The most woke cultural event in Germany right now? A Press Conference.

I recently attended a press conference which shed some light on the state of German attitudes to race in a number of unexpected ways. Said conference was held at HKW (short for Haus der Welt der Kulturen aka the House of World Cultures), a contemporary arts institution situated in the former-West Berlin. Erected as part of the city’s 1957 architectural exhibition Internbau, HKW was originally designed as a “propaganda building” intended to promote western modernity via an international-style congress hall nicknamed the pregnant oyster” on account of its ballooning oval shape. John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter both gave speeches there, and the Bundestag also used it as a meeting place. In 1989 however, its focus (supposedly) shifted, and it was re-purposed as a forum in which to showcase “non-Western culture”—as the then west-German and north-Americans perceived it. 

Campaign poster  What to do with the world? , 2023. Design: Wolfgang Tillmans based on a quote by Zoe Todd © House of World Cultures. Photo: Laura Fiorio/HKW

Yet according to the 2023 conference invite, composed in somewhat more woke or at any rate self-conscious times, HKW will be rejecting this Euro-centric trajectory when it reopens this summer. Previous director Bend Scherer—who is white, German, and made his name as head of the ultra-establishment Goethe-Institut, the headquarters of which are located in the very white, very affluent city of Munich—recently stepped down. He has been replaced by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, who is known primarily as the founder of SAVVY, a grass-roots initiative concerned with contemporary art and the diaspora based in Wedding, one of the Berlin’s most ethnically diverse and economically deprived areas. Ndikung is also black and Cameroonian—that is, not the type of person that has been charged, historically, with representing world culture auf Deutsch.