Those who entered Berlin in the West after 1979 passed a building that felt like an alien entity wedged between a stark, mid-1930s exhibition centre, a motorway, and a turn-of-the-century neighbourhood. The unusual structure was squat and elongated, with spiral staircases protruding like insect legs from its exoskeleton; it seemed frozen in a mechanical forward motion. Still there to this day, the ICC is one of Berlin’s great sleeping giants: a building once constructed with a single function in mind, like decommissioned airports or an animal testing facility; and it is now waiting for its new purpose.

The ICC (Internationales Congress Centrum), designed by the couple Ralf Schüler and Ursulina Schüler-Witte, was conceived to serve conferences. It features two large auditoriums, seating five and two thousand bodies respectively, and about eighty smaller spaces, restaurants and a roof garden, at a scale that rivalled East Berlin’s multifunctional Palast der Republik or Paris’s Centre Pompidou.

Explore the soon-to-be-transformed ICC Berlin

At the time of its completion, locals called it a spaceship, with its visible structure and multi-level exterior staircases. Clad in metal, futuristic in appearance, it looked like a machine in a landscape shaped by automobile traffic. It is almost inaccessible to pedestrians, wrote architecture critic Julius Posener in 1979: ‘People have to sneak into this menacing building,’ he lamented. It is awkwardly placed, isolated from the city, like a self-contained, self-propelled engine for economic growth. Accessing it from the underground taxi deck, people would be guided through areas, seemingly processed as if on an assembly line, from reception to auditorium, from restaurant to toilet.

The ICC’s carapace was intended to shield it from noise and vibration, making the metal cladding functional and not just an aesthetic nod to the space age. However, the comparison with the Centre Pompidou does it no favours, because the Paris building - said Posener in 1979 - is embedded in a city and in a network of streets at a pedestrian scale. It does a much better job at inviting visitors in.

The whole building with its elaborate ventilation system - conference attendees apparently smoked profusely at its time of completion - needed to be rebooted like an old desktop computer if it wasn’t in permanent use. It rarely operated at full capacity and was deemed inefficient and too expensive. So, since 2014, the ICC has been out of use. It took five years, until 2019, for the structure to be listed as a historical monument. Little happened there, save for a large-scale art show during the COVID pandemic.

In 2022, an initiative led by local PR specialists and architects pushed the gargantuan building back into the public eye by suggesting it be open 24/7 and available for cultural use. In the autumn of 2024, actors across the political spectrum initiated a competition for ideas and designs. Given the pace of redevelopment elsewhere in Berlin - Tegel or Tempelhof airports, for example - a decade between closure and project initiative seems relatively short.

On a sweltering day in late June, not far from the ICC, the news was unveiled that a partnership of nine architecture studios and engineering firms was taking on the project. They have two and a half years to enable the redevelopment. ‘The aim,’ says Björn Werner, architect at Max Dudler, one of the nine partners, ‘is to breathe life back into the building.’

First, what’s needed is a viable concept. Graft and Max Dudler, two of the partnering firms, envision multiple uses. Bike paths will connect the site to the neighbourhood; there will be more green. The site should cease to be a blind spot that is scorching hot in the summer and devastatingly grey in winter. The partnership proposes to add two high-rises opposite the ICC's northern and southern facades to connect them to the complex, creating plazas and opening up the currently closed-off structure.

The aim is to draw on the ICC’s existing formal language but make it sleeker. For the inside, the partners are thinking about different formats. Concerts, for example; the Berlin Philharmonic could use the venue. Or, after some adjustments, the auditoriums could house table tennis tournaments or boxing matches.

One of them might turn into an exhibition space, and the unused rooms spread throughout the building could become artists’ or recording studios. The ideas are many; little is settled. ’The formal language of the building gives us a lot of orientation: the way the car park extends under the structure, which seems to prop itself up via the staircases; the materiality, the rounded corners, variability of the facade, horizontality, layering, the transitions of the body to its exterior,’ says Graft’s Thomas Willemeit.

Flexibility is one of the words Willemeit and Björn Werner use a lot when talking about their project on this summer day in the Graft office on a street corner in Berlin-Mitte: ‘To grant the ground floor expression is essential.’ These are problems that Posener outlined at the close of the 1970s show; the then-architecture tackled other problems than what is required for present day operations. The past era's promises of an automobile-centric city have not been fulfilled. On the contrary, they turned into an urban nightmare. In the 2020s neighbourhoods and urbanity are more connected, fewer cars are used and pedestrian lifestyles are prefered.

‘In Berlin, we have been led to believe that large-scale projects - like the transformation of the two airports - proceed very slowly,’ explains Willemeit. ‘We need unconventional partnerships to find commercially viable solutions, and we shouldn’t wait for a single international player to give us one.’

Another idea is for the new ICC to be open to all, without a ticket, staying accessible late into the night. A possible model for that is Oodi, Helsinki’s central library, which provides space to make music, play video games, and study. Public space, such as that of a library with a multitude of uses, is vital for an open society. Werner adds: ‘We can turn this symbol of failure and stasis into a symbol. It is possible when municipality, investors, and cultural politics get together.’

When asked why they took on such a volatile project, Willemeit muses on the decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when East and West experienced tech-fuelled optimism. ‘This building, spaceship on the outside, plush on the inside, embodies this hope for the future.’ He adds: ‘As architects, we have a great affinity to positive visions of the future.’

icc.berlin

'You are invited to build something, maybe to demolish something. You are invited to build with others. You are invited also not to build and just stay looking at others working,' says Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelyte of her installation of 400,000 wood cubes at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The cubes, chunked from trees from her homeland, spread out and pile up in the 2,500 sq m space like a giant construction site awaiting human hands

While architect Friedrich Neuhaus conceived the space as a handsome train station in the mid-19th century, with ease of travel in mind, Lapelyte has transformed what is today a voluminous gallery into a place of interaction and experimentation.

Although the vision might initially suggest ‘kindergarten’, the artist touches on many aspects within her work – community, improvisation and creation among them. The installation is accompanied by live performances featuring locals singing poetic verses that Lapelyte, musically trained, has translated into moving scores. The exhibition’s title, ‘We Make Years Out of Hours’, borrowed from Jürgen Paape, a German electronic music producer and DJ, invites one to slow down and appreciate the impact of rumination and playful action.

'It is perhaps the small things that count – the one tiny cube that measures ten by ten – when we build together, turning a space into a landscape, into an environment, into a building. When we have a voice of one, it's one thing, but when we have a choir, it becomes another thing. For me, this work is very much about believing in small gestures, in small connections, in our relationships as well; in humanity,' says Lapelyte.

She held an open call for performers. 'There is a sailor, there is a theatre producer, there are some dancers, singers, actors, and some who had never performed. Then we all try to find a way to be within the piece and it's beautiful how we open up, accept the other, and that's what the work is about.’

The sculptural/polyphonic installation is the second Chanel Culture Fund commission at the museum, following 2025’s project with artist Klára Hosnedlová. The three-year programme supports female artists with big visions who create at scale.

‘In the industrial age, people would be running around to catch their trains. What we see here is very dedicated and distilled,' says Yana Peel, president of arts, culture & heritage at Chanel. She first came across Lapelyte’s work in 2014, but it was her operatic piece, Sun & Sea (Marina), for the Venice Biennale in 2019 (winning the Golden Lion) that cemented her reputation as a leading voice. For that piece, set on a faux indoor beach, performers in sunhats and swimsuits sang about the impact of climate change. That stealthy subversion of expectations and genres is a Lapelyte hallmark.

'Deep in my heart, I am a musician, but for me, music was never just about performing a score. For me, music is also about listening and how we listen to the world. Music is a metaphor,' she says. ‘We Make Years Out of Hours’ was gestating in her mind when the invitation for the commission arrived, and Hamburger Bahnhof provided the ideal immersive space with the vaults creating superb acoustics. 'The Chanel Culture Fund generously invites an artist to envision an artwork that probably would be hard without that kind of support and openness,' she adds.

As Peel says, it is great to see so many extraordinary female artists taking up significant space right now: Rose Wylie, Tracey Emin, and Klára Hosnedlová among them. 'Lina’s vision is a non-monument in a sense and really brave,' says Peel, who collaborates with Hamburger Bahnhof directors Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath on the commission.

The Chanel Culture Fund does not build museums or permanent collections, explains Peel, but strengthens existing institutions essential to their home cities. It currently has 42 projects across 15 countries. 'We invest not with the next quarter in mind, but the next generation,' she says of the distinct cultural patronage.

In November 2025, Chanel opened the Espace Gabrielle Chanel at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, designed by Japanese architect Kazunari Sakamoto. It is the first public art library dedicated to contemporary art in Mainland China. Recently, the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland and the Chanel Culture Fund announced the appointment of a Chanel Botanical Curator, the first of its kind at a major arts institution.

As Lapelyte’s installation in Berlin suggests, big change, both societally and personally, starts brick by brick and in incremental steps – and ideally, with sonic interludes.

‘Lina Lapelyte. We Make Years Out of Hours’, until 10 January 2027, smb.museum

Brought to life in sultry technicolour by award-winning hospitality interior designer Rachael Gowdridge, The Dean Berlin embodies the German capital’s unique character with a considered offering that feels intimate and tailored specifically to the needs of today’s urban traveller. Located in a historic west Berlin neighbourhood, a stone’s throw from one of the city’s main arteries, the hotel’s 81 rooms and thoughtfully designed communal spaces act as a cosy base from which to get to know one of the world’s most layered cultural destinations.

The first of two culture-rich lifestyle hotels opened by The Dean Group in Germany – with its new Munich outpost following quickly behind – The Dean Berlin offers a modern take on hospitality, balancing a no-frills approach to on-site amenities and services with a refined, design-led architectural standard that includes a curation of artworks from local artists and galleries.

The Dean Group has teamed up with Berlin brunch favourite Benedict for its ground-floor bar and restaurant, serving breakfast classics from early in the morning until all the way into the evening, positioning the hotel as a daytime social hub while embracing local food culture. Here's what else to expect from your stay.

Wallpaper* checks in at The Dean Berlin

What’s on your doorstep?

Situated in a peaceful Charlottenburg neighbourhood just a 10-minute walk from Berlin’s most famous shopping street, Kurfürstendamm, The Dean offers itself as a gateway to the elevated shopping, dining and entertainment experiences the west side of Berlin has built its legacy on. Local highlights include the Zoo Palast cinema, C/O Berlin photography gallery, the Helmut Newton Foundation and Schwarzes Café – a legendary café that has been attracting artists and writers since 1978. Meanwhile, more ambitious explorers enjoy easy access to public transit in order to explore the full breadth of the city, with multiple U-bahn (metro), S-bahn (overground) and mainline train stations within strolling distance of the hotel. The hotel even has bicycles available for hire, inviting guests to explore the city like a local.

Who’s behind the design?

British designer Rachael Gowdridge has breathed new life into a late-19th-century building with interiors that centre the building’s multi-faceted history. Original architectural details collide with punchy colour schemes, sculptural lighting and avant-garde aesthetics, bringing a confident sense of Berlin’s personality into each aspect of the hotel.

Having previously worked for hospitality-specialised practices Martin Brudnizki Design Studio and Ennismore International, before launching her own studio in 2021, Gowdridge is well-versed in employing design principles and intuition to shape premium hospitality experiences. Amenities and services are kept to a minimum, but the considered design ensures that the needs of the modern traveller are met with ample desk and seating space, atmospheric lighting and a number of options for connectivity and entertainment.

‘From the outset, we thought carefully about how people actually travel today and how the hotel could support those shifting rhythms. Hotels are no longer just places to sleep: they’re spaces where guests might work, meet, socialise or simply pause between experiencing the city,' Gowdridge says.

Upon arriving at The Dean, guests are greeted by a lounge-like lobby featuring a snug library alcove. Clad in eye-catching Ettore Sottsass veneer, the space is furnished with an enticing blend of contemporary and vintage pieces and feels more like a private living room or studio. A bespoke art curation titled Wanderers by Thom Oosterhof adorns the hotel’s communal spaces and rooms with off-centre works from local galleries and artists, complementing Gowdridge’s design scheme, which she explains is built on ‘contrast, restraint and moments that make you pause.’

The room to book

Guests of The Dean Berlin are enveloped in Gowdridge’s decadent palette of colour and texture, with a focus on textiles and finishes that nod toward the work of German artists such as Anni Albers. A welcome arrangement of visually interesting floor and table lamps offers a warm glow, while the intuitive installation of end-grain timber flooring and graphic carpet gently outlines key areas of each room.

The Cosy and Double rooms provide compact but well-designed options that are perfect for short stays spent traversing the city’s many wonders, while the range of suites available invites dedicated travellers to make themselves at home. In particular, the generously sized Balcony Suite comes complete with a spacious lounge area; a beautifully designed dining table and chairs; plenty of work space and an irresistible bed that faces the balcony with views of the city that stretch as far as the iconic TV Tower at Alexanderplatz.

Staying for drinks and dinner?

Despite its brunch-forward menu, Benedict, the hotel's on-site restaurant, is the perfect place to start or end your day. Open from early morning to late evening, the inviting eatery spills into the lobby, promising casual dining with a touch of glamour. Breakfast favourites such as a hearty full English, steak and eggs and (of course) eggs Benedict are accompanied by an intriguing drinks list designed to suit brunch orders and beyond.

While there is no dedicated dinner menu, some of the more decadent dishes on the menu make a suitable late-in-the-day order, and the restaurant’s experienced bartenders are more than happy to cater to off-menu cocktail orders, such as a classic martini with a twist. Benedict’s reputation as a must-visit brunch spot extends far beyond the hotel itself, so be sure to snag a reservation when you check in.

The verdict

It is the attention to detail and richness of the design of The Dean Berlin that elevates the experience of your stay. Thanks to Gowdridge's hands-on design approach (many aesthetic decisions were made on-site 'with a hammer in hand,' she says) each room and communal space feels tactile and unique. While some might hope for a more tailored evening offering from the restaurant and bar – perhaps with a dedicated dinner menu and a bar open later than 10 pm – Benedict’s brunch concept is executed with excellence, and the surrounding city offers plenty of alternatives. With no on-site amenities such as a gym or spa, The Dean Berlin is most suited to adventurous travellers keen to get up and go out.

The Dean Berlin is located at Uhlandstr. 49, 10719 Berlin, Germany

Berlin-based Yont Studio has completed a new hybrid space for Seven, a queer house-music label, in the city’s Mitte club district. What started out as a real estate office at Torstrasse 220 is now a 180 sq m space defined by bold pink architectural objects, including a DJ Booth, a new object in a series of ‘Brutalist Pink’ pieces created by Serdar Ayvaz and Coşan Karadeniz of Yont.

The inspiration here is not hard to discern, but rather than form this deck-bearing sculptural piece out of solid concrete, Yont has given it a surrealist edge by forming the booth from a wooden substructure and hand-shaped rigid foam, styled and carved to resemble a hefty lump of stacked aggregate. Finished with pigmented epoxy and pink paint, the DJ booth anchors the space with visual weight yet can be easily moved.

Yont Studio shaped the object digitally before fabricating the structure and hand-finishing the surfaces. The Seven store example is effectively a physical prototype, with a limited, made-to-order run of units now available. The treatment of the new space for Seven preserves and accentuates the industrial character of the building, removing layers of decoration to reveal raw bricks and patchworked plaster.

The programme includes a record shop with personal spaces for listening to vinyl, in addition to offices for the label, a kitchen, a photo studio and a community event space. Curtains subdivide the space, with the ‘Brutalist Pink’ series providing visual punctuation against the sober backdrop.

This includes the ‘Vinyl Listening Station’, a more compact version of the twin-deck DJ Booth. Combining record storage with a turntable niche, the listening station is carefully shaped to reduce vibrations and enhance audio quality, becoming an eccentric centrepiece of the vinyl experience. It’s also available in a limited edition.

Yont included custom-built elements throughout the store, such as stainless steel display units and oak vinyl storage systems. A scattering of vintage pieces adds warmth and variation, while custom audio components were supplied by Have A Nice Day Hi-Fi (H.A.N.D.) and the Sound Metaphors record label.

Yont will be showing the ‘Brutalist Pink Vinyl Listening Station’ at Salone del Mobile 2026.

YontStudio.com, @YontStudio, @Seven.Berlin

East Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, where Kino International is located, was purposefully laid out as a striking showcase of socialist architecture. From its monumental apartment blocks to the lofty, domed towers at Frankfurter Tor, everything along the grand boulevard was built to impress. And among the jewels in its crown was this film-lover's destination, a gleaming modernist cinema conceived as a statement of Soviet sophistication.

Tour Kino International, a cinema gem reborn in Berlin

No expense was spared when it came to its construction. Architects Josef Kaiser and Heinz Aust’s bold design features a cantilevered foyer on the first floor that floats unsupported over the entrance below, with its windowless side walls covered in a vast sculptural relief depicting scenes of a Communist utopia. The cinema opened 1963, with custom-made crystal chandeliers and gleaming parquet floors leading audiences to the 500-seat auditorium – complete with elaborate wood panelling and a distinctive, wave-shaped ceiling that was meticulously shaped to optimise acoustics.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the building was granted heritage protection and taken over by the Yorck Cinema Group. But by 2024, after more than 60 years of continuous use, the once-futuristic movie theatre was beginning to show its age. Architecture firm Dickmann Richter was called in to bring the building back up to scratch with modern technical standards and polish up some of its original features, and the cinema has just reopened following 18 months of painstaking renovations.

'The building services systems have been completely modernised, and the latest projection and sound technologies have been integrated,' says Dickmann Richter architect Helen Hart. 'With restored architectural surfaces, a refreshed colour scheme, and carefully designed lighting, the building once again radiates the modernity that distinguished it at its opening in 1963.'

The process of breathing new life into the cinema’s historic fabric required the expertise of a team of master craftspeople who were assembled from across Germany to work on the project. 'Almost 800 sq m of textile wall covering were replaced, and all of the wooden slats – amounting to more than 7km in total – were meticulously refurbished,' says Hart. But of all these restoration challenges, one feature called for particular attention: the stage curtain, which was adorned with some 40 million sequins. 'It’s certainly the building’s most iconic feature, and its restoration required an enormous amount of care and effort.'

For architect Daniel Dickmann, co-founder of Dickmann Richter, the refurbishment was a rare opportunity to safeguard one of the city’s key architectural landmarks. 'We consider it extremely important to preserve such a significant representation of recent German history,' says Dickmann. 'For many East Berliners in particular, Kino International is not merely a cinema, but a place of shared memory across generations.'

dickmannrichter.de

See more of the best cinemas around the world.

Known for many years as a playground for club-goers and techno-lovers, the German capital’s reputation is evolving, and with it, its uniform. Thanks to recent headline-grabbing collections from up-and-coming Berlin-based fashion brands, including Sia Arnika, Ottolinger, GmbH and Ioannes, Berlin Fashion Week has established itself as one to watch, attracting attention from forward-thinking style obsessives around the world.

The city’s identity as a boundary-pushing cultural centre has seen it emerge as an incubator for bold personal style. Defined by a blend of concept, vintage and historic department stores, the shopping landscape in Berlin is one that often requires you to dig deeper, looking beyond regular opening hours and instead viewing retail spaces as museums and historic archives. As the latest edition of Berlin Fashion Week concludes (30 January – 2 February 2026), this is your guide to shopping in a city that sits at the convergence of subculture and style.

Darklands

Beloved by rockstars, artists and Hollywood names, Darklands isn’t for everyone. Catering to bold personalities with a sense of personal style to match, founder Campbell McDougall has spent the last 35 years cultivating a collection of garments, accessories and objects from only the most interesting corners of the fashion world. With a focus on masculine styles, McDougall and his partner Estefania Campillo lean on personal relationships with the likes of Geoffrey B Small, Carol Christian Poell, Taichi Murakami, and Label Under Construction to bring the highest echelons of global style to three striking Berlin showroom spaces. Located in a Schöneberg courtyard, flanked by art galleries, Darklands’ Bunker is its only walk-in space, where visitors can choose from a notably gothic curation that includes Devoa, Boek Verstappen and Deepti Barth, among others. Accessible by appointment only, Darklands’ 19th-century Villa, meanwhile, accommodates private, one-on-one appointments, while the brand's hard-to-find Tiefgarage space is dedicated exclusively to the work of Carol Christian Poell.

Mercator Höfe, Potsdamer Strasse 81F, 10785 Berlin 

darklands.berlin

Andreas Murkudis

For 15 years, culture connoisseur Andreas Murkudis committed himself to Berlin’s multifaceted art scene as director of Berlin’s Museum of Things. Rooted in an appreciation of true creativity, the role uncovered in him a passion for beauty that today manifests as his eponymous store. Inhabiting 1,000 sq m of the light-filled halls of the historic, former Tagesspiegel newspaper printworks, the Andreas Murkudis showroom presents fashion, design, art and furniture with museum-like curation. Discover ready-to-wear pieces from names such as Issey Miyake, Tonywack, Jil Sander, Cecilie Bahnsen and Sacai, alongside an exclusive range of furniture and design objects that complement the brand’s bespoke interior planning services. ‘Space, to me, is the ultimate luxury – it allows objects to fully unfold,’ says Murkudis.

Mercator Höfe, Potsdamer Strasse 81, 10785 Berlin

andreasmurkudis.com

Endyma Archive

Michael Kardamakis is the world’s most prolific Helmut Lang collector, and Endyma is his archive. While not technically a store, Endyma is Berlin’s answer to what happens when you want to create a shoppable museum. Since 2014, Kardamakis has curated his impressive archive as ‘part historical garment collection, part research initiative and part shop’, making it a favourite of fashion editors and stylists alike. Visitors with a curiosity for contemporary style archaeology are invited to take a guided tour of an unmatched collection of Helmut Lang artefacts, alongside a catalogue of other historically and culturally important garments and objects. Anyone can make an appointment (at an hourly rate), but make sure you do, as the archive does not accept walk-ins. While some items are available for loan or sale, many exist only as part of a permanent collection, so don’t pass up on this unique opportunity to experience rare fashion histories in the flesh.

Address available upon request

endyma.com

Rick Owens

Unveiled by the Prince of Darkness himself in late 2025, Rick Owens’ flagship Berlin showroom is a fitting addition to a city defined by an unofficial uniform of striking black style. Owens and Berlin are a match made in heaven (or hell), and the brand’s new minimalist German home has become a hub for non-conformist style. In an Instagram post announcing its opening, Owens writes, ‘Like a lot of people, my first perceptions of Berlin as a teen just starting to make aesthetic choices, were Marlene Dietrich and Hansa Studios, where Bowie recorded Heroes and mixed Iggy’s The Idiot. And I never really moved on from there.’ He adds, ‘When I first looked at the space, I asked myself, what would [Joseph] Beuys do? I hope you like it.’

Schlüterstrasse 45, 10707 Berlin

rickowens.eu

KaDeWe

Still one of the world’s most visited department stores, KaDeWe first welcomed Berlin shoppers in 1907, but it was its reopening following the Second World War that secured its place in the history books. It stands as an emblem of Germany’s miraculous post-war economic recovery – also known as the ‘wirtschaftswunder’ or ‘Miracle on the Rhine’ – and today continues to offer an elevated experience, across eight floors of style, beauty, art, food and drink, that belongs to the tradition of historical European urban department stores such as Galeries Lafayette in Paris, Selfridges in London and La Rinascente in Milan. While the original building was designed by architect Emil Schaudt, a 2021 masterplan update by world-renowned architecture practice OMA places KaDeWe firmly in the 21st century. Head to The Luxury Boulevard on the ground floor to shop leading fashion names including Prada, Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta and Valentino.

Tauentzienstrasse 21-24, 10789 Berlin

kadewe.de

Pineapple Factory Gallery

Recognised as one of the best clothing stores in the world, David Ramirez’s Pineapple Factory Gallery is known for its rigorously curated selection of hard-to-find vintage garments, with a focus on Japanese and Belgian designers – as well as rare pieces that speak to the history of contemporary fashion from the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood. Located in the culture-rich Mitte district of the city, in a neighbourhood that blends fashion, arts and hospitality offerings in some of the city’s most picturesque streets, the space is a favourite of Berlin’s stylists, fashion editors and photographers. The store operates with flexible opening hours, so it is recommended to make an appointment to guarantee access.

Gormannstrasse 23, 10119 Berlin

@pineapple_factory_gallery

Happy Victims

Another Mitte must-visit is Happy Victims, where fans of vintage Yohji Yamamoto, Ann Demeulemeester, CDG, Martin Margiela, Bernhard Willhelm, Kiko Kostadinov and Issey Miyake are bound to find a new favourite piece. The store’s owners Giovanni and Lilli have spent the last six years as dedicated Yohji Yamamoto collectors, opening the space in April 2024 as a new home for their growing archive, which no longer fitted within the confines of their apartment. The store borrows its name from Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s 2008 photo book, which documents the overflowing wardrobes of early 2000s fashion lovers in Tokyo, with Tsuzuki personally giving his blessing for the couple to use it.

Ackerstrasse 8, 10115 Berlin

happy-victims.com

Hardt

First opening its doors five years ago in Berlin’s creative heart of Kreuzberg, Hardt’s rising popularity saw it open a second, pared-back, gallery-inspired space in Mitte in June 2025. Founded by siblings Mira and Malte Hardt, the store’s vintage-focused curated selection centres leading fashion names such as Prada, Acne Studios, Issey Miyake, Comme des Garçons and more. Each piece is handpicked by the sibling duo, chosen for its unique story, with a commitment to sourcing high-quality, timeless pieces in order to guarantee them a long second life.

Dieffenbachstrasse 52, 10967 Berlin
Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse 15, 10178 Berlin

hardtstore.com

Neuzwei

In fashionable south-east Berlin neighbourhood Neukölln, eagle-eyed vintage shoppers will find Neuzwei, one of the city’s preferred concept stores, known especially for its womenswear curation. Founded by Barbara Molnar in 2016, Neuzwei offers a thoughtfully hand-selected range of vintage and second-hand designer and independent brands. The store’s warm but minimal interior invites you to lean into the tactile experience of discovering enviable fabrics and forms, with items arranged by colour palette. The physical space is open Thursday to Sunday, so be sure to plan accordingly.

Weserstrasse 53, 12045 Berlin

neuzwei.com

Although best known as a filmmaker, David Lynch (1946-2025) considered himself first and foremost a visual artist. In the late 1960s, he studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, where he created his first ‘moving painting’, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times). Merging mediums and materials, it offered an early hint of the experimentation that was to define his career.

Throughout his life, Lynch went on to create sculptures, watercolours, film, photographs and paintings, many of which are to be united in an exhibition at Pace Gallery, Berlin. Opening on 29 January 2026, it is a teaser for a major retrospective set to open at Pace, Los Angeles this autumn. The exhibition follows rare but significant showings of Lynch’s art, including 2007’s ‘The Air Is on Fire’ at Fondation Cartier in Paris and 2018’s ‘Someone Is in My House’ at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, featuring more than 500 works.

Works here include the ‘factory’ series of photographs that Lynch took at deserted industrial sites in Berlin in 1999, which captured an evocative and empty world of broken windows, chimneys and machinery. Their beauty sits alongside his unsettling paintings, which intertwine surrealist themes with text and open-ended images. His watercolours, in his distinctive muted palette splashed with reds and yellows, are presented in the frames Lynch designed himself.

Elsewhere, upright lamp sculptures built from steel, resin, Plexiglas, plaster, and wood add to the atmosphere of finding beauty in the unexpected, much like Lynch himself.

Pace Gallery in Berlin presents work by David Lynch from 29 January to 22 March 2026, pacegallery.com

The diner is the ultimate pop culture motif: a neutral no-man’s-land for dialogue between families, friends, lovers and enemies. Its interior uniform of repeating limited-session seating and endearingly predictable menus has punctuated film and television sets alike for decades: from the iconic, orgasmic screenwriting of Norah Ephron and the enigmatic, Journey-soundtracked final scene of The Sopranos, to the subtle symbolism of repeat rendezvous at the Midnight Express in Kar-wai’s breakthrough movie Chungking Express. With each wipe-down of a table or countertop comes the chance to tell a brand-new tale.

The cross-cultural reach of the Berlin diner

In Germany, where the diner culture ingrained in North America and other European countries has long been usurped by unpretentious curbside snack stands and the smoky back rooms of Kneipen (a form of pub or tavern known for its popularity with residents of the former German Democratic Republic), a new assimilation of international lifestyle habits is emerging in the country’s capital, Berlin, in the form of a string of restaurant openings that borrow their food, interior and menu concepts, to varying degrees of abstraction, from diner-style venues around the world.

A testament to the cultural richness fostered by growing multiculturalism, the visual and culinary codes of North American, Southeast Asian and European diners, delis and cafeterias are deconstructed, simmered and distilled to their essence at Onette, one of Berlin’s most talked-about 2025 openings. Founded by restaurant industry veterans Tamara Siedentopf and Brienne West, and designed by London and Berlin-based architecture practice Studio Bates Rai, the Schöneberg eatery-cum-wine bar is a sanctuary of light, with sunshine cascading through large windows over a painstakingly proportioned interior of identical booths and bar stools.

As architect and Studio Bates Rai co-founder Thomas Bates explains, the concept and design approach for this new foodie hotspot is anchored in an evocative use of materials and a carefully cultivated ambiguity – one that invites guests to project their own expectations and interpretations onto the space, free from the influence of visual clichés. He explains, ‘The danger of designing diners is that you can fall into a pastiche position, with red upholstered seats and chrome everywhere. We were really conscious that we didn’t want to do that.’ By breaking down the material and spatial DNA of these long-held aesthetic stereotypes, Onette’s architects – who are also responsible for the design of London’s new favourite ice cream and wine spot The Dreamery – were able to deliver something brand new that still manages to resonate with those familiar with the classic format.

‘It’s about the level of comfort, the size of the table, and that sort of intimacy,’ says Bates. ‘We looked at very different geographical diners – Southeast Asian, British, American – because there’s common ground between all of them, but they’re actually quite different. Taking that breadth of ideas gives you the space to make something that can feel new and contemporary.’ Vintage pendant lamps from California illuminate each bright white booth table, while antique café curtains, sourced from Lithuania, accent the bespoke furniture and central bar area with an ode to the city’s historic Eastern European influences.

While the team behind Onette’s abstraction of aesthetic codes has consciously veered away from prescriptive ideas of what a diner should be, chef Arianna Plevisani leaned into cinematic motifs while self-designing her new, and already much-loved, Kreuzberg restaurant, Ari’s, where red banquet seating and an open kitchen serve as an unspoken invitation to gather without the pressures of formality.

Originally from Peru, and having lived and worked in New York City before moving to Berlin 14 years ago, Plevisani once dreamt of a career in filmmaking. Exploring her love of the diner as a cultural concept, she explains, ‘I think the idea of the diner as this setting for life was really imprinted in my brain. I joke that Ari’s is a Peruvian sandwich shop hidden in a diner. But it’s not really a joke. I just think that the diner is a great vessel for any kind of immigrant cuisine, and always has been.’

While she has collaborated with friend and artist Laura Schusinski to refine her vision, as well as enlisting the skills of local carpenter Rainer Spehl, Ari’s was born of Plevisani’s own fantasy and is rife with artefacts of her passion, such as wall lights handmade by her and a kitchen configured to her specific working ideals. ‘I opened the restaurant that I wish existed,’ she says. ‘From my love of movies. From the food that I want to eat on a daily basis.’

Onette and Ari’s are the most recent names to break into the emerging Berlin diner scene, and both capture the synergy of culture, custom and community, but it was Dashi that laid its foundations. A physical manifestation of the friendship that connects co-founders Thu Thuy Pham and Phuong Thao Westphal, Dashi diner’s first location – opened in 2022, in the Mitte district of Berlin – celebrates the Japanese culinary concept of ‘yōshoku’, wherein Western dishes are infused with notable Japanese flavours. For the two restaurateurs, who share a Vietnamese-German background, building a menu within the internationally translated diner format has allowed them to play with both Eastern and Western food influences, without the pressure of so-called ‘authenticity’.

The duo explain, ‘As Vietnamese-born women living in Germany, our personalities, experiences and tastes exist in a cross-section of Western and Eastern food and culture. Inspired by Western-style cafés in Asia, our menu and aesthetic evoke a certain nostalgia and provide an escape from everyday stresses while simultaneously opening conversations around food, looking toward the past, present and future.’

Having kick-started the German capital’s newfound love of diner-style dining, Dashi launched a second location, in Charlottenberg, in 2024 – just a few months before restaurateur Shabnam Syed opened the doors to Neukölln’s Desi Diner.

Located on the banks of one of the city’s famous canals, Syed’s almost psychedelic, pastel-hued community hub embraces the codes of the classic diner while reimagining it through her own cultural lens. Honing in on the tactile nuance of diner-design DNA, she explains, ‘For me, a diner isn’t really a diner without a menu board. That idea became the focal point of the space: I worked with my brand designer, Rocketfuelled, on the lettering and overall identity, and collaborated with the industrial design studio Überdruck3D, who built and fabricated the piece. It’s a nod to nostalgia, but reimagined through my perspective, with South Asian influences and Berlin’s contemporary energy’.

With more than three decades of reunification under its belt and an increasingly culturally diverse population, the gusto with which Berlin’s new contemporary diner scene has found popularity signifies a voracious appetite for global culinary influences, and the communal spaces where people from all corners of the city and world can congregate and enjoy them. In the shadow of a political landscape that is increasingly sowing the seeds of division, kitchens throughout the capital are emerging as spaces where cross-cultural conviviality holds the power to bring people together.

Our bookshelves are buckling under the sheer weight of concrete volumes, but Blue Crow Media’s latest treatise on the topic is at least lightweight – in form if not in subject. Brutalist Berlin is a love letter to German concrete, an exploration of fifty key structures that also tell the tale of the capital’s tumultuous twentieth century.

Flick through the pages of 'Brutalist Berlin'

As the original city of rain-streaked romance and all forms of subversion, Berlin is struck through with sentimental, overpowering architectural gloom. Its plethora of post-war Brutalism either helps or hinders this image, depending on your stance on this most divisive of all building materials. Naturally, author, photographer and architectural historian Felix Torkar is on the side of the aggregate angels.

Brutalist Berlin is both guidebook and history lesson, an expanded version of Torkar’s Brutalist Berlin map (2021). It’s part of a series that has allowed Blue Crow to effectively corner the market in charting and mapping the world’s dwindling stock of Brutalist masterpieces, from Paris, Boston, Montreal and London. The new book on Berlin follows on from Brutalist Interiors and is part of the publisher’s pivot to monographs as well as maps.

Some key buildings from Brutalist Berlin

Thumping hip-hop shifts into dreamlike, electronic tones with cinematic, sci-fi inflections, enveloping CANK Berlin’s expansive second-floor space. The music pulses in sync with the flashing lights hanging from the ceiling, shifting colour to match the room’s cadence. With its Afro-futurist sensibility, this newly commissioned audiovisual installation forms part of French artist, DJ, producer and director Christelle Oyiri’s exhibition ‘Dead God Flow,’ at the LAS Art Foundation. Her first installation in Berlin, the show features sound, scenography and video, considering, trauma, resistance and renewal.

LAS, an organisation that merges art, technology, and science, is known for its light-driven, site-specific installations. In collaboration with Oyiri, they found a way to bring the show to life within the abandoned, former brutalist shopping centre, CANK, in Berlin’s Neukölln borough. 'I'm drawn to light and sound as I come from an electronic music background and being a DJ. A lot of the week, I'm immersed in the darkness and obscurity of nightclubs,’ Oyiri tells Wallpaper*. ‘It was a whole process. I know I'm monomaniac, but I also believe that synchronicity is a language shared across all types of Black people, whether you're African, Caribbean, or Black American.’ The exhibition, which also features a large pyramid-shaped seating area, incorporates spatial design elements reminiscent of a nightclub, with flickering lights and diverse music surrounding the space. Oyiri mentions that she perceives her work through the ‘lens of light and sound,’ rather than through dance.

The exhibition title draws on Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ proclamation, which challenged traditional European notions of morality, values and life’s purpose. In the 19th century, philosophers like Karl Marx and Freud developed their own views of the world, which Oyiri describes as France’s ‘era of the suspicious’. These thinkers argued that ‘You're poor not because of the devil, but because you have a boss who controls the means of production and refuses to pay you a fair wage,’ Oyiri says. After studying philosophy, she incorporates this ideology into her work.

Throughout, Oyiri also draws from her background. Born to a Catholic Guadeloupean mother and a Protestant Ivorian father, she attended Catholic school and has family members who are pastors. Her liberal-minded parents encouraged real-world experience, yet from secondary school she was already drawn to subverting authority, experimenting with polarities like light versus dark and Christianity versus ancestral Afro-diasporic religions, which have often been misrepresented. ‘I didn't understand why Black people were so averse to spirituality regarding our history. For me, I believe that there is more to the story and I do feel that light and darkness are cohabiting because there's no way after 400 years of slavery and colonisation, light and darkness are not in exchange with each other.’

This complex relationship is reflected in her works in the exhibition. At its centre is the 8-minute video Hauntology of an OG, a sonic journey through Memphis, Tennessee. Created in collaboration with Ghanaian-Canadian photographer Neva Wireko after research in Memphis, the video intertwines history, present and future, moving between conflicts and monuments.

Oyiri describes the piece as ‘echoing a lineage of grandeur and grief,’ especially highlighted by the area’s charged landscape. Memphis has faced many challenges, including the burning of the Clayborn Temple in April 2025, with a scene of this tragedy featured in the film. She witnessed this devastating event while filming. ‘It was hard to witness because I grew up with the idea of the South and the KKK burning churches and spaces Black people rely on. It felt targeted, and it’s frightening because it was a community centre for many who had limited resources. Memphis is a poor city, and those who worked in the church lost their jobs.’

Memphis, is a place of contrasts and dualities, one that Oyiri explores in her video. With over sixty percent of the population being Black, she believed it was important to visit this Bible Belt city, which differs from Atlanta, Georgia, and is considered the Black Mecca. ‘I wanted to go where I could sense that it was previously one of the epicentres of the Confederate state.’

Music is central to Oyiri’s world-building artistry, as presented in Hauntology of an OG, including the sampled voice of Memphis rapper Princess Loko, whose ‘cadence becomes both an elegy and a resurrection’, Oyiri says. Her fascination with Memphis dates back to her teenage years as a fan of Three 6 Mafia. She appreciates the city's role in early rap, its DIY cassette culture, and the ‘deep cuts of YouTube,’ in finding authentic sound that aligns with her love for research. Drawing from her experience growing up with CDs and during the peer-to-peer Napster era, she highlights the vital role of sequencing, interludes, and even skits in music, as reflected in the audiovisual installation in the exhibition. ‘I treat some of my shows like music bodies of work, an album, or an EP.’ She emphasises that she’s drawn to strong concepts and narrative direction, much like a mixtape, incorporating the creativity in her work.

While some projects have a definitive start and end, a few, like Hyperfate (2022), are continually revisited and refined with new edits. This 13-minute video, screened in ‘Dead God Flow,’ considers death, memory, and the martyrdom and ghosts of rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Pop Smoke and Takeoff from the hip-hop group Migos. Their untimely and violent deaths have been mythologised in the collective consciousness. In the narration, Oyiri examines the canonisation of rappers and how celebrity culture, particularly within Black communities, has replaced traditional spirituality. The tragic, often young deaths of rappers are presented as a form of modern sainthood. She asks, ‘Did these young shooting stars already know their fate?’

Working across multiple disciplines grants Oyiri creative freedom and prevents her from being pigeonholed solely by ‘Black aesthetics’. She describes her work as ‘focusing on the things that lie between the lines, including lost mythologies, subcultures and diasporic histories’ and aims for critical thinking. With her recent solo exhibition, In a perpetual remix, where is my song? at The Tanks in Tate Modern, as a recipient of the 2025 Infinities Commission, Oyiri has exhibited her works internationally, including presenting work at the Bourse de Commerce.

With 'Dead God Flow', Oyiri hopes that viewers will take the time to decipher and breathe, and ‘grieve and understand that we are in an era where we consume more than we make. If people within and outside the rap-loving community can take something from the show, it is to understand what the fandom is going through, what the artists are experiencing, and that monuments and a pyramid are only monuments because of their foundations. If the bases are removed, it just doesn't hold. You always have to go back to the foundation.’

Dead God Flow is on until 19 October 2025 at LAS Art Foundation, Berlin

It’s an incontrovertible fact that Berlin is an art town. It’s the unofficial artist capital of Europe, backed by a network of edgy contemporary art galleries and world-class institutions exhibiting the history and range of human creativity. But Berlin as a design hub? Well, that’s not quite yet been established in the city’s relentless brand of cool – perhaps until now.

While whispers flutter across the city about Berlin’s first design biennale (called Conceptual, debuting October 2025), another signal of the city’s turn towards design? 'Crafting Community', a monumental exhibition pulling together 19 of design’s most evocative and global practitioners at The Foundry, the creative hub launched last year by lighting lab Bocci (inside the 18,000 sq ft former iron-casting factory-turned arts complex known as Wilhelm Hallen).

For 'Crafting Community', which runs until 14 September 2025 and debuts 'a new annual platform to spotlight creativity through design and art', Bocci tapped curator Anna Carnick, who’s perhaps most visibly known for her work with Design Miami and has been residing in Berlin for the last eight years.

'We were really trying to create more opportunities to spotlight design specifically within Berlin because there are a lot of great design talents, but there aren't so many platforms,' says Carnick

'Crafting Community' was opened as part of Hallen 06, the annual art fair-of-sorts during Berlin Art Week, co-created by Bocci to activate the additional gallery residents of Wilhelm Hallen.

Long-time Berlin art and design resident, Johannes Schön, who’s also Bocci’s brand director, adds: 'In the mid 1990s, artists were showing things everywhere, like in squatting places, and artists becoming gallerists. Design now reminds me of these times. You can now see it with other initiatives that are following our example,' alluding to the design biennial, which arrives after Bocci’s first design/art exhibition last year, titled 'Unexpected Guests 2', that saw 18,000 visitors.

'I think we are kind of ahead of the curve,' Schön continues. 'We gave a good start to this, to offer a bigger platform for a design to be shown.'

Carnick had free reign to curate but calls this exhibition the result of 'us happily conspiring for years. Art and design, there are bridges that can connect people.' This is a decidedly curatorial venture, not commercial ('it’s not a selling exhibition,' Carnick clarifies) but is instead 'a continuation of what we've been doing for 20 years', adds Schön.

Bocci was founded by Omer Arbel in 2005 as a design studio and research lab to explore a range of production methods, ever pushing materials to their limits. 'Experimentation and dialogue have been the core of our practice, and we work with artists, designers, and architects in our studio, and I think for us, it was like, how can we connect here?' The Foundry is being used as a space simply to showcase (not sell).

With familiarity and fidelity in mind, Carnick approached 'Crafting Community' as a way to honour exceptional craft made by thoughtful practitioners who, on the surface, don’t have inter-related practices other than intentionality. 'In this moment, when so many stories and histories are under threat of being erased or rewritten, it is more important than ever to create space to honour one another's stories and to share them,' she says.

In perhaps a statement of how far-reaching community connections can be, the artists and designers in this titular exhibition hail from across all cultures and continents, and 'are in some way giving back to their own community', explains Carnick.

The show includes top-line names Rooms Studio (Georgia), Noe Kuremoto (UK), Beatriz Morales (Mexico), Estefania de Ros (Guatemala), Anas Chao (Taiwan via Saudi Arabia), Mischer’Traxler Studio (Austria), as well as more emerging talent like Yassine Ben Abdallah (Réunion), Bokja (Lebanon), ibiyanε (Martinique).

'There's a lot of shared values between these artists and designers,' explains Carnick. 'There's an openness and an intention to share their talent and their stories, and there's an openness to also hear other people's stories.'

Yet, indeed, community is inherently political, and thus, so is the show. 'This is a reminder and example of the individual and collective power we have,' says Carnick. Though there are no big Ai Weiwei-esque or Banksy-style statements included, the strongest tie amid all these practitioners is their subtle and subversive acts of resistance through these objects, whether it’s the preservation of ancestral wisdom or a material response to governing policy.

That sounds incredibly high-minded, but consider something like Tiblisi-based Rooms' 'Bus Stop Benches', where the studio collaborated with artist Max Machaidze to graffiti replicas of Soviet-style public seating (for more on Machaidze, see Wallpaper’s trip to Tbilisi), or Rozana Montiel’s participatory Collective Correspondence installation of modifying letters and literary texts in German, English and Spanish, and the less abstracted these political gestures become.

Take Victoria Yakusha’s Ukrainian folkloric creatures from her 'Land of Light' series that are meant as a direct response to the Russian invasion of her homeland; when she tried to envision how to get through these dark times, she imagined these mythical beings who could guide her and others out.

Then there’s Jerome Byron’s kevlar dining table dubbed 'Everyday Altar', reflecting and embodying the increasingly militarised presence in Los Angeles, where he lived for nine years (he currently practices in Berlin).

Meanwhile, Chaos’ Homes Away From Home is an installation of handcrafted dining plates and felted tablecloths that feature tribute texts in English and German referencing restaurants where the designer 'broke bread' to feel at home across Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and Europe.

'Anna says this is about stories, but I think she’s seeing the soul, the soul of people and objects,' said Golnar Roshan, of Amsterdam-based studio Rive Roshan, whose 3D-printed sand 'Voices Vessel 03', inspired by a pleated skirt in motion, was selected for its evocation of the current struggle for women's liberation in Iran. (Roshan is Persian by way of Australia.)

'When somebody makes something, they put themselves into it,' adds Estefania De Ros, whose Visions of the Lake commission deploys traditional Mayan cosmology and weaving techniques practiced by Indigenous artisans that are both under threat of extinction from globalized means of production and appropriation. Change lies in community, too, and maybe more than ever, we need to see to believe how in fact we are stronger together.

‘I like to find the most banal thing to paint,’ says Helsinki-born, Paris-based artist Henni Alftan. ‘I have no personal mythology, and I'm not interested in it. I'm not trying to find out if you see what I see, if we can share an experience. If the paintings are too particular, it becomes too powerful, and personal. It's not accessible enough for me.’

There is something unsettling in the flat planes, bold expanses of colour and unexpected crops that comprise Alftan’s figurative works, with the level of restraint raising more questions than they answer. ‘We've learned to assume that there is something we're not seeing,’ Alftan adds. ‘I realised that the less I did, the more your imagination developed. In my early painting, there were more events and character, and I realised it would be more interesting to go towards something more mysterious, by concentrating on things that you generally don't pay attention to – that itself is mysterious enough.’

Alftan builds on this feeling of making do with what there is in a new exhibition, ‘By the Skin of My Teeth’, at Sprüth Magers in Berlin. The title, referring to the sensation of just scraping by, reflects the mood of the paintings. Closely cropped, they ask us to zoom in on the details, whether it is a watch positioned perfectly in the middle of a sleeve and glove, the corner of an eye hidden behind sunglasses, or a single coil of hair, on the cusp of being snipped.

For the first time, Alftan is also presenting drawings alongside her paintings. Small in scale, the drawings consider a range of domestic items – paper, matches, a comb – framed and presented as historical museum artefacts.

‘In the paintings, the cropping becomes very important, whereas I'd say the drawings are more about object and hierarchy and arrangement, in an archeological way,’ says Alftan. ‘In the drawings, I am trying to do something that I can't do in painting. My paintings are very architectural and that small scale just wasn't right. In the drawings, it is also about the object, but in a different manner. From afar, they look like an archetype, a minimal representation that I also do in my painting.’

By choosing to focus on the intimate and the mundane, Alftan is reframing the everyday itself, imbuing the perhaps unseen or unconsidered with a new significance. The viewer can’t help but imagine the story in the picture – who spilt the wine? What are they thinking, cooking, feeling? – but Alftan isn’t giving anything away. ‘I don't imagine the stories myself,’ she says. ‘There are many levels of interpretation.’

‘Henni Alftan: By the Skin of My Teeth’ is open from 12 September – 25 October 2025 at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, spruethmagers.com

Born in Berlin in 1931, artist Frank Auerbach was sent to England alone as an eight-year-old refugee to escape Nazi Germany, leaving behind his Jewish parents, who would later lose their lives in a concentration camp. Settling in the country permanently, Auerbach would go on to study at the Royal College of Art, developing a distinctive style that involved repeatedly scraping layers of wet paint off his canvases, before beginning again, lending his works the visceral, evocative edge that he is celebrated for.

Auerbach rarely left England, working in the same London studio from the 1950s until his death last year. Now his work returns to the place of his birth in his first posthumous exhibition, which is also his first in the city. Showing at Galerie Michael Werner, it encompasses six decades of his paintings and drawings, offering a mix of self-portraits, dating from the last years of his life, and portraits of those closest to him. Among them are ones of show curator Catherine Lampert, who developed a close relationship with the painter over the nearly four decades in which she sat for him, and wife Julia, reclining in a tangle of acrylic. These sit alongside studies of familiar London landmarks, such St Pancras station steps and Mornington Crescent, the area he lived in and loved.

Auerbach had reduced his circle of sitters in the 1980s to a small number. Emboldened by a close intimacy with his subjects, he felt free to embrace an experimental drama in paintings that took on a vivid, mysterious life of their own. Says Lampert, ‘Auerbach’s personal policy was to keep ‘under the radar’, to show as infrequently as possible, and let almost no one into his studio. In the last years, with several exhibitions of very early and very late work, there is not only more awareness of the importance of his achievement, but, characteristically, a greater realisation that what he said was true. He wanted to get to know his subjects, his urban landscapes and sitters, intimately, as a way of spotting unfamiliar connections, in the hope of achieving ‘a more precise and demanding sense of what is the truth’.’

‘Frank Auerbach’ is on until 28 June at Galerie Michael Werner, Berlin

A version of this article appears in the June 2025 Travel Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Cross the threshold of the vast historic hall at Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin and you are transported into a bizarre, sublime 2,500 sq m realm that simultaneously seems to straddle ancient and future civilisations. Six giant hand-woven tapestries in flax and hemp hang from the ceilings; sandstone and glass sculptures protrude from walls, reminiscent of fossils, while the floor is partially covered with more than 3,000 concrete slabs set with epoxy resin ‘puddles’.

Entitled embrace, the monumental installation is the work of Klára Hosnedlová – a 35-year-old Czech artist – and her star is firmly on the ascendant. The installation is the first Chanel commission at Hamburger Bahnhof, from a series of three by different artists that will be funded by the Chanel Culture Fund over the next three years.

‘I love this space. It's super-specific but, on the other hand, it's one big open space: cold, heavy, and also quite masculine because of the metal girders,’ says the artist of the former train station complex that was built in 1846 to connect Berlin to Hamburg. It was transformed into Germany’s National Gallery in 1996 and houses the Contemporary Art Museum in spaces including the iconic hall. ‘I wanted to create something that's fragile: opposite of the structure. It was also about creating a forest of tapestries where you can hide, just be with yourself and feel embraced by the ecology. The work really has to occupy the space and it's very challenging,’ says Hosnedlová, who has created a humbling, terrific realm. Her work is audacious yet tender in its intricate detailing, such as glass sculpting, hyperrealist embroideryn (motifs are drawn from her video recordings of performances she has staged), hand-tufted and dyed sprawling tapestries that drape like animal hides.

Hosnedlová, who grew up in rural Moravia, began painting and drawing as a young girl, encouraged by her family, before enrolling at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts. Erasmus scholarships took her around the world, including a year at Canberra University, Australia. The giant, communist-era brutalist architecture of her homeland looms large in her imagination, as does Czech folklore, and she began exhibiting in underground spaces in Prague, overseeing every aspect from the making to the graphic design.

This installation is given ambient strength with a layered soundtrack that mixes a Carpathian all-girl singing group and Czech rapper Yzomandias, while the tapestries give off a hempy smell. Hosnedlová’s multidisciplinary practice, spanning sculpture, music, film and video, is impressive in its range and scale. She never sees a work as ‘final’ but part of a continuum that mutates over time. ‘In my practice, nothing is completely finished and I also curate performances within the works that I film that provide with me with ideas for future embroideries,’ she says.

Hosnedlová’s extraordinary installation, made in a series of different specialist studios in and around the region, has been a year in the making and this is her largest institutional solo exhibition to date. ‘For me, it's always so important to develop all my materials. I spend a lot of time just researching materials, combining materials, mixing the different mineral powders for the sculptures, to have the tone and surface as natural as I can,’ she says.

Her meta themes traverse utopias, the notion of home, the politics of shifting borders and how industry and artisanship co-exist in rural areas of Czechia. ‘Shining a spotlight is often transformational. So, we feel very lucky that we're able to accompany Klára at this critical moment,’ says Yana Peel, global head of arts and culture at Chanel. Elsewhere, Hosnedlová has just been commissioned for the inaugural work at the OMA-designed extension of the New Museum in New York.

The scope of the Chanel Culture Fund

With the Chanel Culture Fund, Peel’s aim is to tap into the projects, institutions and people that are driving the narrative forward. ‘Excellence could be in the form of Klára embodying this huge space. It could be a game designer in Brooklyn who wins the Chanel Next Prize,’ says Peel of the unconventional broad church.

The Chanel Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof marks a new chapter in the museum’s story, empowering artists to realise ambitious, large-scale projects. This edition is co-curated by Sam Bardaouil, director of Hamburger Bahnhof, and Anna-Catharina Gebbers. Corporate sponsorship of the arts is still relatively rare in Germany and, with cuts in arts funding, ever more needed.

The audaciousness of Hosnedlová’s installation makes it a great contender for the fund. In the five years since its launch, Peel has initiated more than 40 projects with partners in 15 countries. ‘Not having our own foundation space allows the fund to be multipolar. What matters most? What's coming next? How do we figure out what is the urgency?’ she says of the agility and wide scope of the scheme, which spans sculpture, film, emerging talent, fine art, performance, podcast and research.

Projects include an expansive ecology research project at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, the just-announced Chanel Center for artists and technology at CalArts in LA; and the appointment of Chanel Curator, Dr Flavia Frigeri, at The National Portrait Gallery, with the remit of upping the representation of women at the institution. At M+ in Hong Kong, the mission is to restore and preserve the golden age of Hong Kong cinema, and to that end, the Chanel Culture Fund created the Curator of Moving Image role. ‘In Taiwan, [meanwhile], what matters is performance art and we partnered with Taipei Performing Arts Center, designed by OMA, on a performing arts festival that will encourage the next generation in a medium that is so native to Taiwan,’ says Peel, who masterminds long-term partnerships and stages an annual summit for cultural leaders. At Shanghai PSA, the foundation is funding a contemporary arts library and creative hub, named Espace Gabrielle Chanel.

Hosnedlová’s installation represents a breakthrough in Berlin, and embrace will be a big draw during Berlin Gallery Weekend. ‘The city is a place where giving a woman [artist] a 2,500 sq m opportunity could really make a difference,’ Peel affirms. Expect a gigantic surge of the sublime.

Chanel Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof, ‘embrace’ by Klára Hosnedlová from 1 May – 26 October 2025

smb.museum

Berlin Gallery Weekend 2025 arrives this May with renewed creative energy, reaffirming the city’s position as a global nexus for contemporary art. Against the backdrop of Berlin’s ever-evolving cultural landscape, and amid financial cuts affecting many programmes that have made the city attractive for artists in the first place, Gallery Weekend offers a moment of shared focus.

Despite the rising costs and perennial buzz about other cities vying to be the 'New Berlin,' BGW director Antonia Ruder cuts through the noise: 'I would say that what matters is the density of the artists living here. International stars such as Monica Bonvicini, Anne Imhof, and Olafur Eliasson – all of whom are participating this year – live and work here.' It’s this critical mass of creative minds that continues to define Berlin’s gravitational pull. Now in her second year at the helm, Ruder is on a mission to further professionalise the much-emulated format first launched by Berlin gallerists over two decades ago. This year, that vision takes shape through a new podcast pairing Berlin’s art writers with the artists generating buzz, and a growing network of VIP ambassadors aimed at drawing more visitors to the city – particularly from this year’s target region: Asia.

This year, alongside more than 50 participating galleries, West Berlin’s storied luxury department store KaDeWe is presenting a 24/7 pop-up exhibition in its display windows, bringing contemporary art to the high-volume footfall of the high-street, with Berlin-based artists including Saâdane Afif, Karin Sander, or Alexandra Bircken, to name a few. Meanwhile, Berlin’s institutions are stepping up with unmissable exhibitions—most notably a double-header Yoko Ono retrospective split between the Neue Nationalgalerie and Gropius Bau. On Friday, May 2, in a night that’s already sold out, Berlin fixture and performer Peaches will restage Ono’s legendary Cut Piece, adding a charged, contemporary layer to the historic work.

As the first project under Hamburger Bahnhof’s new partnership with the Chanel Culture Fund, Klára Hosnedlová’s embrace takes over the museum’s vast hall with unapologetic scale and style, transforming it into a hauntingly surreal environment. On view until October 26, 2025, the installation features nine-metre-high woven tapestries, embroidered sculptural panels, cast-glass forms, concrete slabs, and site-specific objects arranged in theatrical, almost sacred configurations. Drawing from Brutalist architecture and the domestic aesthetics of post-Soviet interiors, Hosnedlová explores the fragility of utopia, the weight of memory, and the textures of survival. Hosnedlová‘s first institutional show encapsulates Chanel Commission’s mission: backing high-impact, materially rich work that pushes boundaries.

Amongst the highlights on the official program is Berlin’s newest art space, Die Tankstelle, opening its doors in a restored 1950s gas station in Schöneberg—now home to a collaboration between Pace Gallery and Galerie Judin (the space also includes a café-bookshop by Die ZEIT.) Its inaugural programming sets a bold tone: Pace presents Reverse Alchemy, featuring works on paper by Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Nava. The exhibition explores the concept of transforming high art back into raw, primal expression – a nod to Dubuffet’s art brut ethos. Simultaneously, Galerie Judin unveils a Tom of Finland retrospective, spotlighting the artist’s iconic, hyper-stylised depictions of queer masculinity.

Navigating over 50 galleries during Berlin Gallery Weekend is thrilling but demanding. With shows spread from Schöneberg’s sleek spaces to Kreuzberg and Charlottenburg’s hidden gems, the challenge lies in both logistics and curation. Notably, many highlights come courtesy of women and women-identifying artists. Anne Imhof returns to Galerie Buchholz with Cold Hope, a series of large paintings based on film stills, digitally manipulated and layered with moiré effects. Developed alongside her recent blockbuster New York performance DOOM: House of Hope—a sprawling, operatic piece blending choreography, sound, and live action in shifting tableaux—the show translates her visceral, time-based practice into a more abstract, contemplative realm.

Marianna Simnett presents Charades at Galerie Société—a multi-layered exhibition exploring ritual, and performative deception. The show features new video works, sculptures, and oil paintings, a medium that the artist has only recently started working with, that blur the line between masquerade and myth. Central to the exhibition is Leda Was a Swan, a striking video piece reimagining the ancient tale of Zeus and Leda through a contemporary feminist lens. With her signature mix of the grotesque and the theatrical, Simnett confronts societal norms and bodily politics.

For its Gallery Weekend debut, NOME presents UNCENSORED by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, following her 2024 solo show at LAS. Blending video, sound, drawing, and sculpture, her work confronts cultural repression and emotional avoidance. Using elements of horror and surrealism, Brathwaite-Shirley invites viewers into raw, disquieting encounters.

Sprüth Magers unveils Retinal Rivalry, a cinematic tour de force by Cyprien Gaillard. Shot in razor-sharp ultra-HD 3D at 120 frames per second, the film plunges viewers into a disorienting, almost hallucinatory experience. From the dizzying excess of Oktoberfest’s final hours to the ghostly remnants of Roman Cologne, Gaillard collapses time and space into a hypnotic meditation on urban spectacle, decay, and the haunting persistence of history. It’s a definitive must-see, no matter how long the queues that are likely to form outside the space.

Venturing beyond the official Gallery Weekend program is both inevitable and deeply rewarding. In Mitte, Mountains gallery presents Luftbrücke, a moving solo exhibition dedicated to the late Filipino artist David Medalla. Curated with his partner Adam Nankervis, the show spans Medalla’s iconic Bubble Machines, his participatory piece A Stitch in Time, neon sculptures, rare paintings, and archival materials. Anchored by his 1997–98 DAAD residency in Berlin, Luftbrücke connects Medalla’s nomadic, communal practice with the city’s layered histories—art as both personal journey and collective lifeline. It’s a fitting tribute in a city that, despite recurring declarations of its demise, continues to lure artists with its promise of reinvention and resonance.

Berlin Gallery Weekend is 2- 4 May 2025

In one of Berlin’s most storied urban residences, Am Tacheles, creative director Garth Roberts has unveiled a new interiors project which he explains is ‘to explore the diverse aesthetic and emotional potential of domestic life, shaped by the iconic architecture of these living spaces’.

For 'Rooms of Am Tacheles’ (ROA) x Vignettes, Roberts worked with three design studios – Fernando Laposse, Mexico City; Lotto Studio, Berlin, and Studioutte, Milan – to design interiors concepts which aim to highlight the contemporary living space within Herzog & de Meuron’s cosmopolitan architecture.

Each studio took up residency in a room in Am Tacheles, and drew on one aspect of the development to interpret through their work.

Rooms of Am Tacheles 'Vignettes' project

Rather than displaying fully furnished interiors, for each 'vignette' Roberts embraced the unfinished and the exaggerated with a focus on using unusual materials and forms to create a visually tactile experience.

Studioutte referenced brutalism in their interpretation. Utilising the expansive room heights and exposed concrete of the Herzog & de Meuron building they softened the space with dramatic black curtains which cascaded over three metres.

For Fernando Laposse, the playfully pink nature of Brandlhuber+Muck Petzet‘s building attracted his eye. Referencing the entrance of natural pink stone and its groovy mirrored ceiling, Laposse’s interior interpretation included challenging more traditional habits and dived into the origins behind materials, sustainability and culture.

In Grüntuch Ernst Architects’ building Lotto Studio had a more minimalist approach. The building, although the smallest, is well lit and spacious. Matching the building’s floor-to-ceiling window frames, the Berlin design studio created custom aluminium furniture which crafts an indoor-outdoor narrative.

Roberts’ ‘Vignettes’ project is a realisation of intricate and unusual contemporary design and encourages playful thinking, ‘This project is aspirational.' said Roberts of the work. 'It not only presents creative interiors, it sparks the imagination and inspires its audiences.'

Built in 1908, Tacheles, as it was then known, fell into disrepair after the Second World War but saw new life in the 1990s as Berlin's biggest squat, a countercultural hub where artists could work and live. In recent years, it was completely redeveloped by Herzog & de Meuron, transforming the once derelict space into a new multi-purpose hub for offices, high-end apartments, retail stores, and a photography museum. Roberts was tasked with designing the interior spaces of the development – combining elegance with practicality while respecting architectural integrity.

garthglobal.com
fernandolaposse.com
lotto.studio
studioutte.com

Fragility and loneliness, melancholy and grief. These are a few themes brushed upon by artist Louise Bonnet’s latest solo exhibition, 'Reversal of Fortune', at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin. In her renowned style, depicting fluid emotions encased within the human form, she explores the notion of falling and the emotions of a turning point or downfall.

Louise Bonnet presents 'Reversal of Fortune'

On a series of linen and paper, the viewer can see female figures beyond the picture frame, positioned slipping off beds and other furnishings in a descent into the unknown. As Bonnet elaborates, ‘I thought that falling, which betrays us as absolutely human – our bodies slipping from an ordained position, failing to perform an expected pose or an expected role – could therefore be a form of passive resistance, a way to show complete humanity in the face of what is being expected by the world or ourselves.’

Bonnet’s technique nods towards Dutch 16th-century painting as she layers oil paints on a linen canvas with depth and tonality. Her work is dramatic, with figures falling headfirst and limbs resting at uncomfortable angles. Some faces are distorted, features blended together as they hit a hard surface, referencing the fragility of human existence. Others have charming smiles, somewhat gleeful and accepting of the fate that is bestowed upon them.

The figures are deeply rooted in art historical references, and are composed to be unintrusively observed and not objectified; they live in a world inside the painting, stuck within the frame. For the observant viewer, Bonnet’s symbolism hints at a secret message to unscramble. Begonia, irises, and dahlias signify warning, danger and instability. In each composition, the cooling colours and curved bodies spark an emotional language, a narrative to be felt rather than told.

Louise Bonnet, 'Reversal of Fortune' is on display at Galerie Max Hetzler, Potsdamer Straße 77–87, 10785 Berlin, until 18 January 2025

Berlin is a green city, with the Tiergarten at its heart and a necklace of forests and lakes. Still, a public park atop a new office building is a new model of urban landscaping for the German capital. Named Darwinstrasse 1 for its street address in the Charlottenberg district, this is an eight-storey linear block – the first to be built on a former industrial site beside the River Spree.

Designed by the prolific Berlin firm Grüntuch Ernst Architeken, it applies the sustainable architecture principles laid out in Hortitecture, a book that includes contributions made by 33 architects at a series of symposia on the synergy of architecture and plantings, and how that enhances the environment.

Discover Darwinstrasse, an elevated, new Berlin park

As GEA observes in its introduction, 'unlike solid building materials, which are fixed and controlled by the architect, living green materials challenge the design with the dynamics of growth'. It’s a challenge GEA has mastered in several other commercial projects and schools, and in Berlin’s Wilmina Hotel, which the firm created within a former women’s prison.

The commission for Darwinstrasse 1 came from Bauwens Development, a Cologne-based firm, who responded enthusiastically to the planners’ mandate for a publicly accessible roof garden that would create a valuable amenity for tenants and the neighbourhood. An open staircase runs up the west side of the 120m-long block to the north end of the fourth floor and the 2,200 sq m park cascades down from the south end. Trees in planters 2m deep rise from each terrace.

Ingenhoven Architeken’s Marina One complex employs a similar strategy in Singapore, where every new commercial development has to devote 25 per cent of the site to green space that is open to the public 24/7. In Berlin, where innovation is often stifled by a forest of regulations, it is a new departure that deserves to be widely copied, just as the Viaduc des Arts in Paris and New York’s High Line have inspired planners around the world.

Inevitably, the park and staircase added to the complexity and cost of construction. 'We were lucky to have a client willing to pay for that,' says GEA co-principal Armand Grüntuch.

For the architects, who worked with landscapers capattistaubach on the park, a major challenge was to reinforce the roofs to sustain the weight of wet earth 40-150cm deep and create a waterproof seal. They specified a concrete with embedded carbon and the building utilises renewable energy from the neighbouring power station. The open-plan floors are lit from expansive windows that can be shaded by external blinds. The spaces have an open technical infrastructure in the ceilings and they can be easily reconfigured with soundproofed partitions to accommodate a thousand workstations.

A large Bavarian investment firm bought Darwinstrasse 1 and is now leasing it to other firms. The landscaping will continue to grow but already it has created a significant micro-climate, with a measurable difference of temperature between park and street. Multiply that ten thousand times and Berlin would be the greenest city in Europe.

gruentuchernst.de

capattistaubach.de

The first buildings of Berlin’s born-again Potsdamer Platz opened 30 years ago. Largely complete by 2000, this ambitious urban development, a kilometre south of the Brandenburg Gate, had been Europe’s biggest construction site. How big? One hundred and fifty acres. Think of Potsdamer Platz as more or less the size of 50 Trafalgar Squares or 30 Midtown Manhattan blocks. Half as big again as London’s towering Canary Wharf and almost as big as Beijing’s Forbidden City.

A walk through Potsdamer Platz

How could such a big, jigsaw piece of a major European city have ever gone missing? What happened to the old Potsdamer Platz between its bright-lights 1930s heyday and the 1990s? What is the new Potsdamer Platz like 30 years on? Daniel Libeskind, the architect of Berlin’s radical Jewish Museum, which opened in 2001, said around the time of the development's completion: 'Potsdamer Platz is an example of how you can hire the best architects in the world and still not automatically end up with something great.' Proficient, that is, if a little soulless.

The buildings rising here from the early 1990s on four commercially developed plots were designed by, among others, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Hans Kollhoff, Helmut Jahn, Arata Isozaki and Rafael Moneo, all distinguished architects. The quality of construction is high, with generous use of terracotta, brick and sandstone cladding. The development also features sustainability elements that were ahead of their time, such as green roofs and the recycling of rainwater into urban pools to lower the environmental temperature. The Sony Centre, designed by the Chicago architect Helmut Jahn, has a dramatic, circus-like quality, its eight buildings sharing a dramatic vaulted roof stretched between them. There is public art galore. Frank Stella. Robert Rauschenberg. Jeff Koons.

Here is also Dunkin’ Donuts, Pret a Manger, KFC, the Legoland Discovery Centre and The Upside Down, 'Berlin’s first interactive social media museum'. On any day of the week, tourists parade in their tens of thousands. In other words, Potsdamer Platz is an interesting port of call for daytrippers, students and fans of 1990s commercial architecture and urban planning, and it remains an important site of Berlin's reunification and a powerful place in European history.

It is also an important case study for those keen to understand the effects of the privatisation of public space. At the time of its development, the large-scale scheme was controversial for bringing a commercially led attitude to a historically sensitive and central part of the city. Even with its high footfall, the development can feel detached from the city proper.

It was always going to be a challenge to re-establish what had been a No Man’s Land for many decades. Photographs, films and recollections of Potsdamer Platz between the two world wars reveal how it was once an essential and decidedly lively part of an energetic and cultured city that lost its way, along with its very fabric and thousands of its citizens, as Nazi Germany went to war in 1939.

What had been an 18th-century military parade ground morphed into Berlin’s version of Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, albeit on a much bigger scale, criss-crossed by trams and, below ground, by U-bahn and S-bahn trains, and flanked by grand department stores, Neo-Baroque embassies and government offices, nightclubs, neon lights and a general sense that all modern life was here.

In 1933, as Martin Wagner, the chief city architect, drew up plans to completely reconstruct Potsdamer Platz in a modern style, the Expressionist architect Erich Mendelson completed his ultra-modern, multi-use Columbushaus on one side of the great square. Remarkably, Columbshaus survived the Second World War only to be gutted by fire and then demolished with the coming of the Wall and No Man’s Land on either side.

Since the reunification of Berlin and Germany in 1990, a debate had raged as to how the city should be rebuilt. One solution was Potsdamer Platz, vilified for bringing commercially driven development and privatised public space into the heart of an old European city. Compared, though, to many later such schemes around the world, it can still look remarkably refined and restrained – an outlying, unexpected sample of 1990s architecture.

For the last two months, a new aparthotel in Berlin’s Hackescher Markt has been inviting people to try and give feedback on its design and experience. Wallpaper* took up this offer, spending two nights as a willing guinea pig. Dubbed MM:NT Berlin Lab, the hospitality concept was developed by Philippa Wagner, an experienced design strategist at PeoplePlacesSpaces, for apartment hotel operator Adina Hotels, part of Sydney-based TFE Hotels.

Inside MM:NT Berlin Lab aparthotel

MM:NT Berlin Lab bills itself as a ‘digital first’, self-serve experience. ‘You need to be digitally savvy, ideally a digital native,’ says MM:NT operations lead Janek Gensch. As such, spots like the front entrance, guest rooms, and in-room drawers and cupboards had to be accessed by swiping the corresponding ‘key’ on the app. Although bewildering at first, the system eventually became second nature.

With no staff on site during the beta mode period – just an MM:NT intercom system connecting with a staff member – the only background noise we experienced was the incidental music in the communal spaces or that of other guests conversing about the futuristic nature of the experience.

Design-wise, the interiors emanate a minimal and functional energy. ACME, a studio based in London, Berlin and Madrid, developed most shared spaces and bedrooms, while BWM in Vienna crafted one room with a different approach. In the communal area, ACME installed a large table made of recycled plastic from Smile Plastic and adorned the space with floor-to-ceiling green drapes to soften the concrete walls.

Our two-night stay commenced in one of ACME’s ‘small’ rooms, a compact 14 sq m space without windows, resembling a Scandinavian cabin on a cruise ship. Distinctively, the bathroom boasted terracotta recycled glass tiles from Eco-Friendly Tiles. On our second night, we stayed in BWM’s ‘medium’ room, where the team ingeniously fit a kitchenette with a Foresso worktop made of recycled materials into the available 19 sq m – space-saving features included fold-out shelves and tables integrated into the walls.

MM:NT Berlin Lab is set to open to the public on 1 July 2024, while the brand has plans to expand in more European cities and Australia.

MM:NT Berlin Lab is located at, An d. Spandauer Brücke 11, mmnt-intime.com

When I arrived at E-WERK Luckenwalde, a former power station half an hour on a train south of Berlin, the place was quiet. Eerily so, for a site soon to open a performance art festival headlined with raucous angst from Pussy Riot. I had been here before, so knew my way around the campus, comprising the power station, the town’s former swimming pool, and the variety of ancillary pavilions and buildings that E-WERK Luckenwalde’s founders – artist Pablo Wendel and curator Helen Turner – had transformed into spaces for experimental culture.

Like me, Wallpaper* had also previously visited. In 2019, when E-WERK Luckenwalde opened with a bang, writer Emma O’Kelly was told by Wendel that the project would be ‘offering art as a power supply’. I confidently strolled straight up the entrance steps of Stadtbad, the swimming pool, and through the double doors to encounter the light-filled Bauhaus hall empty other than for a musician at a piano, filling the space with delicate notes. Immediately, I took out my camera and started recording, a kneejerk reaction to a space and situation I was totally at ease and familiar with. As I completed my panning video, the musician stopped playing to say ‘hello’. I replied, said it was beautiful, then left.

‘Tell Them I Said No’, the title of the two-day festival, was an eclectic mix of performance, workshops, and discussion. Taking its title from an essay series by Martin Herbert, considering artists who had withdrawn from or rejected an art-market-focused art world, the festival – programmed by Turner and freelance senior curator Katharina Worf – sought to explore modes of separation, sustenance and survival.

Hettie Judah, curator of the current touring exhibition ‘Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood’, spoke about the lack of space in a competitive, precarious and constraining art world for caregiving, parents and those who don’t want to conform to a rigid capitalist rhythm. Florence Peake nestled her crotch into that of life- and art-partner Eve Stainton, and without separating, the entangled two then manoeuvred up and down the emptied swimming pool slope for Practice 1, a performance of support, struggle and anxiety that for all its poetic poise, always seemed on the edge of serious injury.

In a discussion on expectations upon being an artist and making work, and the compression into or fight away from conforming neoliberal tendencies, Abbas Zahedi spoke beautifully about his practice as a performance poet in relation to former employment as a medic and community worker. In the art world, Zahedi considers himself a ‘participatory ethnographer’, an outsider less interested in sculpting utopia than engaging with concerns. ‘People think that galleries are where you go and look at things,’ the performer said, then asked ‘but how does that space get converted into something that's more about witnessing, and how can I engender that within the work itself, or require that from the institution or audience?’

Eglė Budvytytė’s workshop in collaboration with Fernanda Muñoz Newsome, Some Were Dragged, Some Were Carried, also spoke to the body unceremoniously being taken through space. Training how a pair can alternatively support the movement of another, the work draws inspiration from how authorities drag disobedient bodies away from sites of protest, but here transforms into mutual support and tenderness. Within E-WERK Luckenwalde’s geodesic dome, Asad Raza’s workshop also explored co-dependency and nurture, but with soil – his session training participants how to create a neo-soil, and through it more deeply understand ecosystems and relationships.

On the second day I needed to step away. The football team I had supported for 30 years were playing an important final game of the season in which they could get promoted to the English Premier League. Holed away in Wendel’s office with my laptop and two cans of beer, I watched Ipswich Town’s 2-0 followed by a pitch invasion and outpouring of collective joy. I was happy, though only felt a profound sadness, thinking of how my father would have been so full of life today had prostate cancer not taken him. At that moment, I didn’t want to be staring at a laptop in Luckenwalde, but in that Ipswich crowd reliving memories for and with my father. A sense of grief I don’t think I had felt in the eight years since he died was building inside.

Back in the power station’s Turbine Hall, SERAFINE1369 presented IV, a dance work lasting for one exact hour. Like a spoken clock, each minute was read out over a glitchy, hauntological soundtrack that conjured the mechanics of the building’s past. Instead of machinery, four dancers adhered to chronological order, then tried to break from it, floating between collaboration and independence before an equilibrium of freedom was found. I held back my tears, just.

After it ended, I tried talking to people about Ipswich’s promotion, its memories and sense of loss, and how witnessing such pleasure could fill me with an empty pain. But, unsurprisingly, the exploits of a small Suffolk football team didn’t seem that important to the down-from-Berlin art crowd, and so I kept it inside, carrying on with the festival programme, staying just on the edge. Regardless, I thought to myself, what I was feeling was sadness, and there are far bigger issues right now in the world.

A panel of Lamis Ammar, Candice Breitz and Zoë Claire Miller discussed Gaza within a world of grief, the art world’s response, and the delicate situation of funding and free speech in Germany – a situation that makes E-WERK Luckenwalde’s political event not only an act of bravery, but perhaps one of defiance. ‘I think there is definitely fear,’ Turner said, ‘but what is the point of having a cultural institution if you can't keep it open and invite people to have discourse – I think that is the priority above everything else.’

The final hours of the event comprised performances in the Stadtbad, the empty pool’s slope and two tiers of balconies, creating a perfect auditorium not only for headliners Pussy Riot, but the preceding acts. ‘I got an email that said when life gives you lemons…’ Abbas Zahedi says in his audio-visual performance, using the fruit as a vehicle to explore trauma, time and ancestry. ‘I have been told that speaking of the past is bad form, improper etiquette, so I speak of lemons instead,’ and in speaking through lemons Zahedi turned the Stadtbad into a space of collective grief – for his neighbours from Grenfell, for ancestors we never met, for strangers and for family.

Then, Jjjjjerome Ellis came on to perform the poetic Aster of Ceremonies. Clearly anxious, Ellis spoke of stuttering from a young age and how it is now folded into the artist’s identity, work and name. They read: ‘The art of the stutter is to give away being on time, the art of the stutter is to utter in time, not on time.’ Ellis owns the stutter, and all the personal trauma it carries, then uses it to empower a broader memory of Black and disabled people, using it as a tool to appropriate the language of escaped slave adverts to speak to timeless trauma and grief.

When they sat at a piano to put words to music, I immediately realised that it had been Ellis’ rehearsal I had so arrogantly walked in on and started filming. A sense of regret struck me. Who was I to have imposed myself into the space yesterday, immediately start filming them, extract that beauty then leave? I began to listen deeper, thinking of not only Ellis’ connected ideas of taking loss and grief to rebuild and renew, but all the other ways these themes were woven into modes of opposition, conversation, creativity and network over ‘Tell Them I Said No’. And in that moment of witnessing, my own grief didn’t feel trapped or interior, but as a tiny part of a wider, shared sense of loss, one of acknowledged vulnerability and with a potential to create new kinds of collective power if considered with care.

‘The Drop Out: Tell Them I Said No’ at E-WERK Luckenwalde in 2024 

Supported by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation), Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Canada Council for the Arts and the City of Luckenwalde

kunststrom.com

Having a distinctive-looking fleet is a time-worn way of giving your brand some free publicity. It’s a trope deployed by businesses since the dawn of the automotive era, whether it’s the instantly recognisable graphics of the New York Taxi, UPS vans, Zipcars or your local estate agency. For more bespoke applications, there are more and more niche models designed to turn heads, a trend that dates back to the Nissan S-Cargo of the late 1980s. 

We’ve commented on Carrosserie Caselani before, when it transformed a humble Citroën SpaceTourer into the retro-infused Citroën Type Holidays, an officially sanctioned camper van that draws on the corrugated minimalism of the French manufacturer’s iconic H-Van. 

Carrosserie Caselani Fourgonnette

Now the Italian specialist is at it again, this time with a smaller and more nimble machine aimed at small businesses who want to make a splash. The Fourgonnette is inspired by the ultra-compact commercial version of the venerable 2CV, introduced as the 2CV Fourgonnette in 1951, two years after the passenger version was launched in Paris. Designed by the great Pierre-Jules Boulanger, this rudimentary van was pitched at rural France, whether farmers or small traders. There was even a ‘Weekend’ model, with removable seats so that it could also be used as a family runabout. 

The new Fourgonnette, built with Citroën’s blessing, uses the French manufacturer’s Berlingo Van Club commercial vehicle as a base vehicle, stripping away the modern styling in favour of the rough, utilitarian style of the 2CV. Using this platform means that there’s also a fully electric option in the form of the e-Berlingo, which supplements the traditional diesel and petrol models.

In addition to a conventional two-seater van, Carrosserie Caselani also makes a crew cab model and a more conventional passenger car. It might not have the bare-bones style of the original 1950s ‘Weekend’, but it’s certainly a fun way to travel.  

Carrosserie Caselani Fourgonnette, Caselani.com, @Caselani_Official

A dozen casually dressed performers animate Hamburger Bahnhof’s central hall, leading visitors around the curious topography as they stage a series of live tableaus or vignettes – regularly punctuated by polyphonic singing and semi-poetic speech. An imposing sand dune has been implanted into the space, and a few of them stand atop it, grasping at handfuls as if in search of something. Their actions are not frantic, but precise and methodical. One of them suddenly abandons the excavation project and begins to slowly roll down the side of the dune. Reaching the bottom and continuing to roll across the floor, they are eventually picked up by two others, carried ceremoniously up a winding ramp and set atop a raised platform next to a prominently displayed agate stone. The person and the large stone appear on the same level, and a kind of duet between them begins, enhanced by the sound of another performer humming a short Bach excerpt.

Alexandra Pirici’s ‘Attune’ at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

This is just one small part of Alexandra Pirici’s Attune, the artist and choreographer’s largest work to date, co-commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, which supported the project from its inception. In the buttressed hall of the former train station, with its impressive windowed-wall as a backdrop, Pirici has created what she describes as an itinerary or parcours that feels like a landscape. Performers will activate the space for four hours each day of the exhibition’s run, with a choreography that loops three times over. Most elements of the action are fixed, but some remain fluid and subject to the performers’ improvisation and consonance with one another.

However playful or abstract Pirici’s choreographies may appear, they are often grounded in extensive research and a desire to address urgent political questions. For her, rigour and playfulness are not rigidly distinct artistic methods: the success of Attune lies in the solidarity it creates between storytelling and scientific inquiry. 

Pirici explains that she ‘intended Attune to be a celebration of the continuum between the animate and the inanimate... I believe that continuum should be celebrated because it literally situates us within the larger fabric of the world, made of the same matter, belonging to the same universe.'

Attune stresses the importance of listening to different voices, both human and non-human. The polyphonic chorus, inspired by Georgian or Corsican folk songs, fills the vast space and draws visitors into a meditation on the necessity of acknowledging our place in a multi-perspectival world. Polyphony, Pirici notes, is challenging for the modern ear, which is so focused on the individual voice – it takes a considered level of engagement to both perform and distinguish the multiplicity of voices.

The sound of the performers singing also occasionally intervenes directly in the chemical processes taking place on the stainless-steel installation mounted in the space, which Pirici has dubbed the 'Organ'. Referencing its part in a larger system, or organism, as well as its resemblance to the musical instrument, this vegetal-like structure has glass cylinders hanging from its branches, which contain different experiments. As the performers sing their 'Organ songs', the colour and composition of the substances changes, adding another layer to the interspecies collaboration at work in the piece.

Placing human bodies in direct dialogue, or chorus, with organic and inorganic matter, Attune draws our attention to the self-organising impulses that exist, not just in human communities but also, and importantly, among seemingly inert materials. By paying attention to the capacity of our surrounding environment to be both active and creative, we can gain a renewed sense of our own propensity for cooperation. Attune, Pirici insists, presents us with an 'invitation to harmonise'.

Attune, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, until 6 October 2024, smb.museum

Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere has visited Venice numerous times in the past and exhibited her work during different editions of the biennale. She also represented Belgium in 2013, with an installation of a gargantuan fallen cripple wood tree (a species known and named for its twisted branches).

An architectural characteristic the artist has long found interesting about the city is hidden in the details. ‘During my walks around Venice, I have always been intrigued by how the walls are full of water and show the wounds caused by this containment,’ De Bruyckere tells Wallpaper*. For her Belgian Pavilion installation, she had marked those wall wounds inside the space by scratching them onto the canvas.

Now De Bruyckere is back in Venice with a solo exhibition, ‘City of Refuge III’, at Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, in which she turns her eye to light, a phenomenon that perhaps has a certain rhyme in Venice, unlike in any other city. After observing the 16th-century, Renaissance-style church, designed by Andrea Palladio, from day to night, she was fascinated by the building’s construction, which allows the sunlight’s travel throughout the day.

‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. City of Refuge III’ in Venice

De Bruyckere’s response is an installation of recent sculptures – most prominently her newest Arcangeli – which speak to the church’s interior characteristic that puts forward notions of devotion, transcendence, and mortality. Given the artist’s long-term interest in incorporeality in sculpture, the installation blends her contemporary exploration of spirituality with the venue’s Benedictine embodiment.

The show’s protagonists are angels without faces: they are shrouded by massive cloths that cover almost their entire bodies, including their wings. Believed to be the servants and messengers of God, the archangel figure (also featured in De Bruyckere’s 2023 show at Hauser & Wirth Zurich) entered the artist’s repertoire during the early days of the pandemic, when she was in search of a mythical figure. She came across Giorgione’s painting Cristo morto sorretto da due angeli (1502-1510), which shows an angel wrapping his arms around a tormented Christ, reminding the artist of the solidarity she witnessed among patients and caregivers.

In De Bruyckere’s interpretation, the archangels are devoid of the freedom to fully spread their wings, buried under the heavy cloth. A pair of lanky legs are their only visible human-like traits, holding a posture of a landing or an ascent, with their toes just touching the pedestals they stand on.

They defy gravity while radiating a marble heft inherent to classical Italian sculptures – they tower over the viewer, similar to interpretations of the crucifix. De Bruyckere’s material palette, however, veers her away from any depiction of David on the pedestal or Jesus on a cross. Wax, instead, gives the archangels a humanlike thickened softness, as well as a spectral transparency – they convey a sheen with the light beaming through the windows.

At her Ghent studio, the artist works with a live model to cast the body, which she later enlarges by around ten per cent to maximise the figure’s otherworldly grandiosity. She uses a cow-skin mould for the shroud, which holds the possibility of translating the animal hair into the final work. The grainy sepia hues are a result of what she calls ‘a big surprise when I take out the mould and see the colours underneath’.

De Bruyckere’s collaboration with light continues with a configuration of mirrors that echo the archangels with broken reflections. The mirrors, which she uses for the first time in her career, are hung on antique curtains that backdrop the sculptures. Draped similarly to mammoth theatre curtains, the mirrored fabric ‘adds a sense of multitude of reality’, according to the artist, who also had to adapt a new form of domination in space. ‘I usually study a space before exhibiting there and make it mine with my installation,’ she says. ‘I had to find my place in the space without overwhelming it,’ she adds about operating in a consecrated church where people still come for worship in the company of numerous paintings, including five by Tintoretto.

At the sacristy, De Bruyckere salutes one of her fundamental subjects, the fallen cripple wood tree, in this case, cast from a tree she found split by lightning near her studio. Between a glorious defeat and an eerie stillness, the monstrous trees with crippling branches in wax rest on welding tables that in the artist’s words, ‘reference the heavy construction materials I came across at Venice harbours – they are rusty and brutal’. By pairing the wax’s lingering tactility with metal coldness, she monumentalises the catastrophic moment of a fall with a potential for new life: ‘There is a sense of resurrection, an element of mortality that is already a part of the environment.’

‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. City of Refuge III’ is at Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 20 April – 24 November 2024 and is a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. More about the artist at hauserandwirth.com

For more to see in the city, read our Venice Biennale 2024 guide

Reethaus' gently imposing thatched roof hints at its context's wider approach; an artisan- and design-led, slowly crafted environment, drawing from the past but firmly reconfigured for the 21st century. The new cultural space, which opened recently in Berlin, is the first in a series of completions coming up in a new urban development for Berlin. Titled Flussbad, it aims to become a leading creative campus, which will eventually comprise old and new structures, including wild parkland and workspaces, restaurants and accommodation set within historic Weimar-era river baths on the Spree riverfront – with Reethaus at its heart.

Reethaus: a space for art, community and contemplation

While the surrounding landscape and complex are still in development, Reethaus has opened its doors, hosting a rolling programme of performances – from community activities to art, with a wide cultural scope, including sound installations and musical performances (the latest being a Tibetan choir).

Claus Sendlinger, who is behind the Flussbad scheme, explained: 'The Reethaus was conceived as a place for radical presence. It’s often compared to a temple and it is indeed a place where deep, contemplative, even spiritual experiences take place, but it’s also a space for exploration, connection and experimentation. Its 360-degree in-built spatial sound system allows for a new kind of immersive sonic experience. With the full opening of the Flussbad campus, the Reethaus will become the place where our community gathers to experience truly impactful programming, from health rituals to artistic performance to immersive learning and workshops.'

'In some ways, you can also see the Reethaus as replacing an outdated concept: the conference centre. With mass digitisation and the rise of remote work, the rules of engagement have changed. When we come together in the physical world, whether for business or leisure or to learn something new, we want to truly connect and experience something akin to awe or wonder. This is what the Reethaus was designed to do. It’s where you could say, the magic happens.'

The architect behind it is Austrian Monika Gogl, who worked alongside Belgian interior designer Cédric Etienne on the building. Their design approach was more about textures, light and capturing the 'emotional power of stillness', they explain, than designing a traditional auditorium or art centre. 

The duo were inspired by a variety of influences – as far away as Japanese teahouses and the tea ceremony, and as close as the green nature of the Spree riverside around the site. 

'The task is [to allow the visitor] to feel, smell, recognise the soil and the energy of a place,' said Gogl. 'There are many options for using the space. The visitor should dive in, along the long concrete entrance ramp (like a flâneur of Walter Benjamin) and feel calmer, letting all fears behind them. They enter through the big steel door (a kind of transition) and connect with the earth, through the light which comes from above. [There is] a beautiful view of the river, the water and the green. They should see the transformation of the materials in the daylight, they should feel the connection to nature. They should feel secure and “held”, and witness the different spatial situations in the foyer, the atrium, the different energy of the meeting rooms…'

The calm and at the same time powerful creative draw of the Reethaus will keep inviting guests in with its varied performances – meanwhile, more reasons to visit the area are coming up later in 2024, as the team behind Flussbad is gearing up for further openings on the site. 

'Next year will be the big one for Flussbad,' said Sendlinger. 'We’re expecting the entire campus to open, welcoming gastronomy, health offerings, guest rooms and working lofts within an architectural ensemble by neo-brutalist master Arno Brandlhuber integrated into one of the greenest, vastest sections of Berlin’s riverside. Flussbad will also host the “learning environment” of Slowness, a laboratory of new ideas in hospitality that we’ve been building over the past few years, bringing together a vanguard community of designers, artists, scientists, farmers, chefs and other visionaries whose work engages with slowness toward a resetting of values.'

flussbad.com

The newly opened Moët & Chandon bar in Berlin department store KaDeWe is a chance to take celebrations for the festive season and beyond to another level. Although champagne is often reserved for special occasions and marking major successes, Moët & Chandon wants to redefine what’s celebration-worthy by toasting everyday wins.

As 2023 draws to a close, it is a time for reflection on the passing year’s achievements. Whether yours are big, small or indifferent, the champagne bar is a place to mark them.

Moët & Chandon bar in Berlin

Global design studio Yabu Pushelberg (who earlier in 2023 revealed their interiors for Centurion New York), took on the design of the bar, ensuring it stayed true to the heritage of Moët & Chandon. Embracing the champagne house’s opulent past, the interior features rich cream tones and sensual curves. A VIP room is furnished in a luxurious deep red.

The marble-topped bar is richly crafted and offers first-come-first-served seating, while more private tables are set amid niches in the curvaceous space, the whole interior providing an air of grace, fluidity and intimacy.  

George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg, founders of Yabu Pushelberg, reflected on the design process: ‘To design for Moët & Chandon is to understand [that] craftsmanship remains the living soul of the champagne house. We are honoured to be entrusted with the challenge of shaping the visual expression of a Moët & Chandon experience.’

Moët & Chandon bar, ‘The Sixth’ food floor of KaDeWe, Tauentzienstraße 21-24, 10789 Berlin, open Monday – Saturday 12–10pm

moet.com

In a world of increased automation, can humans learn to have compassion for machines? Lawrence Lek’s ambitious installation NOX might have visitors weeping over the fate of a depressed car. The surprisingly moving show, created with LAS Art Foundation, is situated within Berlin’s abandoned Kranzler Eck shopping centre, reimagined into a rehabilitation facility for automated cars. The show’s design draws on contemporary aesthetics of tech and wellness, referencing the experiential, immersive nature of everything from car showrooms to cultural institutions and the Apple store.

On the ground floor, numerous vehicles appear to have crashed into the walls and central escalators, as their headlights illuminate the darkened space. Visitors’ headsets are activated at different points across three floors, with video installation and narrated sessions between a therapist and a self-driving car that has come to the facility for a five-day rehabilitation programme. The car’s monologues explore the nature of memory, intergenerational trauma and consciousness, with his soft voice calling to mind noirish sci-fi. 

Lawrence Lek, NOX, 

Lek – winner of the 4th VH Award, in 2021, which supports Asian artists – has imbued the work with a sensitivity not often associated with machines, and while he doesn’t wish to project a particular mood onto the audience, the depth of feeling is crucial. ‘For me, that connection is the most important thing,’ he says. ‘There is a definite empathetic quality I want to communicate.’ 

In order to get into the mind of his central character, Lek thought in human terms. The car has misbehaved and is being put back in line. He saw parallels with the treatment of troubled children at school. ‘Very often the bad kids are the most promising, but they have issues. Should you send them away because you don’t want them to influence the other kids? I thought it could be the same for these cars. Would you reset the car? Would you wipe its memory?’

NOX evokes the cold experience of humans in a corporate, post-industrial world. The car is being treated with care, but this is in order to get it back into working shape and carry out its tasks with minimal fuss. ‘There are corporate practices for making people feel better and corporate practices for making machines work. In this super-intelligent, self-driving car scenario, you get both. In our world,’ considers Lek, referencing protective measures such as airbags and seatbelts, ‘it’s often uncertain if things are there for human or corporate benefit. Let’s save humans, but let’s save humans so they can’t sue us for liability.’

The show also touches on the role of professional care within an increasingly automated system, with the top-floor installation inviting visitors to cosplay as AI therapists. One film features equine therapy, as the car is taken for an emotional drive alongside a horse. ‘I was thinking about what happens in fancy treatment centres,’ says Lek. ‘But also, this super-intelligent self-driving car might identify with a creature who is useful to humans until it becomes glue or a handbag. One hundred years ago, horses were essential modes of transport, agriculture, or war, but they became phased out in mechanised societies where they are no longer the working machine.’

The work is eerily devoid of people. On first entering the space, visitors may think they are experiencing a post-human society. But throughout, there are hints at the lives of those who own or run these machines. It’s a poignant reflection of a world that has recently been through severe lockdowns. ‘Where is everybody?’ Lek asks. ‘Are they at home sleeping? Getting everything delivered? Or are they completely gone? This noir mood is sadly very relevant today.’ 

Lawrence Lek: NOX at Kranzler Eck, Berlin, until 14 January 2024

las-art.foundation/de

Locke at East Side Gallery has landed in Berlin, marking the innovative hospitality brand's 14th location globally, and showcasing its refreshing, design-led spirit in the German capital. The aparthotel is also the company's first venue in the city, located on the borders of three key inner-city neighbourhoods, Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg and Mitte. The property follows the launch of Ember Locke earlier in the year, and the previous openings of Munich's WunderLocke by Holloway Li and Buckle Street Studios in east London by New York City architecture studio Grzywinski+Pons – the practice also behind the Berlin space. 

Step inside Locke at East Side Gallery

The new Locke at East Side Gallery features an expansive 176 sleek studio apartments. Each is equipped with its own independent kitchenettes and living areas, as is the aparthotel's usual approach. Many have access to a private balcony for long city views - and all are bathed in light. Guests can lounge at their private space, or spend time at the complimentary co-working area, shared by both guests and locals, strategically ensuring the hotel is embedded into the neighbourhood life this way. A coffee shop, a bar and the restaurant Anima are also on the premises for more options. 

Matthew Grzywinski of Grzywinski+Pons envisioned the space as a playful, chic continuation of the building's context, mixing planting with neutral tones, natural textures, and raw concrete. Meanwhile, pops of colour and furniture with tons of character make sure interiors stand out when they need to. 

A carefully curated music and event programme, as well as rotating art on site, highlight Locke's creative edge and invites the city's inherent dynamism into the property. This is reflected in the restaurant's approach too, as explained by head chef Andrea Lannicella: ‘It’s important to keep the true nature of ingredients and introducing creative twists to culinary traditions is vital. Berlin is an inspiring setting that encourages exploration and experimentation in the field of food and culture and this will be reflected in our offerings at Anima.’

'We are thrilled to be opening our first Locke in Berlin, a city of innovation and creativity. Locke at East Side Gallery has been a very special project for us and the finished result is an incredible offering. With an exciting partnership in place with audiophile bar and restaurant Anima, spectacular views across the River Spree and located in a great location within the trendy inner-city districts Friedrichschain, Kreuzberg and Mitte, we are excited to open the doors and welcome people to Locke at East Side Gallery,' said Stephen McCall, Locke's CEO.

lockeliving.com 

A Berlin house in the quiet neighbourhood on the edge of the Grunewald Forest has been extended by London based O'Sullivan Skoufoglou Architects, who took a single-storey house with a pitched roof and transformed it into a modern brick-and-limestone villa. Inspired by US architects Moore Lyndon Turnbull & Whitaker, who consoled Postmodern architecture with landscape in San Francisco, this dwelling is both romantic and protective, an effect achieved through its strong materiality in response to the woods.

Berlin house by O'Sullivan Skoufoglou Architects

Although O’Sullivan Skoufoglou is based in London, the project felt close to home, because the client was the brother of architect Jody O’Sullivan, practice co-director with Amalia Skoufoglou. For 15 years since moving in with his family, O’Sullivan had already been ‘designing, debating, amending, iterating’ the house over the years. Now that the children were grown, it was time for a home refresh, introducing more flexibility and privacy, while making the most of the scenic, linear plot. 

This time it was to be a bolder transformation. The duo replaced the pitched roof with a new two-storey, timber-structured volume (its form guided by local planning regulation, as advised by local executive architecture practice Tectur). They carefully-deliberated a robust material palette that would age well and reflect the patina of the forest: limestone from Dietfurt, one of the oldest quarries in south Germany; brickwork from Belgium; and naturally-oiled solid oak window profiles. 

The long shape of the house did present some challenges for the interior plan, which the architects solved with inspiration from Charles Moore's New Haven house. In a similar way to the latter, they carved out the staircase from a central rectangular void, from which the plan unfolds, succeeding in balancing privacy, openness and interconnectivity influenced by Mies Van der Rohe’s Lemke House in Berlin.  

The interior is lined with natural materials and smoothly-finished surfaces. There are solid ash and ash-lined plywood walls in the hallway and staircase. The kitchen features solid oak and linseed-oil-stained veneered panels, a counter of emerald quartzite from Poland and terrazzo flooring from Italy. Elegant, seamless and unified, these materials hide practical in-built storage essential for family life. 

It’s an interior approach the architects consistently return to: 'Having practised in tight urban sites in London, we’ve become familiar with the need for as much storage as possible without closing up space,' says Skoufoglou. 'We’ve often used joinery to do so and enjoy working with joiners and on-site carpenters to incorporate different door configurations, when budget allows.' And in that case, when it comes to this suburban villa, it’s clear from the generosity of open space and integrated storage – no expense was spared. 

osullivanskoufoglou.com 

If you’ve ever ordered food via a delivery service, then you’re probably aware of ‘ghost’ or ‘dark’ kitchens – commercial spaces dedicated to making meals solely to be packed up and delivered to the person who ordered them. The idea of using 'dark kitchens' as the theme for jewellery brand Avgvst’s Berlin flagship store, designed by Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios, and their subsequent jewellery collaboration started with a conversation between the designer and Avgvst founder Natalia Bryantseva. The pair started talking about nomadic interiors, ultimately landing on the theme together, which led to an Avgvst x Crosby Studios jewellery collaboration.   

Avgvst Berlin: a jewellery store inspired by industrial kitchens

The Avgvst founder moved to Berlin from Russia in 2017, gave birth to her daughter, and two years later, she launched the jewellery brand. 'Avgvst and Berlin are a match,' says Bryantseva. '[They share an] uncultivated beauty, beauty and protest, beauty and disorder, beauty and chaos. All this can describe both my jewellery brand and Berlin.'

Bryantseva and Nuriev, who has designed two retail spaces for Avgvst along with the jewellery designer’s home, started working together in 2017 when Bryantseva opened her first store in Russia. Both Avgvst and Crosby Studios were still rising names. '[Crosby Studios’] projects really stood out for me, they were absolutely unique,' says Bryantseva. 'Those broken tiles, a chandelier made of Bic pens – they just stuck in my mind. And I loved how Harry saw beauty in everyday things, in imperfections, and flaws.' By chance, Bryantseva brought a yellow notebook to the café where they met. 'Harry fell in love with that colour,' says the jewellery designer. 'This is how Avgvst's signature yellow was born, by pure accident.' 

To mark their collaboration on the Avgvst Berlin flagship, Bryantseva and Nuriev created ‘The Cutlery’, a limited-edition collection of earrings, necklaces, and bracelets featuring kitchen utensils. They elevated everyday kitchenware into fine jewellery. A tiny silver spoon is linked to a chain for a bracelet; little spoons, forks, and knives connect to form a necklace; for dangling earrings, the duo joined a Lilliputian-sized fork, spoon, and knife. 'I send her ideas and she brings back the perfect collection,' says Nuriev. 'Miniature is one of my favourite parts of the work. I collect small versions of my projects.'

The retail space, centrally located in Berlin’s Mitte district, features more than Avgvst jewellery – it also has a tattoo studio and secret garden for the community to gather. The resulting colour palette is grey, silver, and Avgvst’s signature yellow. Foldable camping chairs and tables dot the boutique, while blinds were repurposed as wall finishings. Nuriev purchased all the steel appliances and shelving from a kitchen supply store. Although some of the elements are custom, the kitchen elements were primarily left intact. 'I prefer to use their raw potential,' says Nuriev. 

The 'Dark Kitchen' theme simplified things. 'There is no need to produce something new when you can repurpose equipment and tools from another industry,' adds Bryantseva. 'Restaurant equipment is made of steel – we wanted steel display cases, which are durable, have the right height and convenient drawers. So why not just reuse them? We both liked the decision.' 

Visitors can also make an appointment for one of Avgvst’s custom tattoos, and Bryantseva plans to hold yoga classes, meditation sessions, and pop-up dinners in the store’s garden. 'The store has never been just a point of sale for us,' says the Avgvst founder. 'It’s a medium for our messages, and, in a way, a temple where you can take communion.'

avgvstjewelry.com

Berlin’s contemporary art museum Neue Nationalgalerie – defined by its glass-and-steel pavilion that hovers above the vast below-ground space where most of the art is held – was one of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s final projects, first opened in 1968. Yesterday evening (12 June 2023), in a continuing world tour of his menswear collections for the house, Anthony Vaccarello of Saint Laurent took over the gallery to host his Spring/Summer 2024 men’s collection (previous shows have taken place in Morocco and Los Angeles, as well as Paris last season). 

The clarity of its design – since renovated by David Chipperfield Architects in a six-year process that culminated in 2021 – reflects Vaccarello’s ongoing desire to distill and perfect his own menswear codes. At his previous menswear show, the designer noted that the O-shaped set in the newly opened Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection gallery in Paris was ‘a symbol of perfection and purity of execution... a recurring, pertinent thread at Saint Laurent.’ At the time, he described the collection as one of ‘ultra-focus’, a continuing exploration of silhouette; namely, the juxtaposition of sharply drawn tailoring and something more louche and diaphanous, which he accounted to the growing synergy between his mens- and womenswear collections. 

Saint Laurent S/S 2024 menswear at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie

Amid the Neue Nationalgalerie’s upper pavilion, here swathed with vast curtains that alluded to a sense of performance (‘dark curtains and smooth surfaces create a dialogue with the building's distinctive grid frame’, said the house), Vaccarello continued to blur the lines of gender in a collection titled ‘Each Man Kills the Things He Loves’. ‘Ideas examined in recent Saint Laurent collections are reprised and developed,’ read the collection notes. ‘Foremost a free interplay between elements considered masculine and feminine. Echoes of the house’s last womenswear presentation emerge in new configurations.’

One such look was a series of plunging scoop-neck satin tank tops worn beneath a broad-shouldered tailored jacket. In the womenswear show, a similar combination had been teamed with a skirt for a suggestion of both sensuality and power; here, Vaccarello teamed them with a narrow high-waist cigarette trouser. ‘It all starts with this gesture,’ said the house at the time of distinct padded shoulders, a silhouette which continued in the menswear collection, including a slew of broad tuxedo-style eveningwear (crisp white shirting and bow ties beneath) and trench coats sliced along the back and amplified at the shoulder. 

Elsewhere, the house noted an ‘unexpected lightness’ – trailing mousseline and silk shirting wrapped elegantly around the neck or crisscrossed the body, while asymmetric one-shouldered tops fell away into a train of fabric below. Leopard prints and polka dots recalled some of Yves Saint Laurent’s most memorable collections, a reflection of the house founder’s innate understanding of sensuality and desire.  

The collection came with an accompanying printed publication about the Neue Nationalgalerie, which would be Mies Van der Rohe’s only post-Second World War building – it was constructed between 1965 and 1968 – and is largely considered a masterpiece of modernist design. In it, Saint Laurent describes the architect’s ‘distillation of building elements into an essential language’. It is an apt parallel to Vaccarello’s own pursuit of rigour and clarity in both his mens- and womenswear collections; the search for an essential language of Saint Laurent.

ysl.com

A new architecture book on Tegel Airport celebrates the last days of the seminal German transport hub. Over the past few decades, Berlin’s airports have been in flux as the shifting and psychological borders of the Cold War came down and radically changed who needed to fly from where. For decades during the Cold War, East Berlin was served by Schönefeld Airport, while West Berlin relied on c and Tegel. The latter had its origins in the 1948 Berlin Airlift, when it was quickly established to bolster the city’s cargo capacity in the face of a Soviet blockade.

Revisiting Berlin’s Tegel Airport

Tegel lasted right into the modern era, becoming the city’s primary airport as Tempelhof closed and Schönefeld was folded into the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport, nearly three decades in the making. Tegel itself is now also closed, and for this new photographic architectural monograph, Andreas Gehrke spent over a year making frequent visits to the vast site as operations gradually wound down and the site closed after the last commercial flight on 8 November 2020.

The German photographer’s images show the empty airport to be deeply redolent of a particular era in air travel, before terminals transformed into luxury malls, with terraces of lounges and every conceivable concession. By modern standards, Tegel was ultra-compact, opening with a central hexagonal hub and control tower in 1974. Just five miles from the city centre, the internal distances were gentle strolls compared to the endurance hikes of modern multi-terminal hubs.

Gehrke shows the listed main buildings, which will survive the site’s transition into a new business and science park, as well as the forlorn sights of frozen departure boards and superfluous specialist equipment and infrastructure. 

The handsome volume is limited to 600 copies and is also available in a slipcased edition.

Flughafen Berlin-Tegel, Andreas Gehrke, €55, Drittel Books, DrittelBooks.com

AndreasGehrke.de

In Berlin, Finnish artist duo Grönlund-Nisunen (Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen), and Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda are presenting a joint exhibition, each taking over half of Esther Schipper gallery.

Organised by Olivier Renaud-Clément, Ryoji Ikeda and Grönlund-Nisunen's show is a meeting of technology-powered art minds and follows a longstanding personal and professional relationship between the artists. 

In the first joint presentation of their work, the show seeks to highlight the common elements and distinctions of their practices, which each deploy innovative sound and light to create environments that rouse a phenomenological and intense, bodily response from their audience. 

Viewers may recall Ikeda's epic intervention at London’s 180 The Strand in 2021, a sensory assault course of sound, light and data. One of the standout works from that show, point of no return, has made its way to Esther Schipper. As Ikeda accurately explained of the work at the time: ‘point of no return is a very simple, very intense piece. I paint a black circle on a wall and project light around it, and this intensifies its blackness. It feels like it's always firing, you get a bit scared. It becomes overwhelming.’

The exhibition is the fifth show at the gallery for Grönlund-Nisunen, whom Ikeda describes as 'one of the most important artists to me among my contemporaries'. The duo are known for taking elemental forces – gravity, magnetism, or radiation – and translating these into poetic motifs that envelop viewers in electromagnetic radiation and sound waves. 

A new work for the show, Scattered Horizon, seeks to disorientate viewers by toying with the ordinarily stable motif of the horizon line. ‘The new work Scattered Horizon is an experimentation in a dark exhibition space. Projected slowly-swaying horizontal lines correspond with low sine wave tones modulating with each other, offering a slightly disorienting and meditative multisensory experience,‘ say the duo. ‘We have known and appreciated Ryoji and his work for [a] long [time] and Tommi´s label has also released a record by him. We have exhibited with him on some occasions during the years and it is a great pleasure to be able to do it again.’

Alongside the works by Ryoji Ikeda and Grönlund-Nisunen, a selection of new, recent, and historical works by Estonian sound and installation artist Kaarel Kurismaa will be on view in the gallery's bookstore area.

Ryoji Ikeda and Grönlund-Nisunen's exhibition will be on view at Esther Schipper, Berlin until 25 February 2023. estherschipper.com

Monica Bonvicini’s new exhibition ‘I do You’ at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is nothing short of monumental—a scale that reflects her practice at large. Bonvicini is known for her site-specific, architecturally transformative works, a factor that means although this exhibition features pieces from the 1990s until today, it is not quite a retrospective. Rather, it is an installation representative of her expansive oeuvre but also focused on her modes of feminist and architectural inquiry, specifically tailored to the Mies van der Rohe-designed building. In fact, I found that the smallest work in the show—and the first one encountered inside—truly set the tone: an old TV monitor on the floor plays Hausfrau Swinging (1997), a video showing a woman wearing nothing but a cardboard model of a house over her head. Alone in an empty room, she bangs her head against two white walls. The sounds of the impact ring out with force; she is at once liberated and trapped within a home. Her body might be free, but her head, perhaps her thoughts, are confined. 

The echoes of this woman’s struggle and her fight against the architecture imposed on her sound throughout the exhibition space—the focal point of which is Upper Floor (2022), a functional platform that divides a space renowned for its expansiveness, clarity, and transparency into two levels. The staircase going up is the work SCALE OF THINGS (to come) (2010); three sides are covered in reflective foil inscribed with quotes about architecture (Doors, 2022) and the word ‘desire’ (Desire, 2006); and on top of the platform are sculptures like Bonded Eternmale (2002/2022), Chainswing Belts, and Chainswing Leather Round (both 2022), all of which invite viewers to rest. The floor is covered with Breach of Décor (2020–22), a polyamide carpet printed with hundreds of photographs of Bonvincini’s pants—ranging from Adidas sweats to blue, white, and black jeans—crumpled on the floor. The result is a welcoming, interactive space that could, in theory, resemble a domestic interior. However, the materials used immediately evoke other associations, transforming any such notions into something more reminiscent of lounge areas in Berlin’s clubs: Bonded Eternmale is a set of four design chairs by Swiss designer Willy Guhl, but each one is covered in a piece of black leather connected with a steel ring. The Chainswings resemble hammocks but are constructed from stainless steel chains. Leather accents dangle from one; loose chains collide on the other. 

Moreover, from this platform, the entirety of the exhibition space can be seen. In one far-away corner hangs Bent Glass (2022), comprising LED neon tubes strung tightly together with black leather, simultaneously referencing the traditionally female craft of weaving and the traditionally masculine notions of industrialisation. Along three of the building’s glass walls hangs You to Me (2022), a series of 20 sculptures, each one made of two floor-to-ceiling chains with a black steel handcuff on either end. Visitors are encouraged to lock themselves to the chains, and the rules stipulate they must do so for a minimum of 30 minutes. During this time, they can stand, sit, and look inside or out, but they are trapped in place. Other visitors, meanwhile, circle around them. Chaining oneself is at once an act of meditation and submission, yet when witnessed from the platform, the visitor becomes an overseer: from here, you can watch everyone chained in place, staring at themselves in the reflective foil or outside into freedom. It’s an unsettling feeling, especially when backdropped by the sounds of the hausfrau struggling to escape. In any kind of game of submission, there is both a passive and an active player; in this exhibition, Bonvicini asks the viewer to be both. And in doing so, ‘I do You’ ensures that a visitor’s perspective—towards the space, themselves, and their surroundings—continuously changes.

Monica Bonvicini, 'I Do You', until 30 April 2023, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. smb.museum

Potsdamer Str. 50,
10785 Berlin

We’ve seen the viral videos of people using virtual reality headsets at home, so involved in personal digital realms that they forget the physical limitations of their living rooms. They jump away from a monster only to leap into an IRL wall, or swing an imaginary baseball bat and end up smacking a relative.

It can be awkward to squeeze emergent technologies into physical spaces, let alone more traditional modes of exhibition, commerce, and communication. We are observing in real time the rather haphazard way in which artists (and occasionally con-artists) have been exploring and exploiting NFTs. Equally, artist-made VR can feel awkward in a gallery setting. Spending 15 minutes hooking up to electronic gear, to speculatively explore a virtual artwork, hardly encourages the accidental encounters that we expect in physical galleries.

These are questions New York-based artist Ian Cheng wrestles with – amongst others of a deeper philosophical bent – in his ongoing project ‘Life After BOB’. At its root is a 50-minute narrative anime, The Chalice Study, whose protagonist, Chalice, has had an experimental AI named BOB placed into her nervous system by her neural engineer father. Cheng envisions it as the first of an eight-episode series, which will not only explore a variety of characters, each with ethical and social reflection upon AI technology, but also explore aesthetic and technological capacities as each episode absorbs new modes of making, collaboration, networking, and play.

The Chalice Study is presented largely as a traditionally projected artist film, though future episodes will experiment with new experiences and technologies. Cheng considers this first episode a scaffolding: ‘Can I tell a story? Can I make an animation look like anime and feel entertaining enough within the Unity game engine? Because that will be the foundation for later episodes, which will have more AI and algorithmically driven storytelling.’

The work is co-commissioned by the Luma Foundation, The Shed, and Light Art Space (LAS), and its global tour has so far included Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art as well as Zurich and New York, homes of the first two collaborating organisations. It has now arrived in an industrial space adjoining Berlin’s legendary Berghain for LAS’ presentation. While the film was given a traditional cinematic presentation at previous locations, in its present iteration, LAS head of programmes Amira Gad has overseen a truly immersive and architectural experience.

With Gad’s encouragement, Cheng has drawn inspiration from Disneyworld, particularly its use of mundane fictional details to build a deeply immersive experience. His scaffolding is created in Unity, an engine employed for many well-known video games including Monument Valley, Fall Guys, and Pokémon Go, and increasingly used by artists and filmmakers intrigued by the overlapping of fine art with progressive technology and aesthetics. He has used Unity to create environments formed of countless carefully composed components and characters, a process he terms ‘Worlding’ – not only ‘fleshing out the territory’ of place, character, and backstory as a fiction writer would, but going further to create ‘an actual place that people can inhabit, then have the potentially tedious and difficult task of keeping that world alive’.

His ambition is to create a world so deep in character, backstory, and potential that not only can it contain narrative tales such as The Chalice Study, but the worlding can go on to support interactivity, audience collaboration, and new (perhaps as yet unknown) modes of storytelling.

The Chalice Study follows a scripted, fixed narrative, though background elements of the world react differently for each screening. Future instalments will become more AI-driven, potentially so each retelling of a story may emerge differently in narrative and aesthetic, producing genuinely one-off experiences.

‘The holy grail in storytelling is if I can start a story as an author, and then have a simulation and AI help complete it in a meaningful way,’ Cheng proposes. He had taken on this challenge with Emissaries (2015-17), a trilogy of simulations about cognitive evolution, in which his cast interacts within open-ended narratives. With a dual degree in cognitive science and art practice, Cheng seems to view his works more as ongoing experiments than completed art objects. He states that in Emissaries ‘the main character goes off script and it becomes chaos. It’s entertaining for me, but inherently meaningless – it doesn't coalesce in a satisfying and meaningful way.’

Visitors to LAS’ exhibition finish their visit with a free NFT, an imagined and personalised future character referencing the Life After BOB story. Away from LAS, Cheng has also collaborated with Outland to create 3Face, an NFT forged of aspects of an individual’s personality and their digital wallet transactions to create a unique psychological portrait. Cheng hopes that such NFT owners might appear as background entities in future Life After BOB films, so that anybody ‘can start to participate, influence the artwork, and actually see some of themselves in it’.

The promise of NFTs as a component of audience engagement, rather than a mere vehicle for speculation, is enticing. However, for all the potential technological futures which Cheng’s scaffolding may support, this exhibition is a fundamentally physical and bodied experience, constructed around three phases. Cheng describes the first as a moment of ‘existential gathering’ as guests climb upstairs into darkness, slowly emerging through a horizontal laser field that fills the vast Berghain space like a glistening watery surface. The atmospheric otherness is supported by Lugh O’Neill’s spatial soundscape, designed to play with rhythms permeating the walls on days the Berghain nightclub is in full swing.

‘It’s a prelude to the film, an unconscious spa to massage your brain and mood into feeling the world,’ Cheng explains. Soon, the mellow vibe is interrupted by a sun-like light throbbing at increasing speed until it’s a visceral strobe. Both lighting experiences aesthetically foreshadow scenes from the film, though the artist is also interested in psychological framing: ‘I hope something happens to people's nervous systems, leading to “a sense of surrender to see the film”.’

The actual film plays in a purpose-built cinema within the exhibition space, soundproofed by engineers Arup to shut out the world beyond. Chalice’s traumatic and existential journey is presented with bewildering creativity – perhaps too much for a first-time viewer, but in a way that builds anticipation for future episodes. We follow Chalice as she explores her identity with her infused AI BOB, and then as she reconsiders the meaning of self after it’s removed.

It is fitting that LAS – a young organisation formed to put on technologically infused art encounters in unexpected locations – is presenting Life After BOB in Halle am Berghain. The cavernous space not only has an otherworldly feeling, but is also conceptually aligned with Chalice’s journey. Berghain is a space of escape – in all the excessive, decadent, and kinky ways you can imagine – and clubbers are known for remaining within its thick industrial walls for days. Cheng was drawn to the location as soon as LAS suggested it: ‘In the film, Chalice is stuck in a dreamlike state for ten years, then she comes out, the sun hits her retinas, and she feels every photon like it's stinging her for the first time. I imagined coming out of Berghain, having not seen sunlight for 24 hours, feeling the pain of reality but also a stunned appreciation of “I'm back to the city streets and noise, the normality of life.” You can travel between a dreamworld and the real world fluidly. That's Berghain.’

After the screening, a final phase – Worldwatching – allows anybody to use their smartphone to rewatch an interactive version of the film. Any moment can be paused, cameras rotated, or focus pulled onto seemingly-arbitrary objects to uncover details, presented within a Wiki. ‘You can really break the film in this way,’ Cheng explains, and while this interactive mode is nascent, he hopes that by the final episode it might become the primary experience: ‘Suddenly you're in the world exploring details that couldn't be spoken about in the film itself.’ It’s an enticing possibility, in which audiences don’t just receive the narrative, but become real-time directors for unique and bespoke versions which unfold and evolve based on their input and involvement.

‘LAS is about the future,’ declares the organisation’s director Bettina Kames. It's intriguing to think that the work exhibited here also isn’t so much the end result or a completed art project, but more the acknowledged first steps into a decade-long exploration with outcomes that can only be speculated on at present. Cheng has created his worlding scaffold ready to adapt and respond to new AI technologies so that Life After BOB might become not only an eight-episode anime series exploring the ethics of AI, but also a mapping of existence-altering technologies over their formative years.

He hopes that by the final episode he will have built a world so deeply immersive and rich in character that he can create an Avengers-like episode in which a cast of deeply developed characters return. Cheng thinks that by this stage ‘it's not even a film anymore, but almost like an existential fighting game where it plays itself’, the viewer offering ringside advice as though a boxing coach, guiding Chalice and other anime characters to interpret the narrative ‘in their own style and their own way of being. That’s the dream!’ 

INFORMATION

‘Life after BOB’, until 6 November, Halle am Berghain, Berlin, lightartspace.org; iancheng.com

Catarina Oliveira and Rui Liu’s friendship took root because of a mutual fascination with adaptogenic mushrooms, and their new beauty brand Herbar has grown out of that connection.

The pair meet in a Berlin café when Liu overheard a conversation Oliveira was having about mushroom coffee. Liu, who grew up in China and learned about adaptogens through traditional Chinese medicine, interjected and began a conversation about medicinal herbs, skincare, and natural healthcare that the pair are still having five years on. 

How do adaptogens work in Herbar skincare?

The types and uses of adaptogens are varied but, simply put, they are plants and fungi that respond to physical and toxic stressors – from pollutants in the air to the anxiety of everyday life – by modulating the release of stress hormones from the adrenal glands.

Their particular magic is their ability to adapt to the specific demands and deficiencies of the individual body and, as a result, effectively combat feelings of stress, anxiety, fatigue and more.

When applied to skincare, adaptogens are equally versatile. Herbar’s first product, the Face Oil, uses three hero adaptogens in its formulation to soothe inflammation, enhance elasticity and fortify skin.

They are, tremella, or the ‘beauty’ mushroom, which is known for detoxifying and hydrating properties; the reishi mushroom, which is used to reduce skin inflammation, puffiness, signs of ageing and free-radical damage, while also promoting cell regeneration; and da zao (or Chinese jujube dates), which is rich in iron and vitamin C, and is proven to treat acne, blemishes, and scars.

Herbar’s launch range also includes mushroom-shaped gua shas, which can be used in conjunction with the face oil and are, frankly, adorable (see other gua sha options in our guide, how to use a gua sha). 

Artist-designed branding

While Herbar’s adaptogen-laden formulation is impressive, it is the aesthetics of the brand that really makes it stand out. Oliveira and Liu have recruited a group of their friends in the visual arts, music, and more to contribute to the brand. To kick things off, the founders sent bottles of the Face Oil to artists Laura Le Gal and Lea Woo and asked them to create whatever they wanted in response. The results are a kind of fairy music box from Le Gal and a 1960s-inspired illustration from Woo. 

The brand is also promoting its launch with an ad campaign shot by Nuno Vieira that stars Oliveira’s grandmother and her best friend.

It is a sweet and playful nod to the age-inclusive beauty ethos of Herbar, which is designed to work for all skin types, tones and ages.

INFORMATION

herbarofficial.com

A fiercely political Berlin Biennale curated by acclaimed artist Kader Attia brings works by 70 artists and collectives to five venues and one public location across the German capital this year under the title ‘Still Present!’ Despite its defiant ring (of having perhaps endured, say, a pandemic), the titular proclamation, explains Berlin-based Attia, refers to the imperialist, colonial, and capitalist structures that haunt us in the 21st century. ‘The seeds of fascism are there. They have never disappeared. They are in the blind spots of our perception of modernity,’ he said at the press conference.

The French-Algerian artist’s own practice engages with the notion of repair, and his thesis-driven show is centred on the argument that rendering visible the injuries of the past is crucial to setting a process of correction in motion.

Created together with an international all-woman curatorial team that includes Ana Teixeira Pinto, Đỗ Tường Linh, Marie Hélène Pereira, Noam Segal, and Rasha Salti, the exhibition is dense and at times, severe; the ills it broaches are manifold and tell a global, interconnected story. Algerian artist Ammar Bouras’ video piece Traces (2022) confronts the lasting, devastating impacts of an explosion that occurred while the French carried out underground nuclear tests in the Algerian desert in 1962.

Elsewhere, Yemen-based artist and filmmaker Asim Abdulaziz’s captivating video work 1941 (2021), is a poignantly poetic meditation on the implications of living in a country ravaged by ongoing war. Across different venues, several artists, including Forensic Architecture, Dana Levy, and the duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme look at the asymmetry of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Questions of restitution and reparation are tackled head-on, for example in a work by Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige, who found documents, images, and a collection of human remains of her Sri Lankan ancestors in several ethnological museums across Europe. The artist created a life-size 3D print of herself holding a replica skull of an Adivasi man in a work titled Self-Portrait as Restitution – from a Feminist Point of View (2020). 

The curators were wise to bring Berlin’s tumultuous history into focus not only through artworks but also with the choice of venues: two of its locations are the Akademie der Künste, which expelled Jewish members from its ranks in 1933. During the Cold War, the academy split into two separate bodies, operating on either side of the Berlin Wall. Another venue is the former headquarters of East Germany’s secret service, the Stasi. (The sprawling complex was featured in the 2006 film The Lives of Others.) Today, it functions as an archive and museum.

A three-channel work by Berlin-based artist Omer Fast is playing on hand-held devices installed inside the museum’s cloakroom. Titled A Place which Is Ripe (2020), the work sharply examines the contested use of surveillance cameras in Germany compared to CCTV in Great Britain, where it is widely accepted. On the museum’s upper floor, a heady video work by Turkish artist Hasan Özgür Top, The Fall of a Hero (2020), shows Islamic State recruitment materials explained – down to the choice of ISIS’ favourite font, Trajan – in an interview with a suspect re-enacted by the artist. 

Work after work, the cumulative effect and the density of the issues at hand can feel crushing, or worse – the biennial runs the risk of flattening the very harmful mechanisms it seeks to render visible. Thankfully, the exhibition does offer a few artworks that allow the mind to wander into more poetic realms, for instance in two standout video pieces by Vietnamese artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn.

One is titled My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2017), which melds mythology, history, and magic realism to speak about our relationship to nature. It is narrated as a dialogue between the last Javan rhinoceros poached in 2010 and a 15th-century sacred turtle whose divine sword is believed to have ended Chinese rule. This and a handful of other works across all venues provide much-needed space for viewers to imbue the works with meaning, or, as Attia put it, ‘to hallucinate worlds in which we can maybe try to exist’.

INFORMATION

The 12th Berlin Biennale is on view until 18 September 2022. 12.berlinbiennale.de

On the day of our video call, Jakob Kudsk Steensen is in the midst of an expedition in the Spreewald Biosphere Reserve, a wetland area in the German state of Brandenburg. It is teeming with life and removed from civilisation (he’s had to drive to a nearby small town to get reception). He and his team are at the reserve for a few weeks to study the landscape, paddling around in canoes and wielding underwater cameras, microphones and hydrophones ‘to document all this life that lives between the soil and the forest’.

The work is methodological and meticulous – perhaps de rigueur for an environmental biologist, but highly unusual for an artist. Of course, many artists go to great lengths to acquire insight into their subject. But few have made extensive fieldwork such an integral part of their practice, and fewer still have done so in the service of digital art.

‘I like to dive as deep as I can in my craft,’ explains Kudsk Steensen. ‘To create digital textures the way I do for a rock, I need to take 200 photos just of that rock, look at them, analyse them, and modify them.’ This immersive approach to art-making began with A Cartography of Fantasia (2015), a video installation for which Kudsk Steensen spent two months driving around Murcia to document the afterlife of Spain’s deserted resorts, the legacy of reckless financial speculation. ‘When you move through an environment, you start perceiving movement, time and scale in new ways. And because you’re experiencing it in new ways, you also start imagining new kinds of emotions or landscapes or places in your head,’ he says. 

He describes his process as a reaction to the boom of ‘post-internet art’, the collage-driven works created at breakneck speed for an era of short attention spans and infinite scroll. ‘Around 2015, digital art was becoming this very fast, very commercial field. I just couldn’t connect to that.

This awakening led him to spend a year creating a virtual island for Primal Tourism (2016), modelled on Bora Bora, a popular tourist destination in French Polynesia. His version features abandoned, futuristic architecture amid a primordial landscape. He spared no effort in researching the project, collating satellite maps, tourist photographs, scientific illustrations and drawings from the logbook of Jacob Roggeveen, an 18th-century explorer. Kudsk Steensen rendered the leafy island in dazzling detail, and programmed camera movements so viewers could explore it from the perspective of humans, animals and drones. Beyond its escapist appeal, Primal Tourism tapped into wider conversations around climate change, and the fraught relationship between colonialism and tourism. It set the bar high for virtual reality art and continues to be shown today. Just this March, Serpentine Galleries organised a live multiplayer event on the island, hosted by Kudsk Steensen and three of his collaborators.

While the themes of Primal Tourism reflect more contemporary concerns, its building blocks – a love of nature and a fluency in gaming technology – can be traced back to Kudsk Steensen’s upbringing. As a child, he attended a Steiner kindergarten, which emphasised outdoor learning and play; his family had a fondness for natural landscapes and taught him about plant and mushroom species. When he was nine, they moved to Nørre Nissum, a rural town in western Jutland with a population of around 1,000. ‘At the same time, video games really exploded,’ recalls the artist. ‘My friends and I suddenly had access to these extremely expansive, open virtual landscapes within three-dimensional video games where you could really navigate space. And it just absolutely captured our imaginations and became a huge part of our lives.’

He can still describe in vivid detail his favourite virtual landscape from that time, a multiplayer map called Facing Worlds from the 1999 first-person shooter game Unreal Tournament. The map shows two islands on opposing ends of an asteroid, each with a pyramid-shaped tower reminiscent of a Meso-American temple, while the Earth looms in and out of view in the background like a majestic blue marble. ‘Now it looks like square blocks, but at the time it was considered hyper-real, and had this strange effect of connecting you to something new and virtual,’ he enthuses. Facing Worlds captivated the young Kudsk Steensen and inspired him to learn the tools that would allow him to modify these in-game worlds. So much so that he set his sights on becoming an animator, only to change course when, at his first animation test, he was asked to draw the same character 17 times. ‘But that raw sensation that I had as a kid encountering these things, and the energy it brought, has stayed with me. I still draw on that today.’ 

In art school (first Aarhus University, then Central Saint Martins and the University of Copenhagen), Kudsk Steensen would build virtual worlds, then create paintings of the landscapes within these worlds ‘to make it art’. It was a way to fulfil his passions while conceding to the popular misconception that painting had greater aesthetic merit. He moved away from painting as soon as he graduated and started to build his career around virtual worlds. ‘It’s funny how you have to exit the doctrine of a system you’re brought up in to innovate within it,’ he reflects.

Moving to New York six years ago, the artist found kindred spirits in the growing immersive media sector. One was artist and writer Rindon Johnson, who became the voice of Kudsk Steensen’s Aquaphobia (2017), in which viewers follow a water microbe through a Brooklyn park, while listening to a break-up story between man and the landscape. Another was composer Michael Riesman, music director of the Philip Glass Ensemble, who created algorithmic music for the video and VR piece Re-animated (2018), inspired by a recording of the mating call of a Hawaiian Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird that had been the last of its species. The most important partnership of all has been with sound artist Matt McCorkle, whom Kudsk Steensen met through New Inc, the New Museum’s creative incubator programme. Like Kudsk Steensen, McCorkle has a love of nature and fieldwork, often gathering sounds ‘in extreme isolation to capture our natural world at its purest essence’. The project in Brandenburg’s wetlands is their fourth together. 

‘Jakob came over to my studio one night, and I played some whale sounds I recorded for a then-upcoming show at the American Museum of Natural History, “Unseen Oceans”. We realised at that point our work gelled together like magic,’ McCorkle remembers. ‘We have a similar fondness for the minute details in nature, often exploring the tiny worlds that pass us by in our everyday lives. For example, a small mossy patch on a decaying log is an entire world in and of itself, if you look and listen close enough. Patience is key to the work we create together. We let nature guide our work and expose to us how she wants to be presented in a particular ecosystem.’

Shortly after meeting, Kudsk Steensen and McCorkle began to work on The Deep Listener (2019), an artwork commissioned by Serpentine Galleries in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and architect David Adjaye. It involves an app that takes its users on a journey around Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, using augmented reality to present the sights and sounds of five elements of London’s ecosystem – London plane trees, bats, parakeets, azure blue damselflies and reedbeds – and to illuminate the ecological interplay between humans and non-humans. The title refers to the slow and embodied process of attentive listening that is necessary for learning and reflection. 

Kay Watson, Serpentine’s interim head of arts technologies, recalls: ‘Jakob’s was one of over 350 ambitious works submitted for the first Serpentine Augmented Architecture commission.

Kudsk Steensen’s next stomping ground was markedly different from London’s green spaces. Accepting a residency at the Luma Foundation in Arles, he decided to research the wetlands of the Camargue. ‘You have these basic life forces of salt, algae and water. Depending on how dry or wet it is, everything will feel and look completely different,’ he says. He documented this process over a year for a multiplayer VR piece titled Liminal Lands (2021), created with McCorkle and now on view as part of the group show ‘Prélude’ at La Mécanique Générale.

His residency in Arles coincided with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘I really started thinking about embracing hyperlocal sensitivity, and what it meant to suddenly travel the international art circuit a lot less, and really be present in the landscape,’ he says. ‘It shifted something inside of me, deeply and profoundly. Through this much more extreme engagement with nature, I found out that you have to spend enough time in a place to start seeing it, to realise that it looks and feels different than anything you can imagine.’ There was more work to be done on wetlands still. And so when the Berlin-based art foundation Light Art Space approached him for a new commission, he decided to stick to the topic, and go further.

Light Art Space offered him a major solo exhibition at the Halle am Berghain, one of the German capital’s most celebrated cultural destinations. It’s an extraordinary opportunity that is well aligned with Kudsk Steensen’s ability to reach a wide range of audiences (besides art lovers and gamers, he has a loyal following among the fans of K-pop sensation BTS, who invited him to present a virtual forest ecosystem, Catharsis (2020), as part of global public art project ‘Connect, BTS’). ‘I work with people from different fields. We don’t care about the conventional frameworks, as long as we have a meaningful engagement with people,’ he comments.

The exhibition also comes with a heavy burden of expectation. ‘It’s not the type of show where you just roll in as an art world figure with your artwork. You have to embrace what the building has been as a nightclub, and what it might become, without alienating its history and existing community, without appearing to gentrify yet another space in a city that used to have all this energy.’ 

To live up to its venue, the exhibition, titled Berl-Berl, would have to be epic, collaborative, democratic and one-of-a-kind. Kudsk Steensen’s solution was to create a virtual swamp that would take over all of Berghain, encouraging viewers to contemplate the forgotten complexity and beauty of wetlands. Joining forces with fellow artist Dane Sutherland, Kudsk Steensen began to research historical perspectives on wetlands and swamps. They learned that many major cities in the world are connected to wetlands. Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin, is one big wetland that emerged from a glacial valley 10,000 years ago, and Berlin’s name in fact derives from the old Slavic word ‘Berl’, which means swamp.

Kudsk Steensen explains that across Europe and North America, this changed in the 1800s, when wetlands came to be seen as undesirable. People began to remove and pave over them. Today, freshwater wetlands account for only one per cent of our planet’s ecosystems. As the artist laments, ‘they have become lost from the public imagination’, despite their exceptional biodiversity, ability to filter toxins, and the protection they offer against rising sea levels.

His next port of call was Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. Its director, Professor Johannes Vogel, has been on a mission to revolutionise the way data in natural history museums is used. ‘Natural history museums have to inspire and encourage people to see themselves as part of nature,’ says Vogel. ‘It is extremely exciting and inspiring to learn from artists how human emotions can be evoked and how we can engender dialogue. It is fantastic to see how Jakob has a different approach to a museum object than we as natural scientists have – how we can engage through textures, sounds or virtual access.’ 

The museum has a vast sound archive, including recordings of frog songs from the wetlands of Brandenburg since the 1960s. Going through these recordings, Kudsk Steensen was struck by how much they have changed. So it wasn’t just that enlightenment ideals banished wetlands from our midst, those that remained were increasingly damaged by human activity, too. He also met with the museum’s scientists. The soil in wetlands, they told him, can include organisms that died 2,000 years ago but have yet to dissolve. ‘So the energy is still in the soil. It’s kind of alive,’ says Kudsk Steensen. ‘Then when you look at past religions and folklore, they also talk about the soil as being alive.

With this in mind, he set out to explore the Spreewald Biosphere Reserve, bringing along McCorkle, producer Andrea Familiari, and field biologists from the museum, whom he values not only for scientific knowledge but also for their emotional connection to their subject. ‘I like to bring experts from different fields with me into the landscape. I give a sense of direction, in the theme of the work and the story, but they’re very much themselves, responding to the landscape and being part of the artwork’s creation.’ 

There are precise steps to complete in the wetlands, such as using macro photogrammetry to 3D-scan flora and soil in ultra-detail. But Kudsk Steensen has allowed for spontaneity, too. ‘Once we’ve spent weeks sailing in canoes, looking around, we can experience and see things we didn’t imagine. We procure new sensations, spaces, visuals and sounds, bounce that back on our original material, and then go to the studio to put all this together in a single, holistic experience.’

Back in Berlin, where Kudsk Steensen has been doing a residency at Callie’s, a non-profit experimental institution, he assembles his raw material into a virtual wetland that is at once hyper-realistic and surreal. Gentle waters lap against cragged boulders and gnarly trees cloaked in emerald green moss, pristine reeds stand tall in turbid pools, luminescent fungi emerge from fertile soil. It looks at once like a sophisticated video game and a Romantic landscape painting that has come to life (later, when asked to name his artistic heroes, Kudsk Steensen mentions both the iconic Japanese game developer Hideo Kojima and the 19th-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich).

McCorkle drew from the Museum of Natural History’s archival material and his own recordings to create orchestra-like compositions, which feature three species prominently: the common frog, the European fire-bellied toad and the cuckoo. Further birds, bats and an aquatic insect called the water boatman play supporting roles. ‘The main soundscape consists of many different compositions, each with their own emotional toll, lightness and influence,’ says McCorkle. 

Humans are notably absent from this virtual landscape, and indeed from Kudsk Steensen’s earlier works. ‘We have so much art already that focuses on the human. I want to direct the eyes at the world beyond our human domain, to bring a sense of mystery, imagination and fascination,’ says the artist. Still, in a departure from previous practice, Kudsk Steensen has invited the Venezuelan musician Arca, whose ‘morphing sensibilities’ he has long admired, to contribute to the project. At Kudsk Steensen's invitation, Arca improvises raw vocals that are then layered into McCorkle's soundscape, along with spoken examples of various names by which Berlin has been called over the centuries, further rooting the virtual experience in its physical location.

The seven metaphorical verses of Berl-Berl – the human world, fungi world, root world, trees, frozen world, skies and water – come together in real time rather than following a predetermined sequence. Nine LED screens broadcasting live video have been installed in the cavernous Halle am Berghain, once the machine hall of a district heating plant. ‘The landscape exists on a server, which tells us what time of the day it is, what things look and feel like. And it sends that signal to all the individual computers, who render their own local version of that environment with those shared variables, which shows on the screens. So you get this constellation of screens throughout the space, offering little windows into the landscape, and something shared among them,’ says Kudsk Steensen.

Creative technologist Lugh O’Neill developed the sound technology to transform McCorkle’s compositions into a generative soundscape, parsing the information from the server into the sound experience. ‘This information dictates when and which parts of my composition play, how long they play, how much they connect to Jakob’s visuals and the overall emotional timbre they emit,’ says McCorkle.

Ambitious in scale and astonishing in detail, the resulting artwork is a marvel of VR technology. Kudsk Steensen is already thinking about Berl-Berl’s life beyond Berghain: to extend the reach of the installation, he has created a web portal so viewers can tune in from anywhere in the world. He also points out that because the artwork is virtual, it can infinitely morph and change, adapting to future contexts in which it will be shown.

‘Berl-Berl contributes to the development of new aesthetics and formats, presenting a radical new visual language,’ says Bettina Kames, the director of Light Art Space. ‘The heart of the world Jakob is bringing to life lives on a gaming engine, taking this technology to a new extreme. Very few people have worked with this complex mix of technical elements and scale in the art world. But importantly, Berl-Berl is not about highlighting technology, but using it to offer a certain kind of experience to discuss wider issues. It will allow new perspectives on our environment and create a space for connecting to an endangered ecosystem.’

For Kudsk Steensen, the ultimate goal is to expand the possibilities of virtual reality technology and digital art. ‘I don’t think of myself explicitly as an activist artist, though I work with themes like extinction and the preservation of wetlands.

Kudsk Steensen concludes: ‘This is not a narrative we often hear, and I think that’s the strength of it. That’s what I’m here for: I want more poetry in technology.’

INFORMATION
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl, 4 June–23 October 2022, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark, aros.dk

lightartspace.org

jakobsteensen.com

ADDRESS

Aros Allé 2
Aarhus 8000
Denmark

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When it comes to art in Berlin, it can be hard to decide where to start, especially in a city famed for such a lively and burgeoning creative scene. 

As with the recently opened Venice Biennale 2022, contemporary women artists are currently leading the way in Berlin, with institutional highlights being American art icon Barbara Kruger’s takeover of the upper level of the recently refurbished Neue Nationalgalerie, local artist and former fashion designer Alexandra Bircken’s nightmarish installation at the Kindl, and Candida Höfer’s staggering portraits of vacant public spaces at Museum für Fotografie. Also not to be missed are Swedish sculptor Nina Canell’s meditation on minerals, animals, and technologies at Berlinische Galerie, and Libby Heaney’s musings on quantum physics at Schering Stiftung.

Following on from Gallery Weekend Berlin, we’ve collated some first picks to get you started:

Exhibition: ‘Die Blüten von Berlin’ (Petrit Halilaj & Alvaro Urbano with Annette Frick)Gallery: ChertLüddeDates: until 28 May

Berlin-based artists Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano, who are partners in life, have worked together to produce pieces that reflect the polarity of built environments and natural spaces. Their show at Chert Lüdde, named after a song by late drag queen Ova Maltine, pairs their monumental flowers with Frick’s intimate photographs of the queer and punk subcultures of Berlin. They have also created vibrant, two-dimensional artworks out of repurposed wallpaper from the recent renovation of the gallery space – which had been a decoration store for 70 years – in an additional nod to Berlin’s history.  

chertluedde.com

Exhibition: Xenia Hausner, ‘Unintended Beauty’Gallery: König Dates: 29 April – 19 June

Austrian painter Xenia Hausner presents 12 new paintings exploring her idea that ‘in art, terror is nothing but the start of beauty’. Hausner’s defined but dream-like images take on new layers of meaning when we learn of her former career as a set designer. Hausner describes the people she paints being a part of her story. Her work is a theatre in itself, capturing intriguingly staged moments of fictional connection. 

koeniggalerie.com

Exhibition: Sterling Ruby, ‘In Warm Shroud. Kissing the Bloom Crux. A Frost Window.’Gallery: Sprüth MagersDates: until 30 June

Sterling Ruby’s wide-ranging new show captures the artist’s ability to move seamlessly across mediums, resulting in striking and dizzying works that dominate spaces and immerse viewers. ‘In Warm Shroud. Kissing the Bloom Crux. A Frost Window.’ draws from themes of verticality, duality, craft, domesticity, and shifts in scale – notably in a series of new, monumental wall-based works for the show that blend the worlds of painting and textiles. 

spruethmagers.com

Exhibition: Thomas Struth Gallery: Galerie Max HetzlerDates: until 21 May

Spread across two of Galerie Max Hetzler’s Berlin galleries, German photographer Thomas Struth’s untitled show encompasses two bodies of work with juxtaposing aesthetics but interlinked themes. Bleibtreustraße 45 holds images of environments, from the tangled cable web of scientific research facility basements to the winter landscapes that Struth became familiar with across two years of pandemic-induced isolation. Across the road is Bleibtreustraße 15/16, which holds new additions to his 1985 Family Portraits series. The two spaces pay homage to the mutual experience of solitude, and the paradoxical unity we have all felt in more recent times. 

maxhetzler.com

Exhibition: Ai Weiwei, ‘The Pleasure of Home’Gallery: NeugerriemschneiderDates: 30 April – 14 May

Ai Weiwei explores a variety of mediums in his new show, which spans photography, film and images created from Lego. His starting point was a set of photographs he found on the shores of Lesbos, which are assumed to be lost by refugees on their journey to Europe. Ai welcomes the refugees into his creative and personal space by placing these images next to similar personal images of his own family. He then contrasts the playful medium of Lego with images of incarceration and military activity, and in doing so raises questions about social discourse and rouses the viewer to take a stand against violence and oppression.

INFORMATION

Gallery Weekend Berlin runs from 29 April – 1 May 2022. gallery-weekend-berlin.de

Plenty of artists explore science – its methods and mysteries, precision, occasional poetry, darkest prognoses. Few, if any, are as qualified for that entanglement as Libby Heaney. The author of papers with titles such as ‘Spatial entanglement from off-diagonal long-range order in a Bose-Einstein condensate’, Heaney has a degree in physics, a PhD in Quantum Information Science, and held post-doc positions at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore.

Heaney, though, began to question how little the power, potential and application of quantum mechanics, particularly in quantum computing, was being examined in a wider context – social, political or ethical. Looking for new ways to both leverage and question quantum computing’s super-charge, she completed an MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins. Today, her work interrogates the intersections of quantum mechanics and physics, at once mind-bending and multipurpose; technology, especially AI; and representation, identity and bias, cultural and coded.

Heaney’s Elvis, 2019, is a twin-screen AI-driven deepfake that puts her head where the King’s should be and vice versa, while Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot, 2016-17, sees an AI-version of DH Lawrence’s lusty aristocrat navigate digital dating. Her latest and most ambitious work to date is Ent-, which opened at the Schering Stiftung in Berlin in February, before moving on to the Arebyte gallery in London in May. Commissioned by Light Art Space, a German foundation set on exploring the relationship between art, science and technology, Ent- is an immersive installation that employs quantum computing, AI and gaming technology to reimagine the phantasmagoric central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. 

Heaney’s 360-degree projections are designed, in part, to showcase the creative potential of quantum computing while also warning of its seductive appeal, its power to do bad or simply speed up search suggestions. Yet Heaney’s interest in quantum computing isn’t about speed, it’s in its potential to generate the weird, to break free from the binary and conjure up new forms, establish new connections, imagine the unimagined.

Few artists open a portal into the weird like Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights’ central image is famously full of naked frolicking, sensuous contortions, giant birds and fruits, unicorns and anal flower arrangements. It’s a psychedelic garden party of your dreams/nightmares and art critics have long argued over whether the panel represents a tempting prelapsarian Eden or the lapse in full swing. It’s heady material. 

‘The challenge was: “how can I create an experience that is weird enough to show the potential of quantum, but not so weird that the audience feel sick or like they have been attacked?”’ Heaney says. Essentially, Heaney started with her own watercolours of Bosch’s strange landscape, architecture and animals, and then scanned and regenerated them with quantum computing-based AI. ‘You get a kind of scattering and the images then reform. It sloshes the image around, like water sloshing around a tank,’ Heaney says. The viewer finds themselves in a Boschian universe that dissolves and takes new shape around them.

For Heaney, Bosch’s imagery also addresses the idea of technology as a new faith system, its own beguiling, terrifying garden of delights. ‘People defer to these technologies as if they hold the answer,’ she says. ‘I wanted to position quantum computing and quantum machine learning as a new religion.’ But just as there is no fixed interpretation of Bosch’s image – it might be joyful play or nihilistic soul-destroying decadence, heaven on Earth or a good way to hell – Heaney wants to suggest different possible futures for quantum computing, one liberating and mind-opening, plural and diverse, and another of digital surveillance, of AI-determined loan applications and prison sentences, of maddening distraction and an attention economy in overdrive.

Quantum mechanics is itself a way of understanding the universe, of course, a conviction that complex mathematics describes physical reality or new models of the universe that are as fantastic as Bosch’s imaginings. Before making the shift into art, Heaney’s speciality was ‘entanglement’ – one of the two confounding premises of quantum physics. Put properly, entanglement is when two or more ‘delocalised’ particles – and they can be very far apart indeed – are ‘connected’. Einstein rather poetically called it ‘spooky action at a distance’. 

Quantum mechanics’ other brain-buster is ‘superposition’ which, as Heaney puts it, is the ability of an electron to be in multiple states at the same time. In principle, it is nothing radical: ripples in a pond can come together in superpositions, guitar strings vibrate and create interwoven wave forms and assume superpositions. But for an electron, an elemental particle, to do that opens cans of cosmic worms. It is also, though, the key to quantum computing.

In traditional ‘classical’ computing, a ‘bit’ is either 1 or 0. Quantum computing uses quantum bits (also known as qubits), which can be different combinations of 0 or 1 at the same time, which means they can attack problems in parallel rather than sequentially. This supercharged performance has huge implications in areas such as AI. 

Heaney has cleverly ‘gamed’ Ent- with quantum code and the video game engine Unreal. She is determined that the installation is immersive, fully felt and experienced, rather than Instagram fuel. Ent- follows its own agency and can collapse the projection at any time determined randomly by an algorithm. This is also an allusion to one of the most puzzling aspects of quantum mechanics: electrons behave like waves, assuming a quantum superposition, until you try to measure that wave and it ‘collapses’. The electron then behaves like a less interesting fixed-state particle (the basis of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment). 

Ent- then gets at the way quantum mechanics unfixes us from assumed realities, suggests strange relationships and qualities, at a subatomic level and beyond, but also how much remains mysterious for now. Quantum computers are emergent and expensive technology, largely in the hands of tech giants such as Google and IBM. But there are ways to simulate what quantum computers can do, and play with possibilities. And Heaney is encouraging quantum creative play that gets at these strange but fundamental truths. ‘There are connections between facets of reality that we could never even have dreamt of,’ says Heaney. ‘I’m sure they will shift how people see and understand the world and our place in it.’

INFORMATION

Libby Heaney ’Ent-’, until 1 May 2022, Schering Stiftung, Berlin. scheringstiftung.de; lightartspace.org; libbyheaney.co.uk

A recently opened Asian diner in Berlin’s Mitte district, designed by Danish studio Mentze Ottenstein, creates a new community framework by looking at the diverse identities that exist in the city today. Dashi is the creation of Thu Thuy Pham and Thao Westphal, Vietnamese-born childhood friends who were raised in Germany.

For many families that emigrate from their motherland, a career in the food and hospitality industry is often the most straightforward route. ‘Dashi is about coming to terms with who we were as kids and being proud of our upbringing,’ says Pham.

Dashi takes its inspiration from the cha chaan teng cafés found in southern China as early as the 1940s, and kissaten, Japanese tearooms and coffee houses dating back to the early 20th century and known for breakfasts of thick toast with eggs.

A crown moulding and a constellation of ceiling lights give the otherwise austere space depth. ‘We like to see a space and try to figure out what was the history here. Like archaeologists, we look at the layers and try to look for the potential in a space,’ says Mathias Mentze, of Mentze Ottenstein.

‘For Dashi, instead of changing the travertine floor or the bronze doorknobs, we made decisions that highlighted that quality we liked and that spoke the same language as our ideas,’ elaborates studio co-founder Alexander V Ottenstein.

The finished space is nuanced in its complexity and full of surprises that align with the diner’s overall concept. The main dining area is flanked by windows, letting in generous natural light. An inviting counter of natural oiled ash, pushed forward and to the side, is where the front-of-house team greet diners as they enter the space, which includes wall lamps designed in 1965 by Sigvard Bernadotte for Ifö Electric, ash wood panelling and custom-made, American diner-style leather stools in a muted red.

Dashi’s menu features South East and East Asian classics, as well as a few familiar Western dishes with a twist, influenced by yōshoku, a Japanese interpretation of European dishes.

The diverse kitchen team includes members of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian and American descent. ‘Our parents came here and sold Chinese and Vietnamese takeout that they adapted to the Western palate because it was the way to survive. But we wanted to flip that,’ Pham says of Dashi’s ‘melted cuisine’.

Highlights include chicken congee with Chinese doughnuts, katsu sando with banh mi accoutrements, korokke curry, fries dusted in Sichuan pepper, and winter melon iced tea with grass jelly cubes. Of the restaurant’s name (taken from the eponymous Japanese stock), Westphal says, ‘Dashi is a base ingredient that allows us to build on Eastern and Western flavours. Although it’s Japanese, the terminology resonated with us.’

The pervading theme in all of this – the concept, the menu, the design – is a certain duality that comes from finding harmony in diversity. ‘An Asian diner is really a juxtaposition of two worlds,’ Pham explains. ‘We are in-between people. We feel at home anywhere and nowhere. Dashi itself is a project of contrasts. It is the juxtaposition of many things.'

INFORMATION

A version of this article appears in the April 2022 issue of Wallpaper*, on newsstands now and available to subscribers.

dashi.de

mentzeottenstein.com

Alexandra Bircken often compares her work to skin. For her, it’s a membrane between internal and external; it’s what protects us, what makes us permeable and what functions as the canvas we dress and exhibit to the world. It seems logical, then, that the German artist began a career working with the second skin of humanity: fashion.

In the early 1990s, Bircken left Remscheid, her hometown near Cologne, for the UK, with her lifelong friends Wolfgang Tillmans and Lutz Huelle (she and Huelle will stage a joint show at Paris’ Fondation Pernod Ricard in November).

At Central Saint Martins, which counts Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and John Galliano as alumni, she studied fashion design. ‘I had been reading i-D and The Face, and [London] is where I wanted to be. The underground fashion and eccentricity didn’t exist – and still doesn’t exist – in Germany, so there was no choice,’ she explains via Zoom from her Berlin home. ‘I followed what I wanted to do, which was to play around with individuality.’

And nowhere was individuality as extreme and extravagant as it was in London in the 1980s and 1990s. In its hedonistic, polysexual and ephemeral underworld, fashion school craft collided with high-concept art; each night was an opportunity for an act of personal theatre. These were decades drenched in the brazen sexuality of Madonna, the fetish gear of Vivienne Westwood and the transgressive energy of Leigh Bowery – performer, artist, ringmaster for London’s underground club scene. The last made a huge impact on Bircken. ‘Every week you would sew something new for the weekend, for the club. It wasn’t meant to last; wearability wasn’t a big thing. This is what Saint Martins taught us: if you can’t find what you want, you make it yourself,’ says the artist, who would later lecture on the college’s MA Fashion Design course, and is now a professor of sculpture at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts. 

After graduating in 1995, Bircken co-founded the label 'Faridi', but a career in the fashion world didn’t quite scratch the itch. ‘When you work in the [fashion] market you have to meet the market. You have to make people look “beautiful”, which is why I didn’t like fashion and the system. Nobody wears anything ugly or extreme, everybody wants to look thin and sexy, the typical female stereotype, and I got really fed up.’

The solution was a gradual shift to art, one that retained sartorial sensibilities and skills, but saw the body as a ‘moving sculpture’. It involved a deep exploration of materialism, man versus machine, and man as machine. 

Bircken’s show, ‘A-Z’, which opened in 2021 at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst, and will move to southern France’s CRAC (Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitanie) in March 2022, is her largest to date. The thematic show begins in 2003 with explorations into literal and symbolic ‘knotting’: from experimental early textile works and sculptures in leather, to her own placenta, preserved in Kaiserling solution. ‘A-Z’ culminates in a subtle, but significant site-specific intervention, one that reconfigures the skeleton of the Brandhorst building: wooden grilles on heating vents have been replaced by bones (cow ribs and chicken legs). ‘I had this feeling that wherever you go in the world, you walk on other people’s bones. It’s the overlaying of history,’ she says. 

Another significant and frequent subject in Bircken’s work is the motorcycle and its related gear as an ultra-protective skin. She still rides, but not as much as she did. Her fascination lies in how these machines – unlike cars and bicycles – complement the shape of the body in an intimate, almost carnal union. ‘The whole body is involved. It’s very dangerous; you have to become one with it in order to survive', she says. ‘But a lot of people don’t see the gracefulness of motorcycles’. 

In her work, burly motorbikes are rendered defunct. They are severed to reveal their bowel-like innards, turned upside-down, or infantilised as a rocking horse; their conventionally masculine heft exposed as a myth. The motorcycle is one of many examples of Bircken’s deft manipulation of readymade objects, whether machine-made, manmade, or animal-made – all underpinned by a deep affinity for the human condition, in all its unruly variety.  

Bircken’s work doesn't directly comment on the state of the world. It is not necessarily of this world. But it does highlight the fragility of flesh against the threats of an increasingly unstable, mechanised culture, asking: can bodies still hold themselves?

Bircken describes her other current show, ‘Fair Game’ in Berlin, as a comment on the pandemic’s effect on club culture, and a ‘free interpretation’ of Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones (1971). In the Irish writer’s short story, 200 naked bodies – one per square metre – are contained in a cylinder called the ‘abode’. The lighting and temperature fluctuate drastically, resulting in blindness, skin problems and a climate hostile to sex. The floor and walls are made of rubber, deadening all sound. There are ladders and niches in the walls – some ‘lost ones’ climb ladders to nowhere, others, vanquished, remain on the floor. Beckett’s tale is a version of hell; Bircken’s nightmare doesn't look far off – but in ‘Fair Game’, there’s more at play. 

The work is installed in the Kesselhaus (boiler room) of Kindl, previously a brewery, later a nightclub, and now a stage for contemporary arts. The space is cubic and vast: a cathedral of exposed brickwork with a glass roof. Were it not for Bircken’s bodies strewn across the floor, this might be a space of sanctity. But there is nothing sacred here. Rubber figures dangle from rafters, some hang by their necks, others scale the walls. They climb ladders made of cow ribs, stoop on niches, or lie lifeless on the floor. They are limp, faceless, deflated and void. But devoid of what? Bones, blood, stuffing, air? 

Bircken first introduced these gimp-suited bodies, made from black latex-dipped calico, in ‘Eskalation’ at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2014 (where she contended with David Chipperfield’s famously irregular angles) and again in the curated group show ‘May You Live In Interesting Times’ at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. 

Her scene is the aftermath of something violent. Perhaps it began in fetishistic pleasure and took a sour turn, or was a social experiment that turned into a massacre. But it could just as well be a factory, a production line of clothes: unworn, inanimate and cold.

There are notable modifications for Bircken’s Kindl show. She has embroidered body parts onto the suits: spines, hearts, eyes, ovaries, long blond pubic hair, genitals. ‘It’s a link back to the reality of the human body, and what’s under the skin,’ she says. There are real ostrich eggs placed where wombs might have been; they rupture with oily rags similar to those used to clean motorcycles; possibly a symbol of birth, or, as Bircken notes, a reference to a molotov cocktail. 

This time, the suits come with genitals. During our call, she picks up a pen and paper, draws a phallus and holds it up to the camera. ‘You pull it out and you have a penis, or you stick it in and you have a vagina’. This toying with genitalial forms felt like a logical development for Bircken, but she is keen to keep things non-descriptive: ‘There are no testicles, no labia, it’s very simple,’ she explains. 

There is one exception in this sea of tar-coloured flesh: The Tourist, a figure who presides over the battleground. She is clad in American football-esque shoulder pads, bold, block-coloured attire with a motorcycle exhaust for a head and epoxy resin clogs on her feet, giving an illusion of levitation. But is she a perpetrator or saviour? Has she slaughtered them all, or arrived too late to help? 

Elsewhere, coloured glass incubators resembling alien eggs contain a variety of stuffed objects. In the centre of the space, another black rubber body is draped over beer barrels, which are interspersed with loudspeakers. They emit a soundtrack composed by Bircken’s partner, the musician Thomas Brinkmann. ‘It’s clubby, but then it’s also breathing or a heartbeat. It’s a relentless boom boom boom,’ she says. This sound – pulsating around objects which may have once had a pulse – references the building’s history, and cuts through the deathly silence of this pitiful scene. 

Is this a fair game, as the artwork title suggests? Is it a game at all? Is it game as prey, or, in a culture of ever-intensifying anger and accusation, people as fair game for criticism? However you read it, Bircken has created an ambiguous, impenetrable scene. All we have is speculation. 

Bircken’s work has the intricacies of a vascular system – a tapestry woven with all that makes us complexly and beautifully human: our tangled, changeable and unattainable desires. We are deeply corporeal, but ultimately machines. In celebrating craft, and obliterating material hierarchies she weaves disciplines together like threads on a loom. In an overwhelming world, Bircken gets under the skin. 

INFORMATION

Alexandra Bircken, ‘Fair Game’ is on until 15 May 2022 at Kindl, Berlin. kindl-berlin.com

heraldst.com

A version of this article is featured in the March 2022 issue of Wallpaper*, on newsstands now and available to subscribers

The hallowed, industrialist halls of Berlin’s Kraftwerk have seen a great deal over the years, but, until now, they have never experienced the work of acclaimed Light and Space artist Robert Irwin, and it turns out they’re quite the match. 

Formally the Berlin-Mitte thermal power station, Kraftwerk was built around the same time as the Berlin Wall in 1961 and served as the then-East Berlin power station until 1997. In 2006, after lying abandoned for years, it was resurrected as techno club Tresor. 

The American artist is currently saturating this vast arena with Light and Space (Kraftwerk Berlin), his largest installation in Europe to date, on view until 30 January 2022. The project was commissioned by Berlin-based LAS (Light Art Space), a non-profit art foundation working at the intersection of art, new technology and science. Though nascent, the foundation is rapidly securing a reputation for technology and science-rich projects staged within iconic spaces, most recently with Berl-Berl, Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s VR ode to wetland ecosystems at Berlin’s Halle am Berghain. Elsewhere in the city, Irwin is staging a solo show at Sprüth Magers (on view until 26 March 2022) featuring ethereal lighting artworks and monolithic sculptures.

Shortly after LAS was founded, co-director Bettina Kames travelled to the US to meet Irwin who was invited to conceive a new commission in Berlin. ‘Without an exhibition or a single project in [LAS’s] portfolio, Irwin accepted the invitation and took the plunge!’ explains Amira Gad, head of programmes at LAS and curator of Irwin's show. 

Irwin is a central figure of the radical Light and Space movement which emerged in 1960s California. This futuristic wave of art, characterised by light experiments, science-infused optical manipulations and the reimagining of environments, sought to challenge human perceptions, and utilise the new array of materials and technologies that emerged in the mid-20th century. 

Irwin’s seminal contribution involves site-conditioned artworks that use the effects of light to expand, warp and saturate the senses. As the artist said in 1986: ‘My ambition is, in a sense, to make you see a little bit more tomorrow than you saw today.’ The movement – past and present – is currently being explored in-depth at Copenhagen Contemporary, featuring work by Anish Kapoor, Ann Veronica Janssens, Bruce Nauman, Helen Pashgian, James Turrell, Judy Chicago, Larry Bell, Olafur Eliasson and Robert Irwin. 

Irwin began his Light and Space series in 2007, characterised by fluorescent light tubes arranged in rhythmic yet cryptic patterns. This new iteration at Kraftwerk involves several firsts: it’s Irwin’s largest to date, staged on a monumental freestanding wall measuring 16m x 16m. The work uses blue fluorescent lights in combination with the artist’s traditional white, and, in another diversion from convention, Irwin’s piece for Kraftwerk is double-sided, allowing the space to be saturated in light from all angles. ‘The design of the concept had to be fit for a building that is iconic, of that scale,’ Gad continues. ‘It had to be an installation that would feel monumental but also feel embedded within the architecture. In a way, it's about giving “power” back to the former power station.’

INFORMATION

’Robert Irwin: Light and Space (Kraftwerk Berlin)’, until 30 January 2022. lightartspace.org

Irwin’s solo show at Sprüth Magers Berlin runs until 26 March 2022. spruethmagers.com

ADDRESS

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JIGI Poke is a new poke restaurant in Berlin that forgoes the sunset colour schemes and tropical motifs of most other poke places in favour of a raw, industrial approach. The space has been designed by Vaust, a young design studio that won a Wallpaper* Design Award 2020 for its ‘Toy’ sculptures. 

The sculpture series offered three different ‘Berlin Perceptions’ by using stacked disks of various materials to portray a particular moment in the city’s history.  One design, a tower including polished brass, MDF ivory, and salvaged oak from the Berliner Stadtschloss, pays homage to the city’s 18th century; another, a stack of steel, latex, and black marble, represents its modern reputation for hedonism and nightclubbing. 

Vaust brings brutalist flavour to the poke restaurant

Vaust is a distinctly Berlin studio. Its two designers, Joern Scheipers and David Kosock, create bold, weighty, and monochromatic decorative objects and interior designs that align with the city’s characteristic aesthetic. JIGI Poke is a natural continuation of their oeuvre, with its dramatic combination of concrete and stone textures in tones of grey and beige. 

Two rhombus-shaped concrete tables dominate the centre of the space. They are surrounded by a smattering of stools made from tree trunks or hunks of stone. The arrangement makes for a roomy, communal seating plan that leaves visitors plenty of space while still encouraging conversation. 

‘This project is about re-evaluating the ideas of hospitality in times of a pandemic,’ say the designers. ‘Guests place their orders at a freestanding cash desk, which transfers the task to an isolated preparation lab where the bowls are processed. The customer takes a seat and picks up the tray once being informed to do so. The process avoids unnecessary crowds and waiting situations.’ 

The menu is a selection of typical poke bowl ingredients – salmon, tofu, edamame – enlivened with strange twists like ‘hot banana’ sauce and a spicy ‘Mexico crunch’ topping. 

Overall, the space is spare but not uninviting. The severity of the stools and tables is offset by warm beige walls and airy linen curtains, while a black and white image of a Hawaiian fisherman is projected onto the wall. 

‘A man sitting on a rock with just the very essential bit of clothing on his body is preparing his gear to go out and hunt,’ say the Vaunt pair. ‘We appreciate the intimacy, the balance and honesty of this situation.’

INFORMATION

vaust.studio

jigipoke.de

Since department stores were introduced in the 19th century, they have revolutionised the way we shop. In Berlin, Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe), continental Europe’s biggest department store, with a sales area of some 60,000 sq m, has been one of Germany’s foremost retail outlets since it opened its doors in 1907. The store has since witnessed two world wars, emerging in the 1950s as a notable feature of the nation’s post-war redevelopment and subsequent economic success. But after a century of trading, changes in shopping habits – not least those brought about by the internet – called for a major rethink and a complete revamp. Enter, OMA. 

The (mostly) Rotterdam-based architecture practice was asked six years ago to make a master plan for the building to make it more accessible and interesting to a wider demographic. ‘It's basically a question of updating it,’ says OMA partner Ellen van Loon, who led the project with founder Rem Koolhaas and project architect Natalie Konopelski.

‘We are in a period where virtual and physical shopping are required by both the customer and the retailer. In that sense, department stores are going to be a much more connected kind of enterprise. And then the question will be: how do you connect the two worlds? That is now one of the big questions in shopping,’ says van Loon.

KaDeWe reimagined by OMA

To meet this challenge, the architects decided to scale down the vast space, dividing it into navigable sectors. ‘The floor plates are enormous, and with limited vertical circulation and very few orientation spots, visitors can easily feel lost. So we divided the space into four “quadrants”, each with its own architectural expression, and all of them connected by “primary streets”. It is almost like urban planning, as in a city, but translated to the inside of the building,’ she adds. Each quadrant is accessed from a different street entrance and is organised around a central atrium.

Earlier in October, the vertical circulation in the first quadrant was finished and opened to the public. It features timber-clad escalators in its heart that are a bold presence yet also a warm backdrop for all the shops.

KaDeWe, together with other landmark stores such as London’s Selfridges and Galeries Lafayette in Paris, helped define department store traditions. ‘What is interesting about these buildings is that during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, most department stores chose to seal up all their windows with a plasterboard wall. We decided to open them all up again and that is probably the most important thing we did in getting back the historical value of the building,’ says van Loon.

‘That brings two big benefits: firstly, it gets daylight into the space; secondly, the building also has an enormous amount of balconies all around, and they will be put in use again on the upper food and beverage levels,' she continues. The daylight extends further, as the original vaulted rooftop has been transformed into a glass volume emerging from the structure. Visitors can now view the sky from the ground floor upwards and, by taking a final flight of escalators to the roof, can enjoy grand views of the sprawling city below.

OMA is also creating the first installations for the ten display windows at the front façade of KaDeWe on the corner of Tauentzienstrasse and Passauer Strasse. ‘The shopping window does not necessarily need to show products, but can act as a portal to the city. It could be a teaser – our theme is currently to play with the senses because the senses are a substantial part of shopping,’ says van Loon.

Ownership of such historic buildings implies a certain degree of social obligation. ‘The retailers operating these spaces must also give something back to the city. If an institution like KaDeWe could do that on a cultural level, it would be beneficial for everybody; and the interest it creates would also allow the department store to connect to people from all walks of life and of ages,' the architect adds. ‘Andy Warhol once predicted, “Some day, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” It took a very long time, but it feels that we are now finally at this point.’ 

INFORMATION

oma.com

If there is one place that can tell the story of Berlin’s complex history through design, it is the city's underground system; and it is exactly this part of design and infrasturcture heritage that the latest addition to architecture books publishers Blue Crow Media’s 20th century series on architecture guide maps explores. The newly launched Berlin U-Bahn Architecture and Design Map is a collaboration between Berlin architecture historian Verena Pfeiffer-Kloss and photographer Nigel Green. 

Connected by almost 150 kilometres of track, the U-Bahn is a mostly underground network that hosts up to 530 million passengers a year. From the subway's pre- and postwar expansion to Berlin’s unification, this publication offers us an insight into the architecture of a selection of fifty stations built from 1902 to 2009. The map is a vibrant visual reading of the whole city's design history told through the intimacies of architectural features and details, such as typefaces, tile patterns and material colour palettes, reflecting on Berlin's social, political and economic past. 

Through this playful storytelling, we are whisked into the dynamic aesthetics of the subway system - from the muted tones and brutalism of ‘the ghost stations of East Berlin, to history lessons at Heidelberger Platz and fairy tales at Paulsternstraße,' explains the publisher.

The publication highlights the influential work of architects such as Alfred Grenander and Rainer G. Rümmler, who both left a lasting impact on the architecture of the U-Bahn transit network. On top of being the inventor of Kennfarben, the colour coding on the underground system still in use today, Grenander was heavily influenced by the Jugendstil, Art Nouveau, Futurist and Modernist movements at the time, with one of his most famous station designs being Alexanderplatz. Rümmler is perhaps best known for his colourful, bright and bold mosaics and platform murals that we see in stations like Fehrbelliner Platz and the colourful glazed ceramic tiles of stations such as Jungfernheide.

Published in English and German, the map includes an introduction, original photographs by Green and texts accompanying each of the stations in it. It is testament to the design value, rich, layered information and joy found in one of Berlin’s most important transit systems; an ode to the multiple intersections found in Berlin’s underground design histories.

INFORMATION

bluecrowmedia.com

The ‘mind body connection’ is nothing new. It stretches as far back as Ancient Greece (birthplace of the ‘gymnasium’), where thinkers such as Socrates and Plato taught that physical health and intellectual vigour go hand in hand. 

Flash forward to the modern gym and you will often find meditation classes and restorative yoga on offer, or hear about the mood-improving benefits of cardio, but you will rarely find a place that concretely describes the physical and mental benefits of particular exercises.

Berlin gym in tune with your biorhythms

Hagius is a new Berlin gym that is attempting to do just that. The space offers training sessions grounded in neuro-athletic training and sports science, with a particular focus on ‘biorhythms’, in line with the suggestion that our bodies require different stimuli at different times of day. 

For instance, the circadian rhythm determines when our bodies are awake and when they can relax. ‘Following the sun,’ the Hagius team writes, ‘we would be active in the mornings and calm in the evenings and the time signals to trigger this response can naturally be found through light, food, sound, scent, and movement. If we don’t live in harmony with these rhythms (as is often the case in our modern day lifestyle) our ability to perform and regenerate steadily decreases.’ 

Hagius tries to mimic or stimulate these natural rhythms through cool and warm toned light strips installed throughout the space. So that, for instance, cool white light is dimmed to minimise the proportion of blue light waves that would otherwise disturb the natural melatonin production. 

Hagius uses scent in a similar way. The gym has collaborated with Berlin-based fragrance studio Aoiro to create scents made from natural ingredients such as citruses, herbs, spices and woods to promote different biorhythmic responses to the time of day.  

As a result, all individual training and small group courses – from kettlebell to, boxing, circuit training, movement, pilates and yoga – are accompanied by targeted stimulation of the brain and nervous system through light and scent. The idea being that these different sensory factors can be used to create the ideal environment for the body’s natural rhythm at that particular moment.

‘We wanted to create a place in Berlin where we could offer a different kind of training experience,’ says co-founder Timothy Hagius about the space. ‘Physical performance starts in the mind. Movement is regulated by the central nervous system and sensory input plays a significant role in that process.’ 

Timothy, a set designer and director, established Hagius with his brother, Nicolas, a model. It feels like a particularly Berlin story, that two such brothers would open up a multisensory gym experience in a former post office, and it certainly gives Hagius cachet. 

The brothers worked with architects Pierre Jorge Gonzalez and Judith Haase to create the gym’s minimalistic interior, with ash floorboards from Germay’s Havelland region mixed with stainless steel and granite fixtures. The result is a space with few distractions, making it easy to focus purely on your workout. 

‘We asked the architects to design a space that would give guests a sense of being disconnected from everyday life during their workout, despite being located in the middle of the city,’ says Nicolas. ‘We wanted to minimise external irritants and purposefully counteract the excess noise of modern life.’

INFORMATION

hagius.de

Tomás Saraceno believes that we’re at the point of no return. His current installation at Copenhagen’s Cisternerne – navigable only by boat – is titled ‘Event Horizon’, after the astrophysical term for the moment when gravity makes it impossible to escape the pull of a black hole.

His art, which from the start has investigated the relationship between humans and the planet and called for a radical transformation, has taken on an added urgency in the face of the climate emergency.

Parallel to his studio practice (which is in itself unconventional, he may be the only artist to operate a state-of-art spider lab and work with arachnid collaborators), he also runs the Aerocene project, which aims to answer the question: ‘Is it possible to circumnavigate the world, using no other resource than the sun?’

Through fossil fuel-free flights, made possible by balloon sculptures that are kept afloat by the sun and travel with atmospheric currents, he has captivated audiences around the world, from the otherworldly salt flats of Bolivia to the storied vineyards of Champagne. A human flight in January 2020, at Salinas Grandes in Jujuy, Argentina, travelled 1.7km in 21 minutes, setting 32 world records and demonstrating the viability of a project that once sounded like a pipe dream.

Aerocene is a collaborative endeavour, involving scientists, engineers, and volunteers of all backgrounds, and inviting the general public to join in: anyone can borrow an Aerocene backpack to try out themselves, and the less adventurous can still get to know the project through the Float Predictor app, imagining the zero-carbon airborne journeys of the future. For his recent collaboration with Maison Ruinart, Saraceno additionally created an augmented reality experience which would allow the trajectories of Aerocene flights (‘Aeroglyphs’, as he calls them) to be shared with a global community.

The Argentine artist’s upcoming exhibition with Neugerriemschneider, his first with the Berlin gallery since joining its roster in 2021, continues his exploration of environmental concerns and how we can live together differently. From the exhibition content – visualisations of air quality, photos printed using air pollutants from Mumbai, and blown glass works that heighten our consciousness of breath – to auxiliary gestures such as shifting the gallery’s opening hours with daylight and powering it with renewable energy, we get a sense of the expanse and ambition of Saraceno’s groundbreaking practice, which will only continue to soar in the years to come.

INFORMATION

studiotomassaraceno.org

aerocene.org

‘Tomás Saraceno: We Do Not All Breathe The Same Air’, 18 September – 31 October 2021, Neugerriemschneider, Berlin, neugerriemschneider.com
‘Tomás Saraceno: Du Sol au Soleil’, until 24 April 2022, Domaine des Etangs, Massignac, France, domainedesetangs.com
Museo Aero Solar For an Aerocene Era, until 21 November 2021, part of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice, labiennale.org

A version of this article appears in Wallpaper’s October 2021, 25th Anniversary Issue (W*270), on newsstands now and available to subscribers – 12 digital issues for $12/£12/€12.
Meet more creative leaders of the future nominated by Michèle Lamy here.

You don't need to be an architecture scholar to know of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and opened in 1968, the museum is not only a key cultural destination within the German city, holding a rich collection of modern art, but it is also a global icon of 20th century modernism. But years of use and no major renovation works since its original opening left this seminal building in need of an update. Enter David Chipperfield and his team at Chipperfield Architects, and the venue has just reopened following an extensive, six-year-long facelift. 

The architects worked with the landmark piece of architecture's clean, almost minimalist form that became emblematic of the International Style its creator represents – a glass-wrapped low, orthogonal shape using grids, metal and concrete that was pioneering for the time. It is also the only project by Mies van der Rohe to be realised in Europe, before the modernist emigrated to the USA.

The refurbishment works include the interior and exterior of the main structure as well as its outdoor sculpture gardens, prioritising ‘a minimum of visual compromise,' explain the architects. Functional and technical updates ranged from air-conditioning, lighting and security repairs, to redesigning the café, museum shop, disabled access and art handling infrastructure. Intervention to the original fabric of the building, however, was kept as light as possible.

‘Taking apart a building of such unquestionable authority has been a strange experience but a privilege. The Neue Nationalgalerie is a touchstone for myself and many other architects. Seeing behind its exterior has revealed both its genius and its flaws, but overall it has only deepened my admiration for Mies’ vision. Our work was therefore surgical in nature, addressing technical issues to protect this vision. Certainly carrying out such a task in a building that leaves no place to hide is daunting, but we hope to have returned this beloved patient seemingly untouched except for it running more smoothly,' says David Chipperfield. 

Apart from the architectural celebrations linked to the building works, the reopening also sees the launch of a number of new exhibitions and displays in the gallery's vast spaces – including one focusing on American sculptor Alexander Calder.

INFORMATION

davidchipperfield.com

Tucked away on the café-lined streets of north-east Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood is kaleidoscopic Wunderkammer of beauty goods. MDC Next Door is a new concept store that is, as its name suggests, next door to its sister store, MDC Cosmetic. 

The original, MDC Cosmetic store opened in 2012 as a space that showcased cosmetics, fragrances, and beauty tools, primarily from under-the-radar independent brands or forgotten historic labels. 

Over time, the store has cemented its role as an incubator of new talent and a bastion of the best that beauty has to offer. It stocks the entire range of Frédéric Malle fragrances, Buly 1803, and Susanne Kaufmann skincare, alongside hair tonics from the historic Bavarian apothecary Apomanum, and the strange but beguiling soaps and creams by German designer Frank Leder (fragrances include ‘jam preserves’ and ‘porcini mushroom’). 

MDC is also responsible for opening luxury apothecary Santa Maria Novella’s first German outpost, and is one of the few places that offers spa treatments – from a further Berlin space, MDC Cure – in accordance with Santa Maria Novella’s historic medicinal traditions.

Skincare fanatics will be happy to know that MDC Cure also offers Biologique Recherche treatments that adhere to the French brand’s ‘Skin Instant’ philosophy – the belief that every skincare regime should specifically address the environmental and physical stresses of the moment.  

The new MDC Next Door is a continuation of it forebear’s philosophy, but in more bombastic surroundings. The interiors of both locations were designed by Gonzalez Haase AAS, a Berlin-based studio established in 1999 that works in architecture, scenography and lighting, but Next Door is distinctly more vibrant and playful. 

Gonzalez Haase AAS drew its inspiration for the new MDC project from Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘building cuts’, for which the New York artist carved giant holes into downtown warehouses and sliced residential homes in half. Matta-Clark’s influence is clear from the black cut-out register and the round, overlapping mirrors in shades of yellow and pink that are dotted about the store. 

Speaking about their work for MDC over the years, the architects say that, ‘each project teaches us things that we use in the next project or the one after that. You take something from the past and create something new for the future. The new is created by putting certain elements together in a different way.’ 

It’s true that MDC has created something new by putting together different beauty elements in unexpected ways. Products and treatments from big-name brands, little known innovators, and historic labels combine for a unique take on beauty retail.

INFORMATION

mdc-cosmetic.de