Collector Karen Boros on how the Boros Foundation invited 115 artists to take over the city’s infamous club

Behind the scenes at Berghain’s Studio Berlin

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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, Berlin´s famed clubs shut down overnight. Over the following weeks, art exhibitions, biennials, and museum shows were postponed or canceled, meaning that the city´s artists had nowhere to show their work. While galleries have been slowly reopening, ongoing government restrictions mean that nightclubs remain closed, a disaster for many spaces that rely on a steady stream of dancers from Tuesday night to Monday morning.Enter Studio Berlin: a collaboration between prominent collectors Karen and Christian Boros and the Berghain nightclub. Housed in a vast former power station, Berghain is&nbsp;one of the city’s most beloved clubs (with a door policy so strict it has inspired countless memes dedicated to it). The Boroses and their collection director, Juliet Kothe, have brought together 115 Berlin-based artists, including renowned photographers, sculptors, and emerging voices, to exhibit throughout Berghain’s cavernous spaces: from the main club floor to the Säule – where concerts are usually held – Panoramabar, and Halle. ‘The pandemic has had a huge impact on Berlin’s cultural life and its clubs,’ Karen Boros notes. ‘Studio Berlin is about creaeting something positive out of this very difficult situation.’ Berghain’s owners, Michael Teufele and Norbert Thormann, approached the Boroses, asking if they wanted to collaborate on an exhibition. The answer was an enthusiastic yes. ‘<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6932/Wolfgang-Tillmans" target="_blank">Wolfgang Tillmans</a> was one of the first artists we contacted,’ Boros explains. ‘He has a close relationship to both the Berghain and to us, and he suggested a number of artists to invite. Artists then recommended other artists, and it developed its own dynamic. In the beginning, we were expecting to work with 40 or 50 artists – we ended up with 115! Berghain’s owners also suggested artists they have a close relationship with, such as Sven Marquardt, and Sam Barker, who DJs there,’ she says. ‘We couldn’t transport anything, so we focused on artists from Berlin. We began doing studio visits to find out how artists were working during the pandemic, and quickly found that they’d been using their studios as a place to think, to research, and to experiment – hence the central theme of the show. We saw works that were dystopian, but also hopeful. We were simply the initiators and organizers, definitely not the curators!’ Boros adds.

As its name suggests, Studio Berlin takes the artist’s atelier as a point of departure, a recording of the immense shifts this year has brought. It aims to provide a platform for artists to exhibit their recent practice in the light of these shifts, and to perhaps reflect on what these social changes mean. As is usual for Berghain, photography is strictly prohibited, and stickers will be attached to the cameras of attendees’ smartphones. This means that the experience of the exhibition will also be unique.Apart from a few exceptions, the works were made in 2020. ‘There are many maquettes, works in progress, ideas,’ Boros explains. ‘We noticed that artists are coming back to this idea of being part of a local artistic community, of supporting each other. It was a little like a return to the 1990s, when there was a feeling of community, and there was an intensive exchange between the different creative fields of art, music, and so on.’ This sense of community is reflected in the practice of the multidisciplinary artist <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7089/Danh-Vo">Danh Vō</a>: he is showing photographs of Güldenhof, a former pig farm outside Berlin where he lives with his partner, the photographer Heinz Peter Knes, and his assistant and students.Berghain has a distinctive architecture and atypical lighting conditions, almost in total opposition to the typical white cube environment. Daylight barely penetrates the cavernous spaces, with the few windows obscured by colored gels that let though muted blue, orange, and yellow tones during the day. The artists responded to the unusual conditions in their own manner: in the Panoramabar, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/19662/Anna-Uddenberg">Anna Uddenberg’s</a> shop-window mannequin, clad in athleisure, is draped suggestively over the bar. ‘It was almost too much,’ Boros says with a laugh, ‘but it shows how the artists are playing with the setting.’ In the same room, the Norwegian artist Verena Issel has used cheap construction materials from a building-supply store to create a jungle that takes over the space. Other works are more freestanding, with Adrian Piper participating with an older work that performatively addresses racism and gender inequality.Berghain, to many, is a mythological place, a place of escapism and a symbol of hours spent ‘outside time.’ Many artists have taken this mythology as a starting point: They have already spent a lot of time in the club and it has a special significance for them. ‘I visited <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8270/Petrit-Halilaj">Petrit Halilaj</a> and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/23886/Alvaro-Urbano">Alvaro Urbano</a> in their studio, where they were completing beautiful outsize flower sculptures for the Glass Palace in Madrid. They told me that they’d met in the Panorama Bar, and that at the beginning of their relationship they would give each other flowers. The flower came to represent love to them, and that’s why they wanted to hang [an] outsize representation in the bar itself,’ Boros says. <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8708/Cyprien-Gaillard">Cyprien Gaillard</a> has engraved the stainless-steel walls of the toilets with a version of Bruegel the Elder´s The Land of Cockaigne (1567), which depicts three men – a clerk, a peasant, and a soldier – sleeping off the excesses of overconsumption. Gaillard has renamed it Land of Cocaine, and the work is intended as a permanent installation.Downstairs in the Säule, Tillmans is presenting a new video with a soundtrack that he composed and sang on. Inspecting the exhibition recently, he signaled his approval. ‘It feels right. It works,’ he told Boros. An exhibition, then, outsized and ambitious in scope, yet specific to a very particular scene: a dynamic return from the COVID-19 crisis.Studio Berlin runs from September 9 until December 31; appointments can be booked via <a href="https://www.studio.berlin/">studio.berlin</a>Top image: A work by&nbsp;Rirkrit Riravanija hangs from the Berghain facade.&nbsp;STUDIO BERLIN/Berghain, &copy; Rirkrit Riravanija, Foto: Noshe

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Collector Karen Boros on how the Boros Foundation invited 115 artists to take over the city’s infamous club