Berlin Arts Week - Preview Exhibition at Tempelhof

This week is Berlin Arts week so I headed up to Tempelhof Airport where the Preview exhibition was exhibited and took some shots of my favorite pieces.

The airport is a work of art itself. Monumental, austere, foreboding.

During the 1930s, the architect Ernst Sagebiel expanded it for Adolf Hitler into what was then the largest building in Europe, a triumphal entryway into the new Germania, smack in the heart of Berlin. (NYTimes)

Where else but Berlin would you find one of the world´s oldest and greatest airports, shut down for flights, but opened up for the arts, music and even the runways for the public?

Bankrupt, bust & beautiful - it is good to know that there is somewhere in Western Europe where the town planners aren´t bureaucrats but some whack ball loon-jobs dreaming up eccentric schemes that serve no purpose financially but perfect sense culturally (if only that were really true....)

Love it or loathe it, it does fill you with wonder that there are places where things can be senseless. Then when you head into certain types of senselessness, you find deranged forms of perfection.

That said there is always some mindless pig on an exercise bike dreaming up schemes to fuck everything up for the rest of us. This year the bureaucrats tried to shut down the Tacheles (again) only to be aced by resident warlord Ludwig Eben. They are also trying to shut down Bar 25 (again). Why destroy the things that give a city its identity?

Ben Okri - The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.....But the dreams of the people are beyond them, and would trouble them.

Yes sir, the dreams of the people are bold and beautiful and filled with aching and wonder.....
as well as all the terrible things that we do to one another,  and all the mysteries of the world are populated by their opposite, by both the filth & the fantasy, the goodness and the grime....

Art exhibitions are great. There is all the chin scratching and serious talk, but if you observe high society in groups, they are all checking each other out....our brain tries to trick us that we are not animals, but you open your eyes, or you look at history....and we´re as un-evolved as the rest of the species.....the animals just have the decency not to strut around dressed up in hypocrisy.....protect something innocent and you remember what actually still has meaning....

This little girl was the most high-brow art observer out of everyone - this exhibit was not a PG rating though! Here is a close up:

Now that was the most surreal thing I saw all day! The world invents ironies much more hard to imagine than 

 people can come up with intentionally....

It would have been John Lennon´s 70th Birthday yesterday. Happy Birthday John. Love, love, love:

 

Anyway, all in all the exhibition was great, provoking some thoughts, some smiles, an opportunity to observe and be observed, hang with some old friends and combat a puncture during a brilliant sunset on the landing strip:

But a nice end to a perfect day:

  At the end a Hefeweisen to right all the worlds wrongs - and a Bloody Mary for the girls...

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Thank you all the amazing artists (and friends) who made it such a great day and event- and congratulations! x