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The Technoclub Berghain, which has been closed since March and has now reopened as a temporary art hall, with a banner by the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Photo:
Andreas Gehrke / Noshe
For a long time the Berghain was the epitome of extravagant nightlife with room-filling basses.
Then Corona came and there was silence between the thick walls.
When the club temporarily turns into an art gallery from Wednesday, something should be heard again, with one or the other sound installation already running as a rehearsal.
In general, the "Studio Berlin" exhibition, which was put together in record time, includes one or two works that seem to fit the club's image.
Rosemarie Trockel, for example, contributed an inflatable penis, Simon Fujiwara created great little sculptures on the subject of syphilis, a disease with which he infected himself.
Reference is made to this in any case during a guided tour prior to the opening.
And Cyprien Gaillard left a graffiti on the toilet, an engraving in one of the metal walls, titled: "The Land of Cockaigne".
Then there is a doll in fetish clothes on a counter and one or two more things that seem right.
There is no work in the exhibition that is really provocative and that is - on 3500 square meters - a nice contrast to what has previously happened on and off the dance floor.
The darkrooms are not allowed to be entered by the visitors of the exhibition, because they are, it is explained, "protected rooms".
It sounds like such back rooms are threatened with extinction - and because of Corona there is something to it.
In normal, earlier times, the club allowed a lot of privacy, despite the crowds that came.
And even now photography is forbidden.
Instead of dancing bodies, works of art are now shielded from the outside world.
If you want to see something, you have to come yourself.
And that's a clever strategy, especially in the arts.
In times when you can digitally zap through everything, including exhibitions, media dissemination is strictly prohibited here.
Which is why the cell phone cameras are masked off, a little defensive magic is simply part of the solemn ceremony of entering.
Berghain, located in a former GDR thermal power station, is - you can hardly do without this expression - a myth.
Many will pay the entrance fee to see the transformation, to even see the inside of the building.
For the people who work there, it's also about their existence.
The owner of the club called collector Christian Boros back in March.
He, the founder and head of an agency, also owns a small art book publisher and above all a private museum that is housed in a Berlin bunker.
Boros provided financial support for the Berghain project.
With his wife Karen, he forms an art couple that is usually more familiar from the USA.
Above all, Karen Boros and the curator of the family museum have taken on the organization of the show in the club.
The Berlin Senate has poured in 250,000 euros and Boros' contribution should (according to him) amount to a similar sum.
The entrance fees go to the club.
The Berghain team is known to be art-loving.
The doorman Sven Marquardt, who is also well-known as a photographer, is represented with a rather poetic video work in which flowers play a role, and there are several floral elements.
One of the most striking works is perhaps a buoy that the artist Julius von Bismarck has hung up; it seems to be dancing, its choreography is determined by the movement of another buoy in the Atlantic.
The dancing object was exhibited in Paris some time ago (and should actually cause a stir at a trade fair in Basel this year), and Simon Fujiwara's syphilis ship and his other contributions can already be seen online.
But many of the works have not yet been shown.
Almost all of them come from artists who couldn't leave Berlin because of the pandemic.
There was no common theme, no leitmotif, everyone should contribute whatever preoccupied them during the standstill.
An artist created the glowing lettering: "Hurray the butter is gone."
- and referred not only to shopping behavior in 2020, but also to an illustration from 1935. The South Korean artist Jeewi Lee was not stuck in Berlin, but in Casablanca, where she actually only wanted to transfer to another plane.
She stayed a long time and painted an abstract, slightly shimmering picture with coffee.
All in all, the 117 artists include a number of scene favorites and even stars from Olafur Eliasson to Katharina Grosse, from Isa Genzken to Wolfgang Tillmans (the latter is already present with photos in the house and has now contributed a video-sound installation).
They all no longer need this platform, but the other way round, Berghain needs them, the big names, the experienced people, everything had to be done quickly after all.
Sometimes you could almost have wished for a little more spectacle, a little more joy in experimenting.
Of course, the show is just a snapshot of a different kind, a representation of a network, the influential Sprüth Magers gallery is represented by more than a handful of artists.
It almost sounds cheeky when the organizers of the exhibition keep declaring Berghain a "place of freedom".
The architecture of the Berghain is pathetic, so somehow sappy, the art is mostly not.
Like Bismarck's buoy, it does not sink.
Or like the bedspread printed by Aude Pariset with the title "Locked-In Addiction".
Or like the moonlight sonata that Nevin Aladağ sounds.
And that's a lot.
Fans of the booming club life are probably still looking forward to the fact that the whole spook could eventually be over and the other fun begins again.
Whenever that will be.
And maybe they will then support those artists who are not yet among the celebrities and also those who have not been admitted with their work.
Even if the bouncers were different this time, namely the exhibition organizers.
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