Projects
Fund for Young Design
The Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen launched a "Fund for Young Design" in 2020. It finances a residency programme for young international designers at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. The residents are given the opportunity to engage intensively with the MK&G collection, benefitting from the expertise of the museum staff and from access to the objects as a source of inspiration for their own work. The residency culminates in a new artwork, which the foundation gives MK&G on permanent loan. The residents use the Dieter Rams room on the 2nd floor of the MK&G as their studio and are happy to discuss their work with you. If the door is open, you are welcome to enter.
Mawuto Dotou is an interdisciplinary communications designer from Hamburg. After earning a bachelor’s degree in communications design at the Würzburg-Schweinfurt University of Applied Sciences, she completed a master’s degree in integrated design at the University of the Arts Bremen in 2023. Mawuto Dotou’s design concepts and participatory formats interweave pop culture and political activism with design. Against the backdrop of issues such as racism, post-colonialism and xenophobia, she explores how design can contribute to education, motivation, mobilisation, reflection and destigmatisation. For the exhibition concept “Escape Racism International”, she and designer Julia Sukop won the Golden Nail of the ADC (Art Directors Club) Talent Award in 2021.
Katharina Spitz (b. 1993) is the first resident in fashion. After an apprenticeship as a Custom Tailor at the Couture Salon Pio O'Kan Couture Düsseldorf, she studied Experimental Textile and Fashion Design at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the Robert Koch Forum Berlin, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin and the Fashionclash Festival Maastricht, among others. Since 2021 she has been working as an independent fashion designer with her own studio in Amsterdam. With the design of haute couture, textiles and performances, Katharina Spitz explores the relationship we as humans have with each other and our surroundings. She prefers to work collaboratively.
Anna Resei (* 1989) studied textile, product and contextual design in Stuttgart, Hamburg and Eindhoven. She received several scholarships and design awards and exhibited her work at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Cologne and at the Milan Design Week, among others. The conceptual designer creates objects with a special materiality that can be functional and abstract at the same time. She works primarily with textiles, which she uses as a source of ideas, metaphors and technology while defying genre boundaries in order to connect digital, physical and mental spaces with each other.
Jan Hottmann (* 1986) completed his studies in fine arts at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart in early 2022 and works as a freelance artist and photographer. In his works, Hottmann explores the technical aspects of photography and raises a distrust of standardized visual languages. During his residency at MK&G, he is particularly exploring the question of how the medium of photography is changing as a result of digital technical innovations.
Lea Sievertsen (* 1990) works as a graphic designer in Berlin. In 2020, she graduated from the HfbK Hamburg with a Master of Fine Arts. Previously, she studied at Burg Giebichenstein Designhochschule Halle and at HAW Hamburg.
Benjamin Unterluggauer (* 1989) is a product and web designer and is about to complete his master’s degree at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel. He previously studied at the MOFA furniture trade school in Cologne and the Macromedia Academy in Munich. Unterluggauer has been working as a freelance graphic and web designer since 2010 and joined the MOKIT design studio in 2020. His work has been shown in international exhibitions and he has won several young designer awards.
Anaïs Borie (* 1991) studied product design at the Saint- Etienne Higher School of Art and Design (France) and Contextual Design at the Design Academy in Eindhoven (Netherlands). She currently lives in Eindhoven and has been working for the past two years as a freelance designer with various design collectives. Borie has already shown her designs in international exhibitions, for example in Guangzhou, in Milan and at Art Basel in Miami.
NEO Collections & NEO Lab
"NEO Collections" is a joint project of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Übersee-Museum Bremen and Nationalmuseum Sweden. It is funded by the Digital Culture Program of the German Federal Cultural Foundation until the end of September 2024.
The collaboration is based on the principles of open access and participation. Together with visitors, users, experts and (critical) friends and all kinds of creatives and technologists we are co-creating prototypes for digital formats and products that will simplify and diversify access to our digital collections and enable their reuse in many ways.
As three different museums, varying in size, structure, focus and digital maturity the museums follow their individual approaches to the same goal: Finding new ways of working together — with communities, within our organizations, with interdisciplinary teams and across museums.
As part of the project at the MK&G the NEO Lab is evolving.
Project LEAD
Dr. Antje Schmidt
Contact (project coordination)
Marleen Grasse
marleen.grasse@mkg-hamburg.de
3D-Digitisation
The MK&G has collected about half a million objects to date. In order to make them accessible to the international research community and the public, they are being digitised: they are photographed, for example, and the results - known as digital copies - are stored. This helps with the preservation of objects and new questions can be answered by the digital copies. But how can the three-dimensionality of objects best be reproduced? And how can the resulting 3D digital copies be used? These are just some of the questions being explored by the scanning laboratory.
The scanning laboratory is part of our 3D digitisation project. Within this project, we are testing various 3D digitisation processes, particularly with regard to their usability for museums. We are also examining how they can be integrated into our everyday work at the museum and what new possibilities they present.
Young Cultural Creators
The project, funded by the Stiftung Kulturglück in cooperation with the kultur{}botschaft berlin, the SCHORSCH im IFZ and the TikTok creators Jeannie Naomi Wagner (@Jeanniejuice), Yeo-Kyeong Lee (@yushiseo) and Antonia Valentina Herbort (@antoniavalentinah), enabled a workshop on the topic of TikTok with young people aged between 10 and 16 years under the title "Young Cultural Creators - MK&G goes TikTok". The workshop was based on the idea of using the social media platform TikTok to inspire young people to engage with the museum through direct participation in the creative potential of its collection and exhibitions, while at the same time contributing to the formation of critical media awareness.
The MK&G project relies on the positive self-empowerment of a generation that has long seen its favourite creators and influencers as role models and representatives of diversity and turns to them with increasing confidence. Working with young people of this age group, for whom digitality is by no means a second or alternative but rather a "naturally" expanded reality of life, therefore also means an opportunity for the MK&G to connect with this reality into the future. In this way, a playful, humorous and entertaining relationship can be built up that is based more on the participants' own interests and presents the museum as a space of exploration that has various contents to offer for their own horizons of meaning and beyond. The museum functions as a stage for the own content.
As part of the project, a TikTok channel was set up by the museum for the participants' self-produced videos.
Inclusion Network "Verbund Inklusion"
In the project "Verbund Inklusion" (2018-2023), the MK&G, together with six other institutions, is systematically testing how inclusion can be sustainably implemented and structurally anchored in cultural institutions. The synopsis of the individual measures at the various institutions enables a comprehensive evaluation of the necessary processes and parameters. Together, forward-looking and transferable approaches as well as the necessary resources for corresponding change processes are to be developed and transfer effects made possible. The Bundesverband Museumspädagogik e.V. and the network Culture and Inclusion accompany the project.
Project management: Bundeskunsthalle Bonn
Partner museums: Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, Stiftung Deutsches Hygiene Museum Dresden, Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Bonn, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseen Schloss Gottorf
"Verbund Inklusion" is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media on the basis of a resolution of the German Bundestag.
Download Final documentation (in German)
Accessibility was tested with the screen reader NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access).
The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe was part of the "Pilot Project Inclusion" (2015–2017) working closely with three museums and exhibition venues to develop a modular presentation concept on inclusion and handicap accessibility at exhibitions and collections.
The Bundeskunsthalle Bonn was the project coordinator of "Pilot Inclusion". The partners include the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and the Städtische Museen Freiburg with additional support provided by the Bundesverband Museumspädagogik e.V. and the association Verein Blinde und Kunst. "Pilot Inclusion" was funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Art and the Media in accordance with a resolution passed by the German Bundestag, the Aktion Mensch and the Kämpgen Stiftung.
The results of the three-year collaboration were published in the final documentation (in German) as an accessible PDF.