Techno Worlds: The Idea

About the Exhibition “Techno Worlds”

As a global phenomenon, techno has not only shaped music history but has also set impulses that have impacted contemporary culture, art, pop culture, media consumption, and technologies. Techno is music, but also far more than music, finding its echoes in design and fashion, philosophy, subculture, people’s relationship to machines, to the virtual, in political-emancipatory projects, and in the ruins and fissures in hegemonic norms Techno as a sense of life and time that transcends borders reflects the respective social, living space and economic structures it finds itself in, and can equally well be used as a political tool.  

Starting in Detroit, techno has been developing and spreading rapidly worldwide since the 1980s. What was still a comparatively “manageable” world changed radically with digitality and the political upheaval of 1989/90. In Germany, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, techno was seen as a unifying element between East and West. Berlin in particular, which attracted attention in the 1990s with the Love Parade and techno clubs that became legendary, rose to become one of the most important techno metropolises.  

Techno and club culture have engendered different eras, styles, and variants and are constantly reinventing themselves. TECHNO WORLDS references diverse techno scenes, genres, and subcultural-political projects at different times and in different places around the world and features a selection of these phenomena as narrated and represented in works by visual artists and musicians.  

TECHNO WORLDS includes photo, video, and installation works by DeForrest Brown, Jr., Jaqueline Caux, Tony Cokes, Chicks on Speed, Zuzanna Czebatul, Aleksandra Domanović, Kerstin Greiner, AbuQuadim Haqq, Rangoato Hlasane, Ryõji Ikeda, Maryam Jafri, Robert Lippok, M+M, Henrike Naumann & Bastian Hagedorn, Mamba Negra, Carsten Nicolai, Vinca Petersen, Daniel Pflumm, Lisa Rovner, Sarah Schönfeld, Jeremy Shaw, The Otolith Group, Dominique White, and Tobias Zielony.  

TECHNO WORLDS is a Goethe-Institut exhibition on display in museums and other exhibition venues internationally. 

Curators:

Mathilde Weh (Goethe-Institut, e.V.)
Justin Hoffmann (Kunstverein Wolfsburg)
Creamcake (a Berlin collective).