The filmmaker Nico Weber shows excerpts from her film series «Bauhausfrauen», which was nominated for the Grimme Award 2019. The screening is followed up by a talk with Dr Anja Baumhoff, Professor of Art and Design History at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hanover, who is doing research on the gender relationship at the Bauhaus.
With her film about the largely unknown Bauhaus women, Nico Weber pays tribute to their work at the Bauhaus, which existed from 1919 to 1933 and profited greatly from the accomplishments of female students and the wives of the Bauhaus masters–especially Ise Gropius and Lucia Moholy. Inspired by the successes in the fight for equal rights, in particular the introduction of women's suffrage in the year the Bauhaus was founded, a surprising number of women started studying at the new university in Weimar. But even the otherwise progressive Bauhaus should continue traditional 19th-century gender roles. Despite their outstanding designs, artists such as Anni Albers and Alma Siedhoff-Buscher were to play subordinate parts, and only a few women, the first of them was Gunta Stölzl in 1925, made the leap into the men's association of the Meisterrat as leaders of the textile workshop. Nico Weber's film about the Bauhaus women shows the development from the euphoric vision of being able to co-design modern living space as a woman to the sobering realization that despite all efforts they remained largely limited to typical «female» areas such as the weaving class.
Anja Baumhoff studied in Freiburg and Oxford and earned her doctorate in social history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. Since 2014 she has been holding the professorship of Art and Design History at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hanover. Her research work «The Gendered World of the Bauhaus. The Politics of Power at the Weimar Republic’s Premier Art Institute, 1919-1932», published in 2001 in New York, systemically examined for the first time the role of man and woman as well as the gender stereotypes at the Bauhaus. Her book «Der Neue Mann und das Bauhaus» [The New Man and the Bauhaus], which examines concepts of masculinity in classical modernism using the example of the Bauhaus, will be published soon.
Nico Weber studied philosophy, political science and literature. For over 20 years, she has been producing thematically, dramaturgically and visually boundary-crossing films for the public broadcasters ARD, ZDF, arte, 3sat, ORF and SRF. With her company NOW COLLECTIVE she moves at the interface between film and fine art and works together with artists of her field in camera and editing on filming trips throughout Europe, Asia and the USA. Her documentary «Bauhausfrauen» is the long version of the eponymous 3sat Kulturzeit series which was first aired in November 2018 and nominated for the Grimme Award 2019.
The exhibition project «Bauhaus and Photography: On New Vision in Contemporary Art» is funded by the «Bauhaus heute Fund» of the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Hessian Ministry of Science and the Arts and the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. The event «Bauhausfrauen» with Nico Weber and Anja Baumhoff is also part of the B3 Biennale of the moving image 2019, which, moreover, presents a film installation by Nico Weber.