As immersive art goes, nothing can compete with Berghain

In Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, the protagonist, at the Venice Biennale, muses on installations. ‘Ideally, the perfect art installation would be a nightclub, full of people, pumping music, lights, smoke machine and maybe drugs thrown in. You could call it Nightclub, and if you kept it going 24 hours a day it would be the big hit of the Biennale.’ How right he was. For what else is Berghain — the world’s most famous techno club — if not a wild work of immersive art?

Berghain is housed in the ruin of a Soviet thermal power station in Berlin. Conceived on a grand scale, it’s a fathomless black box you enter into for 12 or so hours to be pummelled by every sort of sensation, before stumbling out again, not quite sure what happened. As immersive art goes, from Tino Sehgal to IMAX, there really isn’t much to compete with it.

Berghain’s founders cut their teeth organising hardcore gay fetish nights. In 2004, the city authorities offered them the ex-GDR building. In 2016, Berghain was granted the same generous tax status as the city’s high art institutions. Recent management changes have seen Berghain further inch towards corporate respectability. In 2018, a Damir Doma fashion show was held there, arranged by Vogue Germany boss Christiane Arp and owner Norbert Thormann. Inevitably, a tension has emerged between subcultural vitality and corporate ambition, and it plays out in the art exhibition currently showing there.

Studio Berlin, which opened during Berlin Art Week, saw Berghain invite the general public inside for the first time (except for the men-only space Lab.Oratory). Organised in partnership with the Boros Foundation, the show invited 115 Berlin-based artists to submit a work for display in Berghain reflecting the lockdown and being bound to one’s studio.