Time:
Wednesday, 21 June 2023, 6 p.m. 

Location:
Bauhaus Museum Weimar
Stéphane-Hessel-Platz 1
99423 Weimar

In 1919 in two completely different parts of the world, two distinct educational spaces for Art and Design were established, which had nothing in common but shared their zeitgeist. The »Staatliches Bauhaus« was founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar and the first non-European Nobel laureate Rabindra Nath Tagore established »Kala Bhavana« (Institute of Fine Arts) in Shantiniketan, India 1919. 

In 1921 Tagore visited Germany for the first time and developed a relationship with Bauhaus. This resulted in the participation of various teachers and students from the school in »The Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art» along with artists of the society in Kolkata, India. The exhibition was the largest and most comprehensive one of the school outside of Europe and happened one year before the »Bauhausausstellung« in 1923, whose centenary we celebrate this year. The »Staatliches Bauhaus« in its institutional form was dissolved by the Nazi regime in 1933, while Kala Bhavana has been a part of Visva-Bharati University until the present day. 

Professor Sanchayan Ghosh, an artist and pedagogue from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, India, will visit Weimar for an academic residency at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His lecture at the Bauhaus-Museum Weimar will reflect on the tools of participatory pedagogy that were initiated in Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan. Tagore incorporated landscape as a pedagogic tool to question the linearity of colonial education with the idea of circular knowledge exchange »under the shade of the mango tree«. In Kala Bhavan, the human and the natural had no difference, they were one. As a result, Tagore considered modernity not as a break away from tradition but as a critical encounter of multiple traditions. 

Under the light of 100 years of »Bauhausausstellung von 1923« the visit of Prof. Sanchayan Ghosh is a starting point to re-establish a connection between two historic universities that is lost in time – Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the Institute of Fine Arts »Kala Bhavan« at Visva-Bharati University in India.

Sanchayan Ghosh, born in Kolkata, is an artist and pedagogue. He has been practising site-specific art as a workshop-based, collective community dialogue, leading to numerous forms of public engagements over the last twenty-five years. He has worked in different self-organised initiatives in various parts of the world and explored possible transformations of the relationship of land, location, labour and practice. Presently Sanchayan Ghosh is engaged in exploring pedagogical engagement as a reciprocal process of making and learning and the process as a participatory tool of resistance. 

He participated in multiple internationally acclaimed exhibition such as Kochi Muziris Biennale in 2012, Dacca Biennale in 2016, Documenta 14 in 2017 and had multiple solo exhibitions including »Reversed Perspective:3 Conjunctures« in 2014 and »Sisyphus Effect«, together with Experimenter in Kolkata, 2010. Beyond that, he co-curated the second session of »Under the Mango Tree« in Santiniketan in 2020.

A project by Practices and Politics of Representation, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (Prof. Mona Mahall, Yelta Köm), the MFA-Programme Public Art and New Artistic Strategies (Vertr.-Prof. Ina Weise, Arijit Bhattacharyya, Lea Maria Wittich) and the Professorship Arts and Research (Jun.- Prof. Dr. Alexandra Toland)