Berlin artist program of the DAAD

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The Berlin artist program of the DAAD is an artist-in-residence program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Berlin . The DAAD has continued the program initiated by the Ford Foundation in 1963 under its own direction and with funding from the German Foreign Office and the Berlin Senate ; Every year he awards around 20 grants for a one-year work stay in Berlin to artists from all over the world from a. a. the fields of visual arts, literature and music.

In 1978, as part of the Berlin artist program, the DAAD gallery (own spelling daadgalerie ) was founded as a gallery for contemporary art to give the DAAD scholarship holders a platform for their artistic activities. In addition to art exhibitions, the DAAD gallery also hosts readings, concerts, film screenings and performances in line with the spectrum of guest artists .

history

In 1963 - a year and a half after the Berlin Wall was built - the Ford Foundation launched a three-year program to strengthen West Berlin's resources in the fields of art, education and culture. The Foundation endowed the program with $ 3 million to get started and appointed former Harvard President and US Ambassador to Germany, James B. Conant , to lead it. From the program, $ 300,000 went to the American Studies Department and $ 350,000 to the Comparative Musicology Seminar, both at the Free University of Berlin . $ 590,000 was spent to enable "artists, writers, university teachers, scientists and composers" to "live and work in Berlin for extended periods of time". This included support for the newly founded Literary Colloquium Berlin , which was supposed to deal with the dissemination of literature via radio, television and film. The Ford Foundation's artist in residence program, started in 1963, was the origin of the DAAD's Berlin artist program. As early as April 1963, the DAAD was entrusted with organizing the artist exchange and commissioned Peter Nestler , who also became the head of the DAAD's Berlin office (until 1972). In 1965 the Berlin Senate decided to finance the artist exchange from 1966 onwards.

The first scholarship holders of the program were the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann and the Polish author in exile Witold Gombrowicz . Bachmann arrived in Berlin at the beginning of May 1963 and initially lived in the guest studio of the Akademie der Künste at Hanseatenweg 10 in the Hansaviertel . Gombrowicz also moved into a guest studio there, so that activities and discussions arose. In the first few months in Berlin they spent their time almost exclusively as a "strange team". Both later referred to their time together in Berlin in their writings, Bachmann in a fragmentary essay ( Witold Gombrowicz , 1964) and Gombrowicz in his Berlin Notes (1965). In August 1963 Bachmann moved to the Villa Hecht in Koenigsallee in Grunewald. Ingeborg Bachmann, who accepted the scholarship in Berlin "gratefully and ungratefully" - grateful for the one-year "blessing", ungrateful for being tied to "a place" that "smells of illness and death" - stayed through the end of hers She stayed in the city on a scholarship until the end of 1965, and wrote large parts of her novel Malina in Berlin .

In 1965 the DAAD took over the entire organization of the artist in residence program from the Ford Foundation and renamed it the DAAD's Berlin artist program. The program has now been partly financed by the Foreign Service and the Berlin Senate . Long-time DAAD President Hansgerd Schulte described the artist program as an “orchid in a buttonhole”, that is, something special even among the diverse funding programs of the DAAD.

ladder

Scholarship holders

The core of the program is a grant for an artist to stay in Berlin for a year with accommodation. Every year, on the recommendation of a jury, the DAAD awards around 20 scholarships in the five fields of visual arts, film, literature, music and dance + performance. For scholars from the visual arts, the artist's program includes organizing an exhibition in the DAAD gallery and creating a catalog. Literature scholarship holders appear in readings. Since 1964, around 1000 artists have been guests in Berlin as part of the DAAD's Berlin artist program.

Between 1963 and 2009 a good 370 artists in the visual arts received a DAAD scholarship in the Berlin artist program. These included Jorge Castillo (fellow 1969), Daniel Spoerri (1973), Joel Fisher (1973), Richard Hamilton (1974), Duane Hanson (1974), Christian Boltanski (1975), Lawrence Weiner (1975), On Kawara (1976) , Jannis Kounellis (1980), Nam June Paik (1983), Erwin Wurm (1987), Ilja Kabakow (1989), Nan Goldin (1991), Marina Abramović (1992), Rachel Whiteread (1992), Damien Hirst (1993), Andrea Zittel (1995), Pipilotti Rist (1996), Allan Sekula (1997), Rineke Dijkstra (1998), Steve McQueen (1999), Mark Wallinger (2001) and Willem de Rooij (2006). The scholarships for fine arts are now so popular that unsolicited applications in this field are not accepted, and instead a commission itself seeks and suggests candidates. In all other areas, applicants can propose themselves.

Between 1963 and 2009 a good 310 DAAD scholarships in the literature section were awarded to authors. These included Ingeborg Bachmann (scholarship holder 1963), Peter Handke (1968), Ernst Jandl (1970), George Tabori (1971), Lars Gustafsson (1972), Friederike Mayröcker (1973), Stanisław Lem (1977), György Konrád (1977) , Margaret Atwood (1984), Gao Xingjian (1985), Carlos Fuentes (1988), Susan Sontag (1989), Cees Nooteboom (1989), António Lobo Antunes (1989), Harold Brodkey (1992), Wladimir Sorokin (1992), Imre Kertész (1993), Ryszard Kapuściński (1994), Richard Ford (1997), Jeffrey Eugenides (1999) and Raj Kamal Jha (2012).

Almost 270 composers and musicians received a DAAD music scholarship until 2009, including Isang Yun (scholarship holder 1964), Krzysztof Penderecki (1968), György Ligeti (1969), Morton Feldman (1971) and John Cage (1972). In the field of film, 105 artists received a grant, including Yvonne Rainer (1976), István Szabó (1977), Andrei Tarkowski (1985) and Jim Jarmusch (1987). The remaining 13 scholarships in the period up to 2009 fell on the dance + performance division, in which a scholarship was awarded for the first time in 1989. The scholarships are to be awarded in all fields to artists who already have considerable achievements to show, but are not yet fully established. The confrontation with the East in the first decade of the program resulted in a preference for the avant-garde. As a result of this combination, the Berlin artist program has already acted a number of times as an early detection system for the next big star of the art scene, the most famous scholarship holder is likely Damien Hirst , who had his breakthrough with his 1993 exhibition in the DAAD gallery.

DAAD gallery

Right from the start, the program was more than a fixed-term grant plus accommodation: the artist program was intended to strengthen West Berlin as a “vulnerable island in the middle of the communist sea”, and therefore the focus was on networking the program with West Berlin's cultural life. This tendency was reinforced by the partial financing by the Berlin Senate. As a result, the program coordinators invited the fellows to cultural events in the city, introduced them to influential people in cultural life, and campaigned for the fellows to appear on the radio, for their music to be performed, for them to produce films and for their works to be shown in exhibitions were.

In order to give these activities a local focus, the DAAD founded the DAAD gallery in 1978 as part of its Berlin artist program in order to give the DAAD scholarship holders their own platform for their artistic activities. The DAAD gallery (own spelling: daadgalerie) was located in the former villa of the actress Henny Porten at Kurfürstenstrasse 58. In 2005 the gallery moved to Zimmerstrasse 90/91 near Checkpoint Charlie . The new daadgalerie opened in January 2017 at Oranienstrasse 161, Kreuzberg.

literature

  • Thomas Deecke (Red.): 10 years of the Berlin artist program . DAAD, Berlin 1975.
  • Wolfgang Siano: balcony with a fan - 25 years of the DAAD's artist program in Berlin . DAAD, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-89357-012-8 . (Catalog for the exhibition of the same name, shown in 1988/89 at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, then DuMont-Kunsthalle in Cologne and the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.)
  • Hans-Joachim Neubauer: Zeitwechsel - the Berlin artist program of the DAAD and its guests (1988–2000) . Bostelmann and Siebenhaar, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-934189-62-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ford Foundation Annual Report 1963 ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Fiscal year from October 1, 1962 to September 30, 1963, p. 49.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fordfoundation.org
  2. ↑ Elke Schlinsog: Berlin coincidences: Ingeborg Bachmann's " types of death" project . Königshausen & Neumann, 2005, ISBN 3-8260-3120-2 , pp. 48–52.
  3. ↑ Friedrich W. Hellmann (Ed.): Traces in the Future , Volume 3. DAAD, Bonn 2000, ISBN 3-87192-750-3 , p. 124.
  4. ↑ Jessica Schulte am Hülse: This is where the greats of art are at home . In: "Die Welt" from October 5, 2008.
  5. ↑ a b c d Berlin artist program - guests 1963–2009 . Website of the Berlin artist program.
  6. ^ Elizabeth Janik: Recomposing German music: politics and tradition in Cold War Berlin . BRILL, 2005, ISBN 90-04-14661-X , p. 257. Award dates of the scholarships according to the Berlin artist program - guests 1963–2009 . Website of the Berlin artist program.
  7. ^ Richard Kostelanetz (Ed.): A dictionary of the avant-gardes , Routledge, London 2001, ISBN 0-415-93764-7 , entry DAAD - Berliner Künstlerprogramm , p. 153.

Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 26.7 ″  N , 13 ° 23 ′ 19.6 ″  E