A conversation between Dr Bernd Scherer (HKW), Ravi Agarwal and Ranjit Hoskote
Library MMB
Bernd Scherer, Director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), one of Berlin's premier international cultural institutions, will be in conversation with Ravi Agarwal and Ranjit Hoskote, co-curators of the State of Nature project in its current, 2022 iteration. They will discuss Scherer's contribution to the transformation of the HKW from an earlier, relatively more ethnographic platform for the understanding of the world's varied regions to a dynamic forum for the discussion and performative articulation of transcultural themes and urgencies. This shift has been carried out through a number of long-term projects that have unfolded in a collaborative manner, as experiments in ensemble-making, such as The Anthropocene Curriculum and The New Alphabet. Scherer will discuss, with his interlocutors, the importance of such durational and polyphonic commitments to contemporary cultural production.
Dr. Bernd Scherer has been Director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, since 2006 and has held an honorary professorship at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin since 2011. His central areas of work lie in philosophy, semiotics, aesthetics and intercultural questions. He has initiated and headed a series of international cultural projects, including “Über Lebenskunst” (2010–2011), an initiative project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation in cooperation with HKW. Since 2012, Scherer has headed “The Anthropocene Project” and, since 2014, the project “100 Years of Now,” both at HKW. He is curating the Dictionary of Now as part of the latter project. Parallel to this, he is overseeing the conceptual development of HKW’s third large scale project, “The New Alphabet.” In his tenure at HKW, Scherer has guided its conceptual development from an institution that presented non-European cultures into one dedicated to the “curating of ideas in the making,” in a world that is changing not only globally, but also in planetary terms.