FOCUS ON THE BERLIN ART SCENE. The city that constantly reinvents itself

* Stefanie Gerke is a research associate at the Institute for Art and Visual History at Humboldt University Berlin and co-founder of Niche Art and Architecture Tours Berlin ( http://nicheberlin.de )

The Golden ’20s of the last century are a memory and the divided city has been reunited for more than 30 years. Today, Berlin is the most important art centre in Germany, a magnet for those creating culture, for artists and bohemians alike. More than anything, however, it is a construction site, in constant transition. This is a current look at the history and the free art scene of Berlin, where the future is taking shape beyond the confines of the major public museums.

Rirkrit Tiravanija's banner on the façade of Berghain as a prelude to the Studio. Berlin exhibition. 2020
STUDIO BERLIN, Berghain,
© Rirkrit Tiravanija, courtesy of neugerriemschneider Berlin. Photo: Noshe

“Tomorrow is the question” (“Morgen ist die Frage”): from early September 2020 this statement in large black letters on a white banner has spanned the entire breadth of the famous Berlin Berghain techno club. For 15 years, the club with the notoriously hard door has been situated in a former heating and power station close to the Berlin East train station. In March 2020, Berghain had to temporarily suspend any partying activity as a result of measures for containing the Corona pandemic. So, instead, at the suggestion of the club's operators, six months later, a much-discussed exhibition opened here, with art replacing celebrations at the city's most famous club. That's Berlin! The show is an example of what makes the Berlin art metropolis what it is: interesting venues and the players acting on their own initiative.

ELAINE STURTEVANT. Installation at abc art berlin contemporary
Photo: Marco Funke

The collector duo Karen and Christian Boros, whose collection is permanently installed in a former bunker close to Berlin's FriedrichstraBe, and the collection's director Juliet Kothe has organised the exhibition, entitled “Studio Berlin”, featuring more than 100 Berlin artists on the Berghain premises. Those asked to participate brought their acquaintances on board as well. Monica Bonvicini is there, as are Tacita Dean, Simon Fujiwara, Adrian Piper and Jeremy Shaw. The banner with the statement on the building's faqade is from Rirkrit Tiravanija. Most of the works on display relate in some way to this fabled place of excess or to direct experiences of creating art during the lockdown.

Installation „World on wire” Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin. Front: NEIL BELOUFA. Jaguacuzzi. 2015
Mixed media video installation. Background: TIMUR SI-QIN. In memoriam 9. 2015. Aluminum box with LED lighting system
Photo: Simon Vogel

“The show is a melancholy self-affirmation of the capital city's art scene in the midst of the crisis,” writes Daniel Volzke about “Studio Berlin” in the Berlin art periodical “Monopol”.[1] Here, the term “crisis” doesn't just refer to the precarious situation of the art world in a period of exhibition closures, travel restrictions and cancelled events due to Covid-19. The Berlin art scene was filled with murmurs about an ‘exodus' as early as spring of 2020. Word had it that more and more galleries were throwing in the towel and more and more collectors were said to be leaving the city because local politicians weren't taking proper care of them. Before that, the prominent collector Julia Stoschek had threatened to take her outstanding media art collection out of Berlin after a small hike in the rent for her space on Leipziger StraBe, a former Czech cultural centre from the days of the GDR on which she had spent almost €1 million to renovate. This prompted Kolja Reichert to ask why the art scene in Germany's capital city was collapsing (“Warum kollabiert die Kunsthauptstadt?”) in a German daily newspaper in May of 2020.[2] There is apparently no clear answer to the question. Media reports like these highlight, more than anything, a fear that the ‘boom' in the German capital's art scene might, once and for all, be a thing of the past. Berlin is in crisis, but is that crisis just a figment of public imagination?

The question of whether or not Berlin is “over” is one that comes up repeatedly. “This doubt has been [...] highly contagious ever since the consolidation phase began in Berlin in the mid 1990s,” is an observation made in a book on the development of the Berlin art scene since the German Reunification.[3] Everyone moving to the city from outside has the feeling of having missed out on something. But the authors posit that this may be exactly the reason for the ceaseless ability of Berlin art scenes to constantly renew themselves. Perhaps the current developments are nothing more than growing pains. After the boom years, Berlin now has to see which type of art metropolis it really wants to be and can be. Glamour, high revenues, collectors with plenty of buying power: that was never really what made the Berlin art scene what it was. There is not, and has never been, a great deal of capital in Berlin. There is a grain of truth in the saying expressing the problem that the city is “poor but sexy”, coined by Berlin's then mayor Klaus Wowereit in 2003. At the same time, a constant gentrification process in several parts of the city has resulted in a rental price increase of 150% over the past 10 years.[4] The affordable rents that had lured so many artists to Berlin have long become a thing of the past, but the influx of artists remains substantial.[5] This is because what made the German capital attractive as a location for art is still true today: a certain freedom of spirit and freedom of space, presumably flat hierarchies and room for development and creation.

This impression also has a historical basis. During the days of a divided Germany, West Berlin represented an ‘island' within the territory of East Germany (GDR). On the one hand, this special status attracted a large number of pacifists. When compulsory military service was introduced by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1956, residents of West Berlin were exempted based on the Allied powers' rights of control. According to one estimate, approximately 50,000 potential draftees avoided military service by relocating to West Berlin.[6] This added to the myth of Berlin as a place of great personal freedom. On the other hand, enormous industrial decay began after 1945. A large number of companies turned their backs on what had once been the largest industrial city in Europe because of the uncertain political situation. They left behind them larger and smaller branches of industry that were waiting to be repurposed.

Berlin ultimately became a magnet for those who wanted to create things, in particular after the German Reunification. The disappearance of the Berlin Wall left an empty strip running through the middle of the city. Quarters and neighbourhoods that had previously been on the edge of the respective halves of the city were now suddenly at its heart. The city was a playing field that could be reorganised. The eastern city-centre quarters Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg transformed swiftly. In the wake of the confiscation of privately owned properties under the GDR, property ownership was often left unclear and the buildings in disrepair, plus there was open space that attracted many artists. Interesting synergy effects and nodes emerged over time.

Auguststrasse in the Berlin-Mitte quarter is a classic example. This medium-sized street, with its pre-Communist architecture, is close to the Museumsinsel museum quarter (renovated at great cost after the Reunification and expanded to become a popular tourist attraction) and immediately became a hotspot for the quickly growing art scene after the fall of the Wall. As early as 1991, a group led by the medical student Klaus Biesenbach, today director of LACMA in Los Angeles, founded the Kunst-Werke - KW Institute for Contemporary Art in an abandoned margarine factory. A spacious and easily convertible platform without its own collection, KW made it possible to react to contemporary developments. In addition, the Berlin Biennale, whose principal venue is still the Kunst-Werke, was founded here in 1998. In 2006, it became a special catalyst for the neighbourhood. Curated by Maurizio Cat- telan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, the fourth Berlin Biennale showcased unusual exhibition spaces, all of which were located on Auguststrasse. These included many new discoveries, for example, a former Jewish girl's school, which opened as a gallery only a few years later following extensive renovation.

4th Berlin Biennale, “Of Mice and Men”. 2006
BRUCE NAUMAN. Rats and Bats (Learned Helplessness in Rats II). 1988
Installation
Photo: Uwe Walter

Auguststrasse was also the epicentre for the developing commercial art scene until important players moved on to the western part of the city and settled around the former Tagesspiegel campus south of the Potsdamer Platz. An interesting competition developed between Berlin and Cologne, the city that had been the leading art centre in the 1970s and 1980s. “Berlin was attractive more than anything to newcomers, because here, in contrast to Cologne, there were no entrenched hierarchies. Sooner or later, large portions of the Cologne scene relocated to the new old capital city,” writes Kito Nedo.[7] Galleries like Max Hetzler moved from Cologne to Berlin, Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers joined together in Berlin in 1998 to form their outstanding gallery Sprüth Magers, and other players at least opened branch offices in Berlin. When the journal “Texte zur Kunst”, led by critic Isabelle Graw of Cologne, moved to Berlin, another important voice in the art scene moved to the capital, as was the case with collector couples like Erika and Rolf Hoffmann. They opened their collection to paying guests on Saturdays in a former sewing machine factory in the Hackesche Höfe and, over time, presented more high-class art here than the notoriously underfinanced Berlin museums did.

KATHARINA GROSSE. Exhibition view. It wasn’t us. Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin. 2020
Courtesy of KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, London, Tokyo / Gagosian / Gallery next to St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna
© Katharina Grosse / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020. Photo: Jens Ziehe

For many years, it looked as if things were in recovery in Berlin, as if the city would soon be able to compete with London, New York and Paris. The established museums welcomed the development of the Neue Nationalgalerie and, in 1996, the opening of the Hamburger Bahnhof, from 2004, the location of the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, two top locations for contemporary art. International art stars like Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon and Tomas Saraceno moved their residences and studios to Germany's capital. Ai Wei Wei, Hito Steyerl and Olafur Eliasson received professorships at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Between 2009 and 2014, Eliasson created the innovative Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments), which has produced an entire generation of artists who understand public space as their playing field.[8] However, Berlin's purchasing power always remained limited, much to the regret of the commercial art scene, and the city didn't always chip in when it came to official art projects. The international art fair Art Forum, launched in 1996 on the fairgrounds location as an alternative to the oldest German art fair Art Cologne, but remained unsuccessful, perhaps because the somewhat sterile convention halls as a location simply didn't fit with the spirit of the city. In 2008, several Berlin galleries[9] founded the attractive competing event abc art berlin contemporary, which did a much better job of embodying the spirit of the city. The abc invited 75 galleries to what had once been a postal rail station. Instead of the berths typical of art fairs, here there were free-standing individual stations. Born of the energy of the local art scene, with the charming flair of historical industrial buildings, it worked - for the time being. The abc was a great success with its audience. After the Art Forum's efforts to merge the two fairs failed, the Forum closed down in 2011, leaving the abc to take over as the driving force in Berlin's art market. But the increased expectations also meant an increased pressure to sell. The Koelnmesse corporation, parent company of Art Cologne, got involved. The abc became Art Berlin in the imposing halls of the former Tempelhof airport, but in 2019, this partnership failed as well. Now, there are only several smaller fairs left, such as the Positions Art Fair. At present, Berlin does not have a world-class art fair. Instead, much more attractive is the Gallery Weekend, launched in 2005 by a number of private galleries. In a cooperative effort unprecedented at the time, some 50 Berlin galleries agreed on a joint opening weekend that, since then, has regularly attracted international collectors to the city.

The “Gallery Delivery” project at the Good To Talk Festival 2019
Photo: EIke Walkenhorst

The stories of KW, abc and of Gallery Weekend have shown that the Berlin art scene works best when initiatives emerge from the art scene itself, when the few remaining decaying buildings or vacant lots can be found and provisionally repurposed and that empty space filled with art, and when the opportunities offered by the rapidly transforming cityscape can be leveraged independently. This process may be authentic, but, of course, it is also very demanding. It needs the necessary financial backing as it is often impossible without public funding. Politicians in the city have apparently recognised the role art and, in particular, the living subculture play in the attractiveness of the city. In the meantime, Berlin has a growing range of subsidies for young participants in the art scene, for example, the Awards Programme for Artistic Project Spaces and Initiatives (“Auszeichnung für Projekträume und -initiativen”), which distributes an annual total amount of €100,000.

Good To Talk Festival 2019
Photo: EIke Walkenhorst

In fact, the most exciting exhibitions often do take place in the alternative art scene and quite frequently in unusual venues normally “alien” to art. One example is the project space Tropez operated by Nele Heinevetter, idyllically located in a park in the Wedding district within a charming outdoor public pool surrounded by old established trees. A few years ago, when Heinevetter heard that the pool's snack bar was closing, she organised the funding and the necessary know-how and set up a french-fry stand featuring exhibition space right next to the swimming pool and sun area. With titles like “Amour”, “Voyage” and “Reality”, each summer, she brings together artworks from young artists who have really come to embrace this special location. They address a widely varied audience who may have only come for the french fries, but who stay for the art. Last year, the Tropez won the project space award.

The Wedding district is also home to Savvy Contemporary. The project space is by no means a newcomer as Savvy has been a location for anti-racist discourse in art since 2009. What is indeed new is the special attention being paid to its programme to raise awareness about racism. The founder, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and his team have undertaken to contribute to the decolonisation of the local art scene. Savvy is a place that repeatedly calls on the public to rethink alleged differences and categories and in particular to deconstruct the Euro-centric perspective of the local art world. Ndikung was honoured with the Order of Merit of Berlin on October 1,2020.

It has to be said that there is no longer as much free space in this growing and increasingly saturated city as there was shortly after the Berlin Wall came down, but there is still some cause for amazement. In the middle of central Berlin, on Alexanderplatz, the Haus der Statistik[10] stood vacant for more than 10 years. Instead of standing by to await the sale of the complex to investors, who undoubtedly would have torn down the stately structure, erected in 1968, the Berlin provincial government followed up on the appeal of an initiative of artists, architects and cultural professionals and purchased the plot. Now, a model project is taking shape, oriented to general social welfare and providing “room for art, culture, social life, education and affordable living space” as well as a new city hall for the Mitte district.[11] Berlin has learnt from some of its mistakes, in which properties have simply been turned over to the highest bidders instead of to the parties with the best ideas, so joint discussions are being held in the Haus der Statistik to figure out what is actually needed. Social projects and artistic initiatives are to begin moving in as of 2024. Berlin is and has always been a big fan of discussions. In 2019, several galleries came together to form “Good to Talk”, an innovative discussion format:[12] a “talk festival” marathon with interested participants covering everything that appears to be relevant, from new formats, technologies and challenges, diversity and inclusion to anti-sexism and anti-racism. And of course, again and again, discussions inevitably turn to how the city's spaces are to be used.

Tiravanija's banner on the front fagade of Berghain clearly states: “Tomorrow is the question,” but what will have to happen to secure Berlin's future as a metropolitan art centre? It is of central importance to recall what actually makes the city what it is: its free spirit. When the art scene pulls together in the city's most famous techno club during the crisis, when galleries pitch in to drive innovative forms of discourse, when art takes place at unusual venues and the scene discovers the topics of diversity and inclusion for itself, then we see that Berlin is far from over. The metropolitan art centre is simply busy once again reinventing itself.

1. Daniel Volzke: 'Ausstellung im Berghain - was Corona uns genommen hat' https//www.monopol-magazin.de, 8.9.2020.
2. Kolja Reichert: 'Warum kolla- biert die Kunsthauptstadt?', in: “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, 21.5.2020.
3. Conny Becker, Christina Landbrecht, Friederike Schafer: 'Endstation Berlin? Ein Rückblick auf die Berliner Kunstszenen seit 1989', in: “Metropolitan Views: Berlin Berlin. Kunstszenen 1989-2009”, Berlin 2010, p. 7-13, here p. 7.
4. Christoph Kluge: “Mieten in Neukolln in zehn Jahren um 146 Prozent gestiegen”, www.tages-spiegel.de, 7.5.2019.
5. In 2010, the artists' professional association Berufsverband Bildender Künstler estimated the number of artists located in Berlin at approximately 5,000. A study puts the number of professional artists in Berlin at 8,000. Cf. Her- gen Wobken: 'Mind the Gap!', in: Wobken (Ed.): “Studio Berlin III - Situation Berliner Künstler*innen und Gender Gap,” Institute for Strategy Development (IFSE), May 2018, p. 2-4, here p. 3.
6. Hans Strömsdorfer: “Stadt der Verweigerer”, www.tagesspiegel.de, 21.7.2006.
7. Kito Nedo: "Pionierzeit: Die Anfange des neuen Berliner Kunstmarkts in den Neunzigern", https://www.gallery-weekend-berlin.de/journal/nedo-90er/ (Accessed on: 2.10.2020) (trransla- tion adapted).
8. For example, Julian Charriere, Felix Kiessling or Fabian Knecht.
9. The founding galleries of the abc art berlin contemporary include Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Mehdi Chouakri, Galerie Kamm, Meyer Riegger, Galerie Neu, Neugerriemschneider, Esther Schipper and Zak Branicka.
10. A building complex originally constructed in the Socialist architectural style by the GDR to house its Ministry of Statistics.
11. https://hausderstatistik.org (accessed on: 4.10.2020) (translation adapted).
12. The discussions are archived at https://goodtotalk.de.