Berlin galleryography

Throughout the last 50 years the social, economic and urban conditions of Berlin have produced an island city, neighborhoods of squatters, and inner city beaches. It has also resulted in an abundance of exhibition spaces and galleries with their own unique programming. Every few months a pamphlet listing 80 galleries and institutions, called INDEX, is printed and distributed for free around the city. It only seems to scratch the surface of what is on view in Berlin. To be included in the index you have to receive a vote from 4 or 5 of the other galleries on the list, creating a democratic elite of art spaces. This list includes most of the blockbuster shows in town: the national museums (Neue Nationalgalerie, Martin-Gropius Bau), the corporate collections (Daimler-Chrylser, Deutsche Guggenheim), private collections (Hamburger Bahnhof), residency programs (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, DAAD), art compounds (Kunst-Werke/KW), and commercial galleries (Max Hetzler, Peres Projects). There are many more spaces in each of these categories. These lists help you locate neighborhoods where a groups of exhibits are concentrated and with a little exploring you will be able to locate other less advertised venues nearby.

I have not yet discovered the role that non-profit spaces play in Berlin, but I am sure that they come in many varieties. A model that we've seen around the city that was unfamiliar to me are 'pay' or 'rent' galleries affiliated with a group of art students. In these spaces a group of art students will get together to rent a gallery space for a exhibit, or a year. They show their work and control the flavor of the exhibits, in return the gallery commercially represents this group during their duration. Depending on the success of these exhibits the space may establish itself with these artists or may cycle on to the next group of students. These spaces confused me at first, the gallery often has a name, the collective of artists often has another name, and the exhibition will have a name. Making it quite confusing to keep track of what one is looking at. There seems to be a collection of these types of spaces along the Brunnenstraße corridor. This is not an entirely new model but one that would struggle to thrive in cities like London, New York or San Francisco because of their outrageous real estate costs, but becomes feasible with the abundance of Berlin's unoccupied storefronts.

I also ran across another gallery, called Jet, that had eluded me for weeks. It is in a strip mall near Alexanderplatz next to Jet Cleaners and Jet Photo. Jet finds a symbiotic relationship to it's neighbors much in the same way that Queen's Nails Annex has with its neighbor Queens Nails (salon) in San Francisco, or any number of the galleries in Los Angeles' Chinatown district. Disguised amongst these businesses I had walked past Jet several times, wondering why the empty store front was so well-lit and was slightly intimidated by the white ceiling tiles sagging out of their fixtures. Upon closer inspection I realized that these tiles were very purposefully suspended and that they weren't ceiling tiles at all, but long planks of white formica woven into the ceiling grid warping the space below. This was an Tilman Wendland exhibit, an artist whose primary mediums are paper and architectural spaces. The front room contained this piece and a few more wall works while the back room consisted of a less effective ceiling installation, sculptural objects, and the gallery desk. Jet is engaged in serious risk taking. Its presence destabilizes and charges this trilogy of storefronts, much in same way that the white formica planks alienated and distorted the storefront that I had casually accepted as empty for weeks. The director of Jet is also interested expanding the curatorial dialogue within her gallery. For half of the year she creates an overarching theme like 'Was Wäre Wenn" (What If?) or this year's "FEHLER" (Failure) as an umbrella concept for a series of shows to take place over several months. During this time group shows, solo shows and guest curating takes place under this theme, then the results are published in an edition that can be found at the gallery. This space was not only a surprise but quite refreshing, and I hope to find more in the days ahead.

Tilman Wendland

We also met an Australian artist living in Berlin this week,DK. He is one of the co-founders of suberbien!, a greenhouse as alternative project space. superbien! is located outside of Milchhof studios in one of Berlin's many hidden courtyards. DK gave us a tour of his studio and answered our many inquiries about how art and Berlin relate. Much of the above conversation regarding the variety of galleries came out of this meeting. He mentioned the influx of a lot of foreign commercial galleries in the recent past, with the potential to make things even more interesting, and Berlin's lack of a Kunsthalle. This struck us all as quite an oversight. Every major city in Germany has a Kunsthalle and they create a type of competitive circuit, generating a regular calendar of interesting exhibitions all over Germany. But the country's capital does not seem to support a Kunsthalle of its own? I am sure this is part of a larger discussion that we are just entering, but Kunsthalles provide some of the most ambitious exhibitions that I have seen. A Kunsthalle is a museum scale exhibition space that doesn't have a permanent collection but instead focuses on rotations of large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art. Spaces that operate on the Kunsthalle model can be found outside of Germany and include the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), SITE Santa Fe (Santa Fe, NM), and many others.

David Keating