Bauhaus anniversary

Anniversary opening / Festival
4.9. – 7.9.2025
Bauhaus Building + Bauhaus Museum Dessau

The opening of the Bauhaus anniversary An die Substanz. Bauhaus Dessau 100 begins on Thursday, 4 September 2025 in the Bauhaus building. The creative connection between the stage and the workshops with their material experiments is symbolised above all by the so-called material dances: metal, glass and stick dances. They were integrated into Oskar Schlemmer’s 1928 teaching course Der Mensch and were performed on stage on individual occasions in Dessau, at Bauhaus festivals and on tours of the Bauhaus stage. The dances are exemplary of the experimental and playful culture at the historic Bauhaus. For the centenary of the Bauhaus Dessau, contemporary, internationally active artists are translating the historical material dances into the present. The respective interpretations will be premiered on the historic Bauhaus stage.

The Italian composer and sound artist Piero Mottola is also working with participants from Dessau, Berlin and Weimar on a score entitled Voices of Bauhaus. This will also be premiered on the historic stage in the Bauhaus building in Dessau for the anniversary opening on 4 September. The result is a complex orchestra of voices – a musica relationale – relational music.

On Saturday, 6 September 2025, the anniversary celebrations will be moved into the city, accompanied by a parade. A varied programme will take place at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau. Pop concerts will be organised in the Bauhaus building in collaboration with zdf/3sat. The Sunday programme begins with a long table on the forecourt of the museum. Residents will become hosts for the guests of the Bauhaus anniversary. The big anniversary kick-off will be extended with a rich educational programme for young and old.

Tour
26.9.2025 > ongoing
Urban space Dessau

In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau. But where did teachers and students live, work and celebrate in the first few months? What influence did the city of Dessau have on the Bauhaus and its
work? And where did Paul Klee go for walks to find inspiration for his paintings?

The digital tour Invisible Bauhaus Dessau explores places, most of which are no longer visible today, that are closely linked to the Bauhaus members‘ arrival in Dessau in 1925/26, when the Bauhaus buildings and Masters’ Houses did not yet exist. A separate walk through the Georgium follows in the footsteps of Paul Klee. Users can call up the videos at the relevant locations via QR codes and watch them on their smartphone. On the website of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and analogue, a folding map shows the way through the city to the individual locations.

Avant-garde film at the Bauhaus Museum
22.10. – 12.11.2025
As part of the film series ‘Filming Bauhäuslerinnen’ and in cooperation with Kunsthalle Dessau + KIEZ Programmkino

According to the latest research, 29 Bauhaus women made around 150 films. The film series shows a selection with a focus on ‘Does Gender Matter?’ and ‘Modernist Materials in Film’. At the Bauhaus Museum on 6 November 2025, the focus will be on experimental film art under the title Nitro |Silver | Light. Projected light, material graininess, chemical development and scratches in the film carrier will be important.

Exhibition
4.12.2025 – 31.1.2027
Bauhaus Museum Dessau

In the Bauhaus Museum Dessau, in the middle of the collection exhibition, important donations to the Bauhaus Dessau from the period 2019 to 2025 are on display, such as works by Christian Dell (Matthias Mynett), Friedrich Engemann (Christine Engemann) and Gunta Stölzl (Ariel Aloni). In a series of talks with the donors, often children or grandchildren of Bauhaus members, biographical backgrounds are revealed and the reasons why these works were given to the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation are explained.

Conference
29.1. – 31.1.2026
Bauhaus building + digital

With a view to the materials of the Bauhaus, the international conference aims to contribute to a new perspective on the narratives of architectural modernism. The conference proposes new perspectives on the material artefact of the Bauhaus, which can not only be exemplary lessons for the future handling of this building, but also represent an invitation to negotiate approaches for the building process of the present in dialogue with the modern architectural heritage of the Bauhaus.

Exhibition + Events
12.2. – 12.7.2026
Bauhaus Museum Dessau + various locations

In 2025/2026, Antje Schiffers and Thomas Sprenger will be travelling to selected extraction sites for raw materials as well as production and sales sites for cement, bricks, glass, etc. in Saxony-Anhalt as well as to Cuba and Turkey. They will visit a wide range of places, associations and companies. The trips will end with an exhibition at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau and various presentations and events at the respective locations.

The historical production sites provide an opportunity to look at what is left today, what people do with the remains, what forms they remember, how things are produced today and what has taken the place of the past. The work of Schiffers/Sprenger is therefore also essentially about structural transformations and their effects on the local people.

Exhibition
28.3.2026 – 10.1.2027
Bauhaus building

The Bauhaus building was erected in 1926 after just one year of planning and construction. What today attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors to Dessau every year as a UNESCO World Heritage Site was an experimental building that anticipated the future of a society shaped by industry and mechanisation. The fabrics and materials from which the Bauhaus was made and with which the school’s workshop work dealt creatively are a visible expression of this commitment. The up-and-coming industry in central Germany offered ideal conditions for this.

The close links between Bauhaus work and the industrial history of the early 20th century are the subject of the three-part exhibition Glass | Concrete | Metal in the historic workshop wing. Here, the material, economic and technological foundations of the iconic building and its workshop production, which have received less attention in Bauhaus history and reception to date, are explored. The exhibition explores the formatting of this modern everyday aesthetic, the manufacturing processes, production sites, working conditions and the extraction of raw materials that lie behind the smooth, clean surfaces of steel pipes or glass façades. It traces trade routes, supply chains and resource flows that are embedded in deeply unequal colonial and imperial economic relations and geopolitics and thematises the irritations, distortions, but also new beginnings that were associated with the material innovations at the beginning of the 1920s. It also shows the dirty underbelly of these material flights of fancy. It literally gets to the heart of the matter!

Exhibition
28.3.2026 – 27.9.2026
Former Zeeck department stores’

The exhibition Algae | Rubble | CO2 in the Zeeck department stores’ in Dessau city centre explores the possibilities of design today and calls for an overview of raw materials and materials, disciplines, practices and knowledge, extraction, application and consumption, use and users as actors. On display are alternatives in the concrete, steel and glass sectors as well as renewable raw materials, materials from anthropogenic sources, concepts and practices of preservation and care.

The exhibition is part of the Zero programme funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. It is intended to be a climate-neutral exhibition that not only talks about the alternatives of building today, but also implements and visualises this using the example of the exhibition itself. In addition, projects will be analysed for their transferability to the city of Dessau-Roßlau. The building – the former Zeeck department stores’ – stood empty for two decades. Opened in 1908 in the centre of the city and extended in the 1920s, it became an HO department stores‘ in 1945 and later a magnet department stores’. A new use for the building is currently being considered. The owners are in close dialogue with the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.

Exhibition
28.3.2026 – 27.9.2026
Historic labour office

Pioneering Bauhaus architecture would be inconceivable without brick. One of the most prominent Bauhaus buildings with unrendered exposed brick is the historic labour office in Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius. As with these materials, the question of the future use of brick also arises. Brick, in the form we are familiar with, is an energy and resource-intensive mass-produced product of the industrial age that has a lasting impact on the environment.
Tours, workshops and artistic-cultural interventions set out on a forensic search for clues in the building, which will remain empty until 2027. The Copenhagen-based artist group Superflex, for example, is looking for answers to the drastic interventions that humans have left behind and continue to produce in the ecosystem with the industrial age and its infrastructures.

Exhibition
28.3.2026 – 28.2.2027
Steel House

Parallel to the Steel House by Georg Muche and Richard Paulick, the exhibition presents Hugo Junkers’ ideas on building with sheet steel. The focus is on his contemporaneous activities to develop a standardised and modular metal house construction system. This basic research led to numerous designs for metal house types and patents, such as for a panel construction method. However, only a few prototypes were realised. In addition to issues relating to the serial production of building elements, their development focussed primarily on the approach of thinking integrally about the general and structural conditions for house construction (weather protection, thermal insulation, soundproofing, sealing, interchangeability). The house was understood as a technical apparatus, as a living machine. An important theoretical impulse was provided by the 1926 publication Der Raum als Membran by Siegfried Ebeling, a member of Junkers’ house construction research team. Here he formulates a vision of the future in which the house is conceived and designed like an organism, among other things ‘as its own source of energy’. This envisages a self-sufficient architecture.

Exhibition
28.3.2026 – 28.2.2027
Slatted hangar

The steel slatted hangar, which is still used today as a hangar for gliders, was built in 1929. It is one of three historical hangars still preserved in Dessau based on the system patented by Hugo Junkers in 1924 and 1925. Its curved steel roof consists of a modular system that was marketed worldwide due to its high degree of prefabrication, transportability, simple assembly and robustness. Halls and hangars spanning up to 40 metres were built using the Junkers system.
The open-air exhibition Lamellas | Purlins | Knots sheds light on the history of the building and the work of the flying club since its foundation. In addition, the worldwide sales success of the Junkers slatted hangar is presented using the example of a major order from the Junkers company: in 1926, a complete aircraft factory consisting of 13 slatted hangars, including machinery, equipment and expertise, was exported from Dessau to Kayseri in central Turkey. The adventurous transport of the components by ship, railway, wagon and camel to the Anatolian highlands was documented in photographs and texts.

Bauhaus Festival 2026
6.9.2026
Bauhaus building + Bauhaus Museum Dessau + urban space

The Bauhaus Festival 2026 will focus on the Bauhaus members’ connections to circus, dance, performance and visual arts. A large parade through the city is being planned.

Exhibition
4.9.2026 – 29.3.2027
Bauhaus Museum Dessau

The exhibition at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau opens for the Bauhaus Festival 2026 with a spatial staging and new filmic works by the artist duo Astrup & Bordorff. For the spatial stage of the Bauhaus Museum Dessau, they are developing a work that celebrates and updates the then revolutionary interweaving of various artistic disciplines at the historic Bauhaus. In their work, they challenge themselves and the audience to think anew: about the biographies of Bauhaus members, about ideas of work, roles and gender, about the wonderfully courageous and free performances of the historic Bauhaus stage and the social presentation, togetherness and celebration in this special place.

Exhibition
4.12.2026 – 29.3.2027
Bauhaus Museum Dessau

The opening of the Bauhaus building in Dessau on 4 December 1926 was a meticulously planned major media event. The avant-garde school shared a commitment to a democratic public that was characterised by transparency and openness. New media and information channels played a decisive role. The opening with over 1,500 guests, a week of celebrations, exhibitions, film screenings and publications was an event that, similar to the popular exhibition culture of the 1920s, aimed to convey the achievements of social, housing and educational policy to the general public in a didactic and entertaining way. The public response was tremendous.
In 1976, the Bauhaus became visible again and the Bauhaus heritage gained new relevance in the context of the changed economic and social policy in the GDR.