Wolfgang tillmans

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