Art in Berlin: 5 Exhibitions You Shouldn’t Miss

Art in Berlin: 5 Exhibitions You Shouldn’t Miss

It’s a strange time right now, isn’t it? Winter is over and spring is not yet here. Or, to put it another way, it’s too mild not to leave the house and too cold to stay out in the fresh air for long. So if you just want to get outside without freezing, you should head for the nearest museum. Because some of Berlin’s art houses are offering us not only a change of scenery and heated rooms right now, but also really good exhibitions. 

Here are five of them that are worth leaving the house for:

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The Hottest Calendars for 2023 Created by Berlin Artists

The Hottest Calendars for 2023 Created by Berlin Artists

The end of the year is coming. Not long now and the old familiar feelings are spreading: a bit of melancholy, a touch of longing, but above all the anticipation of the new year. It’s not called “New Year, new happiness” for nothing, is it?

And even if you already had a lot of joy in 2022, I’m sure we all share the desire to have even more of it in 2023. Be it through traveling, festivities, reunions, work or time for ourselves. We just shouldn’t lose track of all our plans. And what better way to keep organized than with the enchanting calendars of Berlin’s artists? We have looked around and compiled the most beautiful among the beauties for you. 

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Free Entry at C/O Berlin thanks to the ‘Open House – hosted by Airbnb’

Free Entry at C/O Berlin thanks to the ‘Open House – hosted by Airbnb’

Advertisement. photo: David von Becker.

After a super successful first edition in December last year, C/O Berlin and Airbnb are following up and once again inviting photography lovers for free to the Open House – hosted by Airbnb on July 1, 2022 at the current exhibitions.

With the Open House concept, Airbnb continues their efforts to contribute to the revival of the cultural scene after years of pandemic-related lockdowns and to provide Berliners and visitors with a special experience.

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Portraits of a Street: 100 Inhabitants of Eisenacher Straße

Portraits of a Street: 100 Inhabitants of Eisenacher Straße

We’ve had so many wonderful portrait series about Berliners here on iHeartBerlin in our last 15 years: The naked Berliners, creative Berliners in their homes, Berliners of the U8, Berliners through their windows during quarantine, couples of Berlin… And there are just a few that came to mind.

Today we want to introduce you to a brand new portrait series titled “Eisenacher Hundert“, and this time the concept is giving us the double whammy. Not only are all the people portrayed in this series inhabitants of the same street, they also represent all different ages between 1 and 100. So this might be the most intergenerational series we’ve featured so far.

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Fantastic Playground Berlin – iHeartBerlin’s New Exhibition

Fantastic Playground Berlin – iHeartBerlin’s New Exhibition

illustration: Laura Breiling. 

Today, we are proud to announce our next big group exhibition “Fantastic Playground Berlin” which will celebrate the unique diversity of Berlin’s creative scene. It’s been a couple of years now since our last big exhibition Uncensored Berlin so we thought it was about time to do a new one. The last two years during the pandemic with its various lockdowns and restrictions have not been easy for the art and culture scene – nor have they been easy for us. This new show is our effort to reclaim spaces and draw the attention back to the creative people that we care about so much.

For decades Berlin has been the secret creative hub of Europe. From music to art. From theater to architecture. From techno to science. Berlin became the place where cultures clash – but in a good way. 

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Berlin From Unseen Perspectives

Berlin From Unseen Perspectives

photos: KabGrafie.com

 

In our 15 years of iHeartBerlin, we have seen quite a bit in terms of Berlin photos and of course taken a lot ourselves. Especially the great Instagram photography era has given us many wonderful impressions of our city, which has shown us many unknown and surprising sides of Berlin. So understandably, it’s a bit difficult to impress us with Berlin photos nowadays. Or so we thought.

A few weeks ago we received an email from Mark Rautenberg, who drew our attention to his Berlin photographs. We get such submissions every now and then and are of course always grateful and happy when we can share the work of creative Berliners on our blog, especially because it allows us to give new or lesser-known creatives a platform.

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An Exploration of Twins: An Exhibition by Chris Phillips

An Exploration of Twins: An Exhibition by Chris Phillips

photos: Chris Phillips. 

Some might know Chris Phillips as the co-founder of the art collective Pornceptual and co-founder of the queer festival WHOLE. But in addition to leading these groundbreaking projects, this Brazilian ex-pat is a prolific artist himself. Starting on February 22nd, you can see his newest photography work at The Ballery.

The exhibition, simply entitled “Twins”, is curated by Chris together with his twin brother Eric. The collected artwork aims to answer the question: How do twins view twinship?

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HUSH Captures Berlin’s Empty Clubs During the Lockdown

HUSH Captures Berlin’s Empty Clubs During the Lockdown

photos: Marie Staggat. 

It was only a few months after I moved to the city that I was eager to discover the infamous Berlin clubs as a fresh Berliner. I was neither a techno listener nor a raver at the time, but I heard ample amounts of folktales about Berlin clubs that excited me from the beginning. It had only been a few months and somehow I managed to get into Berghain. I was thrilled amateurishly. Not knowing what would befall me, I was feeling confused but eager to partake concurrently. Little did I know that in the following months, Berlin nightclubs would become an inseparable part of my life. Among dancing, sweating, intimacy, and giving in to the moment, they became my Mecca for a sex-positive environment where I did not have to pretend anything other than my very queer self. 

However, last year at the peak of the pandemic in our city, silence hit the walls of our clubs and they were left to utter solitude imminently. Photographer Marie Staggat and journalist Timo Stein capture these unrecognizable club spaces and tumultuous silence in their new photobook HUSH: Club Culture In Times Of Silence. From April 2020 to December 2020, they collected their impressions of abandoned clubs in 360 pages of interviews, observations, and photos, and they reflect the inevitable despair highlighted by strong optimism. 

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Strangers in Berlin: Breaking the Ice During Social Distancing

Strangers in Berlin: Breaking the Ice During Social Distancing

With the new social distancing measures during the extended second lockdown, the idea of meeting a stranger is pretty much a contradiction. But how come the craving for social interactions is so big right now? Is it the season, is it the allure of something forbidden, or a simple case of “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”?

Visual artist Tanya Sharapova has decided to explore this idea as a reaction to the second lockdown which has proven to be such an odd and testing time. The first lockdown already prompted a string of artists to come out with wonderful photo series such as the window photos from Lovis Ostenrik, the daytime/nighttime outfits by Kseniya Apresyan, the nude social distancing portrait by Aja Jacques, and the Together A Part series by AnaHell and Nathalie Dreier. But the second lockdown has been quieter in terms of creative output – even for ourselves. So we are glad to be able to share Tanya’s series “Strangers” here with you.

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16 Amazing Creative Responses to the Pandemic from Berlin

16 Amazing Creative Responses to the Pandemic from Berlin

This year was quite different, wasn’t it? There was a lot of crazy stuff happening, but we can all agree on what the most significant thing was: the pandemic. If you would have told me a year ago that this would happen, I probably would not have believed you. But here we are, 9 months into a global outbreak of an airborne viral disease that has turned the world upside down.

Of course, this pandemic brought us a lot of negative things, but I don’t want to focus on those – you can simply turn on the news for that. I want to focus on the things that were good, specifically on how people responded to the crisis in positive ways. While a lot of us were struggling with our lives, our work, and our mental health, some people gathered their creative energies to come up with great things to brighten the days of everyone else and show some optimistic spirit.

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