portraits with digital art and NFTs? How do forms of collecting differ in different forms of society? How do decentralized collectives challenge museums, and what new concepts of art do they make conceivable? Is the accumulation of art treasures still in keeping with the times?   Studio Bonn moderator Kolja Reichert discusses these questions with Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi in Florence, the artist Harm van den Dorpel as well as curator and professor Clémentine Deliss.

15 July 2021

The craze around crypto art and NFTs (non-fungible tokens, i.e. digital certificates of ownership) blurs the boundaries of culture, economy and politics. Does blockchain technology offer ways out of parasitic platform capitalism, in which all users feed the ledgers of tech gigants? Or will it lead to even greater inequality and the complete financialization of human relationships? Artist Hito Steyerl, the cultural scientist Joseph Vogl and the musician Ville Haimala, one half of the duo Amnesia Scanner, discuss the opportunities and risks of a decentralised internet for the arts and democracy.

Art and Culture in Times of War

26 April 2022

The war of aggression against the Ukraine is resurrecting the spectres of the 20th century: The Russian president legitimises the destruction of a country that is led by a Jewish head of state and home to a burgeoning Jewish community as a ‘denazification programme’, and his supporters stylise themselves as victims of Nazi persecution. Has history become a video game, as Eva Illouz recently wrote in DIE ZEIT? Is violence repeating itself because there is no collective memory in post-Soviet Russia, as Olga Grjasnowa argued in DER SPIEGEL? And do we, here in Germany, even have a map of shared cultural history on which we can situate the Ukraine?

9 December 2021

Do school and university prepare me sufficiently for life in the Europe of the future? Why are there so many different excuses for the fact that digitalisation does not work Europe-wide, even though we allegedly all want the same thing? Is there a young, European consciousness; is democracy in danger? And where do we actually find our much-vaunted European culture? Studio Bonn celebrates the launch of the podcast Europe, what’s up? It offers a forum for young Europeans to ask questions about Europe and for experts to answer them.

Europe, what’s up? is produced in cooperation with the initiative culture-council.eu. Its co-founder Janis Gebhardt has travelled to six European countries to collect the voices of the generation that is in the process of discovering Europe and to record their hopes and their scepticism. The first three episodes were released with responses by the historian Ute Frevert and Quang Paasch from Fridays for Future. The fourth episode was recorded that evening in the Forum of the Bundeskunsthalle.

Supported with funds from Neustart Kultur

Perspectives for Art and Culture in Afghanistan

12 October 2021

Artists fled – if they were able to; in the Bamiyan valley, cultural treasures were looted and sold off, and the Chinese mining lease for the copper mine beneath the important archaeological site in Mes Aynak is up for renegotiation. In the wake of the Taliban’s return to power, Afghanistan has once again entered a period of uncertainty. What will remain of the institutions that have been built up over the past twenty years, partly with German involvement? What are the prospects for the preservation of Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage? And how can the cultural isolation of the country be prevented? The filmmaker Sahraa Karimi, the director of the National Music Institute Ahmad Sarmast, the diplomat Martin Kobler and the exhibition manager of the Bundeskunsthalle Susanne Annen discuss these questions with the journalist and moderator Natalie Amiri at STUDIO BONN.

In an installation by Verena Issel

20 September 2021

Are political struggles drowned out by identity politics? Or do the growing self-confidence of minorities and the multiplication of perspectives simply reveal just how much (white, Western European, Christian) identity politics have always determined our society? How does embracing the new courtesies and agonising over the correct forms of expression affect the way we live together? Is freedom of expression under threat, or is it only just beginning to be being fought for? On 20 September 2021, journalist Petra Gerster and journalist Mohamed Amjahid will discuss these questions with Studio Bonn host Kolja Reichert in an installation by artist Verena Issel.

In the former Chancellor's bungalow

12 May 2021

Since the opening of the Bundeskunsthalle in 1992, the political value of culture has steadily risen. This can be seen in the budget increases that Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media Monika Grütters has achieved in her eight years in office – most recently in the two billion euros for culture to alleviate the consequences of the Corona pandemic. But do politicians really understand how culture works and what it achieves? Are the existing instruments enough to safeguard the work of artists? How do cultural institutions need to change? Is there a need for a Federal Ministry of Culture? And what remains of the cultural sovereignty of the individual states that make up the FRG? At the premiere of STUDIO BONN, Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Monika Grütters, artistic director Eva Kraus and Kolja Reichert discuss the future of cultural policy.