The European Street Art Capital: Berlin
Berlin is unsurprisingly a quite famous and unique city. Aside from its rather tumultuous and recent history, having been separated for nearly 20 years, Berlin has made a name for itself through an incredibly vibrant and open-minded music and party scene, as well as a unique and welcoming character with a multicultural and modern vibe. However there is far more to Berlin than that.
Art for Everyone
When walking through the city, regardless of whether you are in Mitte, Schöneberg or Moabit, a common feature of the city is its street art. Of course you’ll also find graffiti and tags vandalizing doors, walls and windows, however more often than expected you will find yourself looking at beautiful art. Street art is art for everyone; visuals created in public spaces and visible for all, free of charge.
Modern street art was born in New York in the 1960s and reached its boom in the 70s with the rise of hip-hop culture. Within the same years, hip-hop and punk cultures as well as street art were brought to Western Germany and Berlin as a method of expression and experienced an exponential boom. Ever since then it has been gaining recognition as an art form within society, specifically one that creates abstract masterpieces of self-expression. However, street art has historically also served, and continues to do so today, as a means of protest or with the aim to provoke thoughts and incite reactions through messages incorporated in the art.
A Famous Example
The “graffiti Mecca of the urban art world” hosts a variety of large and meter-long street art murals, however the most famous and probably also historic collection of them can be found at the East Side Gallery. Unlike the name suggests, this isn’t actually a gallery that contains works and displays them. Rather, it is a 1.3-kilometer-long memorial of the longest surviving section of the Berlin Wall, located in the borough of Friedrichshain. The strip features works by 118 artists from over 20 countries around the world, including the well-known painting by Dmitri Vrubel depicting “The Brotherly Kiss'' between Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker, expressing Vrubel’s fears of the communist regime through the art.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1990 however did not bring about a peaceful artistic movement centering around freedom, but much rather led to a revolution focusing less on aesthetics and art and far more on vandalism, graffiti scribbles and tags. In the early 2000s, street art was present on a more low-key scale, centered around a few recognizable figures that were seen popping up more frequently, such as Alias, Linda’s Ex and XOOOOX. Only in the following decade did large-scale street art make a great comeback with extensive colorful pieces expressing the identity of Berlin and its people, particularly its youth, and thriving in an atmosphere of freedom. In addition, Berlin as a city, as well as many individuals, actually began hiring artists to create murals on walls and buildings, whilst more and more street artists started exhibiting their works in galleries at the same time.
Urban Nation – a Breathing Museum
Urban Nation however, a museum initiative by the foundation “Berliner Leben” born in 2013, is far more than a gallery to simply exhibit work. Its intention is to promote and facilitate the exchange between the people of Berlin and the city’s artists, specifically through a range of integration activities and education programs spread throughout the city. A few of these projects are highly visible, such as the ONE WALL program, which continues the tradition of painting large murals addressing social issues of the neighborhood they are painted in; thereby connecting the Kiez (an endearing German, specifically Berlin, term for a neighborhood and its lifestyle) and the art.
In addition to these Berlin-wide projects, Urban Nation also opened a museum in Schöneberg in 2017. The goal of this museum was not to drag something that belongs in the public eye indoors, but rather to provide a home, backbone and “breathing museum” to protect artists and their works, allowing people to get up close with urban art and enter into a social dialogue with artists, works and everyone else present. The building is filled to the brim with art, on the inside and out, and promotes the motto “Connect. Create. Care.”, through integrating its entire neighborhood into its urban exhibitions, as well as starting initiatives such as Fresh A.I.R., a residence scholarship program for urban and contemporary artists, giving multiple students each year the chance to gain experience and devote themselves to their art and produce meaningful works to engage generations to come.
