The DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme (BKP) of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) recently began offering insights into its many years of work promoting international artists in Germany. Following extensive digitisation, parts of the BKP archive are now accessible to the public for the first time, allowing visitors to immerse themselves in the development of the Berlin art scene.

"The Artists-in-Berlin Programme has been promoting international artists for more than 60 years and supports cross-border exchange between outstanding creative minds from all over the world. The digitisation of the BKP archive not only opens the doors to great personalities from past decades and their work in Berlin, it also creates a platform for current and future discussions in the art world," said DAAD President Prof. Dr Joybrato Mukherjee.

After four years of digitisation, the BKP archive can now be accessed via the programme's website. In addition to files, photographs, publications and posters, film and video material from the BKP Fellows from the 1960s to the 1990s has also been catalogued and digitised. Film and audiovisual works with great contemporary and cultural-historical significance for Berlin can also be found on the online platform Mapping the Archive: The map of Berlin is a growing network of the archive's digitised finds and marks places that were of particular importance to BKP fellows in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. 

"Mapping the Archive not only creates a previously invisible chronicle of the city, but also a contextual presentation of the digitised works in combination with written documents and other documents. We are looking at Berlin through the eyes of the fellows of the time, who are engaging with the city at a time of political and social upheaval," said Silvia Fehrmann, Director of the Artists-in-Berlin Programme.

Further archive cataloguing in the current year

This year, the BKP is continuing the digital cataloguing of its archive: together with the Writing Berlin research project at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Deutsche Kinemathek and the research project on Jewish film history at the Film University Babelsberg, the aim is to work out Jewish, queer and migrant perspectives from the BKP archive. There are also plans to digitise previously unpublished interviews by US documentary filmmaker Shelly Silver with Berliners from the 1990s and the work of Yugoslavian writer and filmmaker Irena Vrkljan. Vrkljan was one of the first women to come to Berlin on a BKP scholarship in 1966.

The indexing, digitisation and accessibility of the BKP archive is funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion and the Research and Competence Centre for Digitisation Berlin (digiS).