28.07.2018
Bode-Museum
Questions around equality, gender and heritage. Until 19 August 2018, sculptures created by students from the Thomas-Mann Gymnasium during a week-long workshop will be shown as interventions in the exhibition ‘Beyond Compare: Art from Africa in the Bode-Museum’ throughout the exhibition displays in the Bode-Museum.
Coloured plinths have recently been arranged amongst the works of art from Africa from the Ethnologisches Museum and the Skulpturensammlung of the Bode-Museum. Special work titles can be read on them, such as The Joyful One or The Artist Who Paints Strange Pictures. The titles name the plaster busts displayed on the plinths, and thus the artists in whose likeness they have been shaped.
A workshop brought students from the year 7 culture class at the Thomas-Mann-Gymnasium to the Bode-Museum, and into the exhibition Beyond Compare. This exhibition presents works from the collection of the Ethnologisches Museum and from the Skulpturensammlung in experimental juxtapositions.
Building on their interest in the topic of “being different/diverse” the students found artistic ways of engaging with the exhibition and creating connections to their own lives and contexts in practical and thematic ways. While one group created plaster busts from casts of their own heads, another group made a large-format mural in the Denkraum (thinking space). For this, the students used various street art techniques, such as marker drawings, stencils and tape art.
The project being different was carried out as part of lab.Bode - Initiative for the Strengthening of Educational Work in Museums. This joint program between the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin works together with nine partner schools in Berlin to trial innovative forms of educational work in museums. In addition, lab.Bode regularly hosts public discussions addressing educational practices in the museum from a contemporary perspective. All information about the initiative can be found at www.lab-bode.de.