Darkroom of Educational Modernism: On Form & Function

At the latest with the expulsion of emancipative modernism from Europe after the outbreak of World War II and the establishment of the International Style in architecture, the project of modernism split into formally aesthetic and ideologically competing social and national processes. These strands can be reconnected in educational buildings.

Since the late 1990s, the artist duo Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber have been visiting, photographing, and researching buildings and structures of postwar educational modernism, as well as the backgrounds and realities of their use, in countries as diverse as Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Nigeria, Serbia, and the United States.

Exemplary works from this long-term project examine the role and meaning of images of educational architectures in narratives of modernization from different geographies and ideologies. They explore how colonialism, racism, and classism become visible in them and how critique of the promises and crimes of modernism can be captured in terms of image politics.

The exhibition Darkroom of Educational Modernism and accompanying events ask whether and how, considering the complicity of knowledge and education with planetary exploitation processes, spaces can still be opened up today for a “critical legacy” of modernism in which other forms of knowledge are developed and conditions and ways of dealing with education that are fit for the future are made possible.