2023-08-19 19:05:20
The entire city, in its ghostly depopulation, as a precarious gallery of everything that can be exhibited and to be exhibited: that was the berlin 90s, the one that attracted artists from all over the world to a new postmodern bohemia that oozed creativity from every pore. The huge buildings erected by successive authoritarian systems, and massively abandoned after the fall of the Berlin Wall, became dilapidated temples of art and freedom. That Berlin no longer exists and Berliners are divided between those who left, powerless in the face of loss, and those who overcame the trauma of becoming a great European capital but continue to grieve. Those nostalgic for that free Berlin, for the artists’ republic, can recover those sensations this summer in Kirchmöser an der Havel.
A gunpowder factory made up of 400 brick buildings, hastily erected during the First World War, It is used by ten of the most important galleries in Berlin to exhibit their artists in an environment outside the usual circuit and which forces the visitor on a journey, also internal, towards the current art scene in the German capital.
This complex on the peninsula on the edge of Brandenburg an der Havel, where both Hitler and Honecker once made speeches, now offers a ground zero aesthetic that frames individual presentations such as Dan Peterman’s recycled minimal sculptures, corpses ceramic by Heike Kabisch or the photographs of the anonymous Cambridge Climbers. It happens again: the visitor is not able to discern if the broken pipes or the cracks in the walls are part of the works of art or if they only accompany it. It is the exhibition ‘Am Seegarten’. And if the experiment is successful enough, it can lead to a permanent sequel.
Gallerists such as Chert Lüdde, Alexander Levy, Meyer Riegger and Sprüth Magers have joined the adventure. They have offered artists an unexplored space and supported their creations. Jan St. Werner and Michael Akstaller, for example, have taken over what was once a theater for their minimalist electronic sound installation. At the hospital next door, the John Miller manikins they appear out of nowhere and compose a disturbing floating presence. The key is that these artistic manifestations are not possible in the spaces that host the Berlin galleries and contribute to a new art.
Village of the arts
An hour and a half by car from home or 50 minutes by train from the Zoologischer Garten station, there are still more than 50 empty buildings that the organizers hope to populate in the future with this mix of studio-workshop-warehouse-exhibition. Jörg Heitmann, the founder and CEO of Silent Green, dreams of creating in this dark spot of empty Germany a permanent village of the arts, a new Bauhaus. Time will tell if the project comes to fruition, but for now the initiative greatly encourages the Berlin cultural summer and recovers a lost spirit with which Berlin continues to identify.
#Berlin #recovers #gallery #90s