JENNY SCHLENZKA

Anyone who knows the Gropius Bau will recognise the feeling. You walk through the entrance and the building immediately asserts itself. The Neo-Renaissance landmark on Niederkirchnerstraße opened in 1881, before electric lighting existed, and it was designed around daylight: streaming through tall windows, spilling across the atrium, reaching into every corner. JENNY SCHLENZKA says she still catches herself feeling slightly amazed when she walks in, even after two and a half years. It is less a sense of routine than of continued wonder and perhaps that is the first thing to understand about her. She treats enthusiasm not as temperament, but as a way of working.

Schlenzka became director in September 2023, succeeding Stephanie Rosenthal, after spending two decades in New York. She first arrived there as a student at NYU before joining MoMA as a curator, where, under Klaus Biesenbach, she helped establish the museum’s first department dedicated to performance art. She also pushed successfully for performance works to enter the collection, including early pieces by Tino Sehgal and Roman Ondák. Later, as Executive Artistic Director of Performance Space New York, she worked with figures such as Donna Haraway, Juliana Huxtable and Underground Resistance. From the outside, her career can look unusually direct: a steady path from the experimental margins into the centre of the institution. She left Berlin at 24 with a scholarship and the feeling that the city moved too slowly. Today, with two children and a different rhythm to her life, she sees that slowness differently. To explain it, she borrows an image from the writer Kirsty Bell: Berlin is built on sand and marshland, while New York stands on granite. New York constantly throws energy back at you. Everything pushes upwards. Berlin absorbs it. The energy sinks into the ground. Listening to Schlenzka speak, it becomes clear that she no longer sees this as a flaw. She sees it as a form of balance. What surprised her most about the Gropius Bau was the freedom. Not institutional rigidity, but almost the opposite: a place willing to trust. Trust is also central to the way she works as a curator. Asked how she chooses the artists she believes in, she speaks about intuition, though not in the simplistic sense of instinct or gut feeling. For her, intuition needs to be informed. It is something accumulated over time through looking, reading and conversation. The word she returns to is liveliness. Sometimes, she says, a work of art sets some- thing in motion internally and the feeling stays with her long afterwards. That is how she knows. Plenty of art can appear convincing without ever really feeling alive. That philosophy has practical consequences. In one of the building’s most beautiful galleries, right at its centre rather than hidden away, Schlenzka has installed a per- manent play space for children conceived by the German painter Kerstin Brätsch. It is free, open and deliberately unstructured. There are no workshops, no prescribed activities and no warning signs telling children what not to do. Instead, there are simply ‘loose parts’: materials children can use however they want. For an institution built around control and supervision, it represents a surprisingly radical gesture. Several international institutions have come knocking to create something similar.

At the same time, five artists’ studios have been integrated into the building on the condition that the artists themselves remain publicly present. For Schlenzka, accessibility and experimentation are not in conflict with large-scale programming. The Marina Abramović exhibition, for example, brings in a broad audience while also helping create the conditions to stage Gabriele Stötzer at the same time. The blockbuster makes the risk possible. Then there is the project she discusses with particular excitement: an exhibition exploring techno through the connected histories of Berlin and Detroit. She has already travelled to Detroit with the team from Tresor to begin developing it. The story she wants to tell is ultimately also about Berlin, even if techno itself did not originate there. In her view, that only makes the story more interesting. Asked how she hopes this period at the Gropius-Bau will be remembered in five years’ time, she answers immediately: as a time of radical openness. A place where visitors could feel the presence of artists the moment they entered. No theoretical posturing, no curatorial jargon. Just a building that feels alive. Spend time at the Gropius-Bau today and you begin to understand why Jenny Schlenzka still occasionally feels the need to pinch herself.