The last time I visited Berlin it was -3°C so to say that I arrived on this occasion unprepared for the weather is a bit of an understatement. Of course I’d forgotten that that was January and this was June. So given that it was a scorching 30°C, my coat enjoyed a relaxing stay at the hotel while I hit the streets in search of finest contemporary art Europe has to offer. I was visiting to see the Berlin Biennial Contemporary Art and I had four venues to visit in two days.
My first stop was the Neue Nationalgalerie, on Potsdamer Strasse, which was designed by the acclaimed Modernist architect Mies van der Rohe. The space itself is like a vast glass display case and much of the work on display here was commissioned and made for this site specifically. Visitors to Berlin can’t help but notice the city’s Modernist architecture and interestingly it was to this aspect of the city’s heritage that many of the artists had chosen to respond.
One of the stand-out pieces at the Nationalgalerie was a film work by Susan Hiller. The Last Silent Movie is a haunting audio piece featuring archived recordings of languages now extinct or severely endangered. These eerie voices seem to speak to us from beyond the grave and as listener its hard not to feel in some way responsible for their failure to survive into the modern world.
From there I headed up to the lovely leafy area of Mitte and the Kunst Werke, the organising venue of the Biennial. This gallery in an old margarine factory is so big the entire gallery space of the Model would easily fit on one floor. There are four floors and a basement so that easily filled the rest of my first day in Berlin.
The following day I took in the final two venues. The most interesting of which was the Skulpurenpark Berlin. The name conjured up visions of an outdoor museum where I could stroll about in the sunshine taking in the art. When I got there I found that ironically the Skulpurenpark is a vast area of wasteland, which was once a death strip in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. In this space artists had staged interventions and created site-specific artworks, the most intriguing of which was a film, based on a true story by Norwegian artist Lars Laumann about a woman so obsessed with the Berlin Wall that she married it.
The following morning getting off the plane in a drizzley Dublin was the first time in the whole trip that I was glad I had brought my coat after all.
-emer mcgarry
