Project Space Festival in June: comforters at the edge of the pool

Backyard, multi-generation house, kiosk, greenhouse, Sarotti factory, Berlin is famous for its artist-organized, non-commercial exhibition spaces in unusual locations. Every summer, the Project Space Festival invites you to get to know the great diversity of this scene. This year, 30 rooms selected by an internal jury will present themselves with exhibitions, special events, performances and talks. Each day in June is dedicated to a different room.

One of the most unusual project spaces in the city is Tropez. Located in a kiosk in the Humboldthain summer swimming pool, the Tropez celebrated its opening last weekend as part of the Project Space Festival. Art and performances can now be experienced every day throughout the summer in the middle of the swimming pool. Founded in 2017 by Nele Heinevetter, Sophie Boysen has been responsible for the program since 2021.

Art in the pool

For the first time this year, the work will be spread over the entire swimming pool area and its lawns. A parrot by Dardan Zhegrova hovers between the hedges. In one corner, a painterly installation by Christina Krys Huber printed on net fabric wafts between trees and tells of metamorphoses. This year the theme of the exhibition is “Believe”.

As a counterpoint to last year’s fact-based exhibition series, the focus is now on what we don’t see, things we want to believe in, humorous myths and the longing for advice – whether from higher powers or from governments.

A block of marble by Maria Loboda, into which the artist has cast an impression of the buttocks with a devil’s tail wearing jeans and wearing a pair of jeans – the tail, once holy evidence of prophetesses, goddesses and mythical creatures, offers room for a variety of interpretations in everyday swimming pool life. The object could be a protective figure of bathers or a throne for a strict lifeguard.

Shards in Leipziger Strasse

This Monday, the Scherben project space on Leipziger Strasse invites you to the Public Cinema. Artist Onur Gökmen’s first solo exhibition in Berlin has been running there since the end of May. Looking ahead to the renovation work on Leipziger Strasse, which is announced for 2024, Scherben invited the artist, who was born in Ankara in 1985, to a site-specific installation that encourages visitors to exchange views on urban and living space concepts.

Gökmen’s subject is the interweaving of architecture and ideology. In his filmic and sculptural work, he refers to historical sites as well as to biographical and current (building) history in Turkey. In his exhibition, for example, the bumper of an Opel Vectra becomes a “Turkish Chair”.

In addition to the horror film Possession, which gave the title and concept to Gökmen’s exhibition, a film by Gökmen himself will also be shown. Afterwards there will be a conversation between the curator Hendrike Nagel and the artist.

soft power, a project space in the former Sarotti factory in Tempelhof, is about colonialism and history on June 10th. An exhibition project deals with the city’s monuments, streets, buildings and institutions linked to this history, such as the Sarotti factory.

The rooms move

How the project spaces are doing, where they settle and where they disappear from, is a good reflection of Berlin’s real estate market and the city’s pressure to gentrify. That’s what the five members of the Project Space Festival jury say, including Kate Brown from Kreuzberg’s Projektraum Ashley and Christopher Kline from Kinderhook & Caracas, also in Kreuzberg.

In the current issue of the magazine “Arts of the Working Class”, the jury members asked each other questions about the situation in the project rooms. The “complete freedom from fools is giving way to professionalization,” says Kira Dell from Projektraum Neun Kelche. Without funding from the Senate, fewer and fewer artists can even get hold of rooms, and those who want to be funded have to submit multi-year concepts. That reduces spontaneity.

In the expensive Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf there are traditionally hardly any project spaces, in gentrified Neukölln there are fewer and fewer, many are moving to Wedding, where spaces are currently most likely to be found. Others work nomadic or without space at all. There is always some space to be found. What is important to everyone: collective, non-profit-oriented, self-determined work and making a contribution to the local community.