Berlin Art Week 2021: The Long-Awaited Delight of IRL Shows

Rediscover a familiar feeling this fall September: the fear of missing out. While last year’s start into the art season was overshadowed by super-spreader dinners, cancelled exhibitions and dashed hopes for a reopening, art enthusiasts can now stroll in relative safety from shows to dinners to parties that define Art Week in Berlin’s trusted institutions, collections and project spaces, with Gallery Weekend kicking off on 17 September. A gallerist told me on the first day of his show how insecure he now feels about making small talk. “What should we talk about — Corona?” he asks. “Please, no.” I reply.

The vast expanse of outstanding new works is instead poised to become the center of conversation instead of the hardships over the past 18 months. Indeed, many of the projects, shows and events that debut in mid-September were planned long before the pandemic, or “Before C,” as sculptor Alicja Kwade describes it. Her show In Abwesenheit at Berlinische Galerie is unashamedly monumental, and the title evokes the long months of lockdown. But Kwade refuses to name the pandemic henceforth, and instead speaks about her Kreuzberg exhibition as a very extended self-portrait in absence.

The walls are covered with A4 printouts of her genetic code in minuscule writing. The oblong space is jammed with a black steel ring. Attached to the structure are 24 speakers that emit a soft pulse at varying speeds, representing the artist’s heartbeat. The work hints that Kwade envisions new heights for her work, ever since she put a constellation of polished stones held together by steel frames on the Roof Garden of the Metropolitan Museum in New York in a 2019 installation, and after moving her factory-like studio to the far outskirts of the city. And yet, the most touching aspect of her current presentation is the double helices of bronze iPhones. They are stacked at the height of the artist’s friends, and at the preview, two stickers, showing her and her husband’s names, were still visible on the floor. Indeed, while Kwade specializes in big statements about the universe and the human condition—“That’s what makes a human,” she says about the tiny vials that hold the chemical elements a human body is made of — but it is these intimate touches that make her work stand out.

Kwade’s refusal to name the virus that kept most of us inside for a long time resonates, and not far from Kreuzberg at the Kindl—Centre for Contemporary Art, Sol Calero’s installation Isla recalls what has been missing during that time. Berlin Art Week has set up a garden intended to open the gallery circuit to people beyond the typical art crowd, and Calero’s piece is the centre: a colourful hut that doubles as a stage and a hangout. A few steps lead up to the lavishly decorated pavilion, which resembles her expansive 2019 installation at the gallery Chert Lüdde, where the Caracas-born artist transformed the rooms into a tropical, psychedelic environment memorializing her late grandmother. 

At Kindl, Calero has created a light, ephemeral architecture. “The word pavilion is related to papillon,” she explains, noting the French word for butterfly. And like an insect flying away, the BAW garden will “take off” when Art Week is over, while the pieces of Calero’s structure will be repurposed. 

Upon entering the Kesselhaus, adjacent to the garden, one might be surprised to pass from colorful lightness to the heaviness of Alexandra Bircken’s work. The walls of the large space are tiled in a sickly yellow, with fixtures here and there that betray its former use as a brewery. Strewn around the hall are empty black latex sacks resembling human shapes, which the artist had custom-made for the exhibition. On a rope ladder that seems to be assembled from bones, one such form ascends and draws the gaze to the ceiling window. Below on the floor, black beer kegs are stacked like stalagmites in an alien landscape, and the only color is that of a female figure in the middle of the space, made of knitted parts and bits of transparent resin with a large blade in her hand.

A similar interest in the joyfully sinister comes to the fore in Schinkel Pavillon. The former venue for Erich Honecker’s cocktail receptions, an octagonal structure appended to one of its classicist neighbors, is now a Kunstverein, an art association that has a reputation for its excellent shows and extravagant summer parties. For Art Week, the Pavillon pairs late Swiss artist H.R. Giger and South Korean artist Mire Lee. The former is the creator of the terrifying extraterrestrial in Ridley Scott’s space horror movie Alien (1979) and a staple on posters in teenage bedrooms. Long relegated to the realm of mass culture, the Pavillon brings together Giger’s sketches and diary entries, as well as sculptures. Lanky female figures, half machine, half cyborg — is there a hidden xenofeminist reading? — the exhibition suggests that the artist’s work might be closer to surrealism than to the endless repetitions of a movie franchise. It also includes the Harkonnen chairs and table created for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ill-fated Dune adaptation. 

Lee, whose organic sculptures have been presented in group shows in Seoul, Lausanne, Amsterdam and Bolzano, is a surprisingly good fit. Born in 1988, she creates kinetic sculptures from hoses and motors, which she combines with organic materials like hair and viscous substances that circulate tirelessly within. The gallery’s architecture resembles a honeycomb, which curator Agnes Gryczkowska describes as  “womb-like.” Giger is difficult to transport from the pop imagery to an art space, and Gryczkowska hastens to add that Lee’s pieces are commissioned as a direct response to Giger. Perhaps this is where some criticism of the late Swiss artist’s male fantasies with their sexualized, objectifying imagery is possible. Of course, the show likely wouldn’t have made a feminist out of Giger, but that is probably not the point. The gooey ensemble works as an intricate play of seduction and repulsion.

The Schinkel Pavillon is also the driving force behind Disappearing Berlin, a series of events in spaces that are about to, well, disappear. The city changes rapidly, as the truism goes, and the series makes use of the gaps and free spaces before they vanish—an inherently melancholy project. The upcoming iteration will use the Bierpinsel as a stage, a 47-metre structure in Steglitz. Built in 1976, it was used as a restaurant and a tavern—hence the name—but has been empty for more than a decade. Sotheby’s has tried to auction the place, but to no avail. Its future is unclear, which makes it a perfect venue for the collaboration between the series and Reference Festival, a biannual platform for new formats in physical and virtual reality. Disappearing Berlin takes place Saturday and Sunday, including a performance by Amnesia Scanner, the sometimes AI-driven, strangely catchy music project of Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala, as well as videos by Cyprien Gaillard, Cao Fei, a talk with artist Simon Denny, and DJ sets to wake up the dormant 1970s structure.

Some say that this is only possible in Berlin: discourse around art in the ruins of an imagined future. Some might even say this is the only thing that works on the capital’s art scene, and point to the failed attempts to set up art fairs and to the difficulty of keeping big collections firmly anchored in the city. Yet the gallery scene is buzzing, as shown by the Discoveries program, which focuses on emerging artists who have not yet had big solo exhibitions.

Take Daniel Hölzl, who exhibits at Dittrich & Schlechtriem just off Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. The 1994-born Austrian is not entirely unknown, however. Architect Arno Brandlhuber once allowed Hölzl to drill a hole in the outer wall of a building for an installation, and that hints at his affinity for architecture, which he displays in his show Bait at the Mitte gallery. White sacks made from parachute silk billow from the first and second floors of the building, while carbon rods are attached with ropes and magnets to the facade, as if the sculpture encrusts the architecture. 

Located in the former no-man’s-land between Mitte and Kreuzberg, the gallery alexander levy presents a video installation by Su Yu Hsin, which is much more immersive than its backstory suggests. The artist, who has already shown at the Taipei Biennial, has created a unique environment with her essay-like videos that document landslides in Taiwan, their impact on the environment and its visualisation. With its oblique framing and multiple overwhelming screens, the show is a sublime landscape painting for the anthropocene. 

There’s no shortage of talent elsewhere in this year’s gallery shows. Win McCarthy’s reduced but strikingly personal assemblages at Galerie Neu. Brook Hsu’s tender, forceful abstract paintings at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. Not to mention the extensive group of exhibitions at Wilhelmhallen in Reinickendorf, whose galleries present a selection of their roster until the end of Art Week, as well as the finalists of Berlin Masters and group exhibition Untitled (Matchstick) presented by SLEEK Magazine and commissioned by UGG. Finally, there are the institutional shows, like Thea Djordjadze’s first solo exhibition at Gropius Bau, or the hauntingly stark group show Illiberal Arts at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which features exhibition design by artist Anne Imhof.

There is an undeniable current of new energy and excitement at BAW 2021. And in a way, that happened when the federal government pumped 2.5 billion Euros into cultural life, which also partially covered some gallery shows currently on view. All of which comes as relief to many art enthusiasts, as art doesn’t have to be seen solely on Instagram and sale-ready jpgs anymore, but finally, once again, can be experienced in the delightful social mess of in-person gallery openings.