The exhibition Welt ohne Außen features art works spanning from the late 60s to the present day, together with live works and workshops. For the first time, Gropius Bau is issuing passes that will give permanent access to the exhibition and all its activities, inviting visitors to explore all facets of the show and to actively participate in the daily workshop programme. 

Curated by Thomas Oberender and Tino Sehgal, the exhibition traces a development from the pioneers of immersive installations to contemporary artistic practices, bringing together a wide range of art forms and disciplines. Featuring installations, virtual reality, 3D-film, a smell organ, as well as live works and workshops, the exhibition develops a unique dramaturgy that allows visitors to enter into these immersive spaces, with each work unfolding within its own temporality.

These situations – requiring a process of arrival, immersion and emergence – are created within a format that, since its advent, has usually operated with an almost opposed modality: the exhibition. This ritual of Western modernism can be seen as an expression of a particular set of ideas about being in the world: a world that we, as human beings, confront in opposition, evaluating objects (including art objects) from a critical distance. Immersion, on the other hand, stimulates a direct and immediate experience. Entering and immersing oneself as a part of – and in relation to – an experience is prioritised over the evaluating observation. In this sense, immersive practises are an expression of a changing relationship with the world, one that is based not on a dualism between subject and object, but rather on the entanglement of situation and experience.