Not Black and White. An Intervention in Colour Intervention

Feb. 28 until May 5, 2019

About the intervention

Understand history, shape the present and take responsibility for the future. These principles formed the starting point for 200 pupils training in seven different professions at Munich’s Vocational School for Colour and Design to address the history of National Socialism as well as current socio-political issues. In the context of an intervention in the exhibition Munich and National Socialism, they asked questions like: What threatens us, what secures our future? Which values do we consider important? How do we eliminate prejudices and hostile stereotypes? Not Black and White continued the school’s long-term commitment to a society based on solidarity and opposed to discrimination and exclusion.

Many of those who participated have migrant backgrounds, some of them are refugees from Afghanistan, Nigeria and Iraq. They used colour, shape, text and light to turn their ideas into artistic interventions in the exhibition spaces of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism. Their creativity was based on materials and techniques specific to their future profession.

Making of Not Black and White | © NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, photo: Connolly Weber Photography

Making of Not Black and White | © NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, photo: Connolly Weber Photography

Pupils of Munich’s Vocational School for Colour and Design at the Munich Documentation Centre | © NS Dokumentationszentrum München, photo: Connolly Weber Photography

© NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, photo: Connolly Weber Photography

© NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, photo: Connolly Weber Photography

© NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, photo: Connolly Weber Photography

© NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, photo: Connolly Weber Photography

Booklet for the intervention

A free booklet has been published for the intervention – with texts by the students on their work and introductions by Mirjam Zadoff and Clemens Abert.