| For decades, Berlin has attracted artists from all over the globe with its affordable lifestyle and vibrant art community. Although the job opportunities aren’t sprouting up left and right, artists’ spaces and galleries certainly are. These spaces are no longer only located in the strongholds of Auguststrasse or Zimmerstrasse—areas that once held reign over the Berlin art crowd—now, the Brunnenstrasse area is overflowing with galleries appealing to the younger crowds. At the same time, more established galleries are expanding their spaces with studios for their artists and some additional exhibition spaces. |  |
PROGRAM—Initiative for Art + Architectural Collaboration – Sarah Stephenson
For decades, Berlin has attracted artists from all over the globe with its affordable lifestyle and vibrant art community. Although the job opportunities aren’t sprouting up left and right, artists’ spaces and galleries certainly are. These spaces are no longer only located in the strongholds of Auguststrasse or Zimmerstrasse—areas that once held reign over the Berlin art crowd—now, the Brunnenstrasse area is overflowing with galleries appealing to the younger crowds. At the same time, more established galleries are expanding their spaces with studios for their artists and some additional exhibition spaces. One neighborhood in particular that never gets as much attention as it deserves is the area north of Torstrasse, which has been dotted by artists’ spaces and galleries for a number of years, including the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein.
Among these, near the corner of Invalidenstrasse and Chauseestrasse, is PROGRAM, an initiative for architecture and art run by Carson Chan and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga. In the 1800s, this area was known for its recreational appeal because of its numerous hotels. The nearest train station, Stettiner Bahnhof, now Nordbahnhof, was previously known as "Ferienbahnhof" (vacation train station) due to its connection to the Baltic Sea. PROGRAM’s space on Invalidenstrasse had been unoccupied for approximately ten years. The space was originally the ground floor of a hotel and has, unlike many other buildings in Berlin, retained its original façade. Formerly Hotel Nordland in the early 1900s, it changed hands to become the Russian-owned Hotel Newa, which was one of the few hotels in 50s East Berlin renowned for its excellent restaurant and bar, both rarities at the time. Stories of dancing around the fountain in the hotel bar date back to this period, and the hotel gained additional notoriety during the 50s for its role as a non-discriminatory meeting point for the secret services (from both East and West), miscreants, intellectuals and artists alike.
PROGRAM’s name derives from the architectural term describing the relationships and activities that take place within a space. The gallery’s aim is to provide a platform for exchange between the fields of art and architecture, working together with people from a variety of disciplines including artists, architects, critics and curators. PROGRAM hopes to challenge and question traditional modes of architectural practice while also displaying its relevance to other fields.
Instead of relying on grants or continuous funding, PROGRAM functions on a more self-sufficient basis. Since mid-August 2006, PROGRAM has rented out desk space in its main office, formerly the hotel’s restaurant. The office then provides an interdisciplinary, creative workspace based on the idea that working together within a community is more conducive than the isolation of working from home. Furthermore, there are two rentable studio spaces, along with an artist residency program, forming a community open to bringing in new ideas. The money from hiring out these desks and studios then covers the rent for the space as a whole, whereas embassies, paint companies and etc independently fund exhibitions, which take place in the front room. Further projects planned for this community include reading groups, workshops and talks, all based around art and architecture.
Carson Chan and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga met in 2004 while earning their Masters in Design Studies at Harvard, both focusing on the history and theory of architecture. They approached architecture by questioning its interaction with other cultural fields; for Chan this was with regard to fashion and, for Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, this was in relation to media art.
Chan originally found his way to Berlin while working for architect Barkow Leibinger, but his experience in practical design confirmed his preference for architectural research. He then took a job in the Neue National Galerie’s 20th and 21st century architecture collection. While he was pondering his future, Lazaridou-Hatzigoga was simultaneously pondering different ways of “making” architecture. In fact, she was working for an architecture firm in Boston while organizing her own independent projects—a documentary video in Nebraska and an art project in New York in which she explored the relationship between objects to the individual and urban space. When Lazaridou-Hatzigoga visited Berlin last May, she and Chan began their first discussions about collaborating and setting up a project space. In a city open to all kinds of possibilities, arrangements progressed quickly, and within a month, Chan had found the space on Invalidenstrasse.
The opening exhibition, “Apparatus,” externally curated by Adina Popescu, was based around Foucault’s idea of the "dispositif,” tools of mediation or control mechanisms. The idea followed that these social apparatuses stand as invisible lines of force determining our interpretations of reality. The works in the exhibition prompted the viewer to reflect on their own position in space and the imaginary aspects of one’s perception. Jeppe Hein’s light installation, for example, only glowed when no one in the room was moving. After the viewers figured this out, they maneuvered themselves into organizing as a whole, as a community.
Rodney Latourelle’s solo exhibition followed: a site-specific, labyrinthine installation exploring our physical and emotional responses to colors due to their social, political, historical and mystical associations. This interactive space combined natural phenomena (such as the cliché of a sunset) with the tones associated with the esoteric chakra system bringing about psychological, physiological and aesthetic responses. The viewer wound through constricted passages and rooms, offering an immersive environment for contemplation. Experiencing the qualities of artificial and natural lighting along with shifting color tones, the viewer experienced spatial transitions and disorientation.
The third exhibition functioned more as a workshop, combining the tradition of landscape painting with architecture. PROGRAM invited nine painters to work outside their usual format of the framed image and outside their individual studios. The stipulation was to create wall paintings around a uniform horizon line that ran through each of the works while simultaneously working in close consideration of the space and pieces being created around them. The project challenged the artists to work within the kind of boundaries an architect faces—such as context, site conditions and adjacencies—which, perhaps surprisingly, formed a cohesive exhibition where the viewer was fluidly drawn from one personal panorama to the next.
The current exhibition, “How If—A Translation in III Acts,” is Mladen Bizumic’s solo exhibition in conjunction with Künstlerhaus Bethanien. Structured as a “spatial opera,” Bizumic explores the facets of contemporary geopolitics in relation to representations of architecture. The piece shown at PROGRAM is a multi-channel video projected onto an angled wall with a video of the crumbling architecture of the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris projected back-to-back with an avalanche on one of New Zealand’s UNESCO world heritage sites, Mount Cook. In addition, a multi-channel soundtrack brings together ambient sounds taken from the Berlin Museum Island (also a world heritage site) with the flapping noises of flags outside the UN Headquarters in New York. This constellation of global sites plots their historical, cultural and political importance together and confronts the global level of commonality.
Upcoming shows continue the diversity and inclusivity of PROGRAM with a solo show from Valérie Kolakis, currently PROGRAM’s Artist-in-Residence, followed by Einar Thorsteinn, a 70-year-old architect who also works within the realm of aesthetics and mathematics. The latter will additionally be curated by one of the people renting a desk space in the office, Simon Irgens, and will be touring to similar project spaces around Europe.
With such a variety of opportunities in such a thriving city, PROGRAM is opening up a discursive platform, ready to invite a wide variety of disciplines into a communal atmosphere. And despite artists’ spaces opening and closing on a fairly regular basis, I have a feeling that PROGRAM is here to stay.
