Josie Thaddeus-Johns

Many of the biggest and best-known clubs have no-photo policies, and some even place stickers over cellphone cameras on the way in. The idea: Partygoers unrecorded by social media can feel liberated of society’s expectations.

It’s a surprising starting point for a photo exhibition, yet “No Photos on the Dance Floor!” at the C/O Berlin photography museum through Nov. 30, aims to tap into some of this utopian dance floor mythology. Spanning the storied years of night life in the German capital, from the early 1990s, with the rise of techno monoliths like Tresor and E-Werk, right up to the present, the show pays homage to a vibrant and permissive culture.

Like many Berlin exhibitions, the show was accompanied by several events, including film screenings, talks, and of course a party series.

And that was where the trouble started.

In September, the Berlin police were called to one of the parties at the museum to deal with a violent incident between security staff and guests, and the event was closed early.

Video footage, which circulated on Facebook and Instagram, showed a partygoer, Shaun Bass, being dragged along the floor and out of the venue by two security staff, and kicked by another female bouncer. In an exchange of Facebook messages with The New York Times, Bass said he was sober at the time and had not been aggressive. “To be treated in this way is insane,” he said.

Another guest, Simon Kaiser, a Berlin club promoter, said the same female staff member hit him in the head and threatened him.

The incident revealed an ugly mismatch between the relaxed and tolerant atmosphere portrayed in the exhibition, and the heavy-handed security around it. Berlin’s clubs thrive on a permissive, DIY vibe that lets guests feel safe — but some partygoers and activists say overzealous security staff are ruining the tolerant vibe.

C/O Berlin and the party producer DISK Agency, which chose and briefed the security company, both made public apologies to everyone at the party. A spokesman for KV Security, the agency that employed the bouncers, declined to comment for this article.

One of Berlin’s best known clubs, Berghain, recently fired a member of its security staff after a partygoer made a formal complaint. Nico Limo, who identifies as nonbinary and uses gender-neutral pronouns, said a bouncer slapped them and made racist remarks after a dispute at the club’s coat check.

“The security people are supposed to protect us,” Limo said in a phone interview. “But these things keep happening.” A spokesman for Berghain declined to discuss the incident, citing the club’s long-standing policy of not commenting to the news media.

In 2016, Berghain was officially designated a “cultural institution” by a regional court, meaning it pays a reduced tax rate, like the Berlin Philharmonic or the Schaubühne theater. The ruling highlighted the significance night life plays in the city, where the sector generates nearly 1.5 billion euros (about $1.65 billion) a year, according to a 2019 study from the Club Commission, an association of Berlin’s night club owners.

No Shade, the collective of female, trans and nonbinary DJs that organized the event at C/O Berlin, said in a statement that abuses of power by club security staff were common in the city. “The creation of these spaces for marginalized communities is the foundation of global club culture,” the statement on Facebook said, adding that it was disturbing that “such traumatic incidents could take place at an exhibition intended to not only recognize, but celebrate these roots.”

This legacy was “what Berlin prides itself on,” Kaiser said in an interview in Berlin, in October. He is taking legal action against the security staff, and is working with the Club Commission on a training program for bouncers to reduce aggressive incidents.

Lutz Leichsenring, a spokesman for the Club Commission, said most altercations arose at the door, because of “selection.” Part of many bouncers’ jobs, this murky science entails deciding whether someone has the right look and general demeanor to come in.

However, there are many who feel that bouncers use racist criteria and exclude people from ethnic minorities from joining the party. A spokesman from the Antidiscrimination Agency in Berlin said that it had provided legal advice on more than 500 cases of discrimination at club doors since 2006.

Kaiser said he thought that violent incidents like the one he was involved in were rare, but added that when they did happen, it was important to hold security staff to account. He said he had received many messages of support from other people who had witnessed or been victims of assault by bouncers. But, since many partygoers who live in or visit Berlin don’t speak German, many were put off from going to the police or taking legal action, for fear of not being taken seriously by the authorities, he said.

People who work in club security had also got in touch, Kaiser said, to say they wanted to contribute to a safer environment. “I don’t want to demonize anyone, but I think something has to be said,” he added. “If no one says anything, they’re going to keep doing it.”

This article originally appeared in

Anything Goes in Berlin's Clubs. But Are Bouncers Killing the Vibe?

BERLIN — Every weekend (and many weeknights), Berlin’s clubs open up as spaces where anything goes. Fetish wear, nudity and sex? No big deal. Closing times, sometimes days after the party started, are determined by how many records the DJ has in their bag.

After all, the Swedish curator was at the top of his game, working with some of the art world’s most prestigious institutions. In addition to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Birnbaum had led biennials (including Venice, in 2009) and a prominent art school (Frankfurt’s Städelschule). He had been a jury member for the Turner Prize in Britain and organized countless contemporary art exhibitions.

Why would he leave all this behind to work with VR, a technology still in its infancy?

“It’s exciting because it’s a little uncharted,” Birnbaum said at the London headquarters of his new employer, Acute Art. “It comes out of my interest in what art and technology are all about. I think people expected me to take over another museum, in Germany. That would have been very normal.”

In an interview in February, only a few months after he took over the company’s artistic leadership, Birnbaum, 55, seemed relaxed and energized. From his office at Somerset House, a neo-Classical building housing arts spaces that overlooks the River Thames, he’s been overseeing Acute Art while also planning a new curatorial venture: a VR-focused booth titled “Electric” at Frieze New York, which runs May 2-5.

VR generally refers to high-resolution experiences that use a headset to place viewers in immersive environments. Video game developers have found commercially viable uses for the medium, and moviemakers have also dipped their toes in: Last year’s Venice Film Festival had a dedicated section for VR works.

And slowly, cautiously, virtual reality has made its way into the contemporary art world, too, with biennials and art institutions presenting works that come to life inside those big black goggles.

Viewers have lined up in response. For example, Jordan Wolfson’s “Real Violence” caused a stir at the 2017 Whitney Biennial with its graphic depiction of the artist brutally attacking a stranger on the street; at the Berlin Biennale in 2016, Jon Rafman’s “View of Pariser Platz” showed the famous Berlin square being swallowed by an apocalyptic explosion.

While many creators are excited about VR’s possibilities, the technology to realize them has some problems. Remaining in the immersive environment for too long can induce a nausea akin to vertigo — “virtual reality sickness,” it’s been called. While there’s plenty of investment in both software and hardware, the headsets are still aimed at the gaming market. It’s still not clear how audiences outside that niche will get access to the full VR experience without shelling out for a pricey headset.

Stepping into this volatile landscape, Acute Art sees itself as something between a production company and an artist studio. Dedicated solely to creating works of contemporary art, it started out with a roster of world-famous artists who were completely new to the medium: Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons and Marina Abramovic have all since made their first VR works with the company.

For his Frieze New York booth, Birnbaum has selected several works produced by Acute Art, such as Kapoor’s “Into Yourself, Fall,” a stomach-churning plunge through the viewer’s own body into a kind of afterlife, and a new work by R.H. Quaytman that responds to the mystical paintings of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. Birnbaum said it was also important for him to include artists whose work wasn’t produced by Acute Art, like Rachel Rossin — an outlier in the field because she does all her own coding.

Birnbaum said he was aware that these might be the first VR art experiences for some in the Frieze audience. “For the normal art world, it’s a novel thing,” he said. “I hope this will create curiosity.”

Acute Art reinvents the production process for each work it produces to suit the artists. The piece by Abramovic, for example, demanded a highly detailed, three-dimensional avatar of the artist herself, which the viewer can choose to save from rising sea levels; Koons wanted a metallic ballet dancer whirling around an ornamental garden.

This means that the studio setup changes with each new work: One week, a row of computer screens showed clay animals that team members were digitally animating; the next, they were modeling NASA data to recreate outer space for Antony Gormley’s “Lunatick,” a work produced in collaboration with the astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan.

The mastermind of Acute Art’s technical output is Rodrigo Marques, the chief technology officer, who works closely with artists. On a visit to the office in February, Marques was overseeing the programming of Gormley’s piece, using design and animation software to recreate the environment of space as realistically as possible, as requested by the artist.

The piece begins with the viewer alone, exploring a remote island, before zooming into the atmosphere and landing on the moon. There, the viewer can wander in low-gravity across reproductions of the cratered surface. Making this technically feasible calls for massive amounts of information to be processed in milliseconds. “The amount of visual data required to simulate space is huge,” Marques said.

“For each artist, you need to figure out exactly what’s the best way to work with them,” Marques said. “It’s challenging.”

For a 2017 work by Olafur Eliasson, the Acute Art team created an uncanny reproduction of a waterfall with a realistic rainbow shimmer. (It was a nightmare to build, Eliasson said.) The Berlin-based artist is used to working with digital technology, and has employed at least one programmer in his studio since 2008. Eliasson said that the experience of working with Acute Art opened up new technical possibilities: “The level was way beyond what I would normally have access to,” he said in a telephone interview.

Although tech companies, including HTC Vive, Oculus and Google, are also working with artists to create VR works, they often have a more commercial attitude, Rossin explained. “They’re used to how advertising works,” Rossin, who is based in New York, said in a telephone interview.

But Acute Art, Eliasson said, was solely interested in making art that suits the artist.

“They fundamentally wanted it to be the best possible art work,” Eliasson said, “and the technical solutions had to fit to that.”

High-grade technical solutions don’t come cheap, and yet no money changes hands between Acute Art and the artists they work with. Instead, the company is funded by Gerard De Geer, a Swedish businessman and art collector, and his son Jacob. The company’s original business model involved making the works Acute Art produce available to headset-owning subscribers for a monthly fee, but the pay wall was dropped in June 2018.

Now the company’s focus is on reaching a wider audience by way of the Acute Art app, which offers 360-degree video versions for free. These are less immersive than a headset experience but can be downloaded by anyone with a smartphone. The app also offers variations that works with Google Cardboard VR viewers, which use special lenses to create a 3-D effect.

“We are keen on having the largest outreach,” said Irene Due, the communications director of Acute Art. “If our aim is to get the biggest outreach, you have to make it free.”

Essentially, the business is betting on the artistic value of their products translating into commercial value down the line, presumably through a traditional gallery model of selling a small number of limited editions, although the company’s representatives were vague about their long-term strategy. “Our focus is to develop the works at this stage,” Due said.

Birnbaum said that one of VR’s biggest challenges is how to show it to large audiences. Until headsets are widely available, Acute Art is making do with phone-ready 360-degree video, or it is relying on gallery and museum shows where headsets can be provided.

At Frieze, Birnbaum has chosen to show simplified versions of all the works he is presenting, leaving out audience interactions so that more people can watch them: Viewers will be able to move around the virtual worlds, but won’t be able to have an effect on their environment. Engagement takes time to explain to the viewer, and that slows things down.

But does this show the best of what VR can do?

That is just one of VR art’s many unanswered questions, and Birnbaum raised some more: “How will this be shown? How will it be collected? Will it at all be sold?” He seemed comfortable to leave these unresolved for now, but he acknowledged the future was uncertain.

“I hope I won’t regret it,” he said of his move to VR. “I don’t yet.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="a095e0d1-b879-3cf0-aea4-13fa41959fb3" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/arts/design/virtual-reality-art.html">The New York Times</a>.

A step into the unknown, with virtual reality

LONDON — When Daniel Birnbaum announced last summer that he was stepping down as the director of the renowned Moderna Museet to join a virtual reality startup, it raised eyebrows in the art world.

<h1>PARIS — At the Institute, everything was real. Real mathematical equations chalked on real blackboards, by real scientists wearing real lab coats. Of course, in this midcentury Soviet science lab, there were no laptops, no internet, no Wi-Fi — nothing, in fact, that wouldn’t be part of the daily life of an institution studying theoretical physics in the U.S.S.R. Oh, except cameras, a director and a production staff who were turning the whole thing into a movie.</h1>

Between 2009 and 2011, director Ilya Khrzhanovsky created the most ambitious film set of all time. His living recreation of a theoretical physics institute took over the town of Kharkiv, Ukraine, and the actors lived their roles 24 hours a day. No one had scripts: If a character was to be a lab assistant, the person in the role simply had to live as a lab assistant.

“DAU,” the result of this provocative experiment, is finally on show for the first time in Paris, opening Thursday and running through Feb. 17. The Théâtre du Châtelet and Théâtre de la Ville have been taken over with this genre-defying accomplishment, which ballooned from a movie into something between immersive theater and a live video game.

Exhibition efforts have been plagued by problems. The debut was initially planned for Berlin in September — intended as the first stop of a three-city tour that would then travel to Paris and London. It was canceled weeks before it was supposed to open, when city administrators rejected a proposal to build a concrete wall around the interactive spectacle. The wall was intended to be 1.5 miles long and painted by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, encircling the event until its final night, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when it would be torn down.

Once announced, the wall began to divide people (as walls do), stirring up debates about painful historical events that are never far from the surface in Germany. “I don’t believe in reconstructing a totalitarian system as an experiment,” said Sabine Bangert, a politician from the Greens party, who, like many Berliners, felt that the construction of a concrete barrier just meters from where the Berlin Wall once stood was an insult to those whose lives had been torn apart by it.

But many artists said that refusing to show this work was cowardly censorship of artistic expression. In the end, the wall proposal, which had been negotiated over several years, with millions of dollars of investment, was rejected because the paperwork was not filed correctly. “DAU” is to open in London in April, but its showing in Berlin is still an open question.

Paris officials received the project’s premiere more enthusiastically, but it has nonetheless been forced to scale back its ambitions. A proposed bridge that was supposed to arc over the Place du Châtelet, linking the two theaters for the duration of the event, was scrapped in part because of ongoing protests in the city, Khrzhanovsky said. “The yellow jackets killed the bridge,” he said in a telephone interview, because the city authorities were “afraid of terrorism.” (A spokeswoman for the Paris Police said that the bridge proposal was refused partly over security concerns, but also because it would have disturbed foot traffic in one of the city’s busiest areas.)

“DAU” was originally conceived as a biopic of the theoretical physicist Lev Landau, who received a Nobel Prize for his work. Landau was also known as a proponent of free love, and his marriage included a “spousal nonaggression pact.” Like Landau’s sexual appetites, the film’s ambitions spiraled.

During the shoot, historical authenticity was paramount, down to the last detail, according to people on the set. Food was labeled with 1950s expiration dates. Underwear, cutlery and sanitary products were sourced to match those of the time. The toilet pipes in the institute where “DAU” is set were modified to ensure the flush sounded right. Despite this mammoth effort, shooting was sporadic, pausing for up to six months at a time. In all, more than 700 hours of footage were shot.

Khrzhanovsky said that his unorthodox approach began with the casting process. “I started working like this because I needed nonprofessional actors,” he said. “I needed to find certain types of personalities and combine them.”

These included Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis, who plays the uncompromising genius Landau, and Radmila Shchyogoleva, the only professional actor, as Landau’s wife. More than 400 ordinary people also joined the “DAU” experiment, as did 10,000 extras and the occasional, real-world luminary. Performance artist Marina Abramovic played a visiting professor of anatomy, and theater director Romeo Castellucci a visiting anthropologist; theoretical physicists David Gross and Carlo Rovelli also made appearances.

If the epic shoot was the first phase of the project, the premiere on Thursday is the beginning of the second — and it is just as ambitious. Upon entering the installation, visitors hand over their cellphones, exchanging them for smartphone-like devices that guide them through the various interactive performances, happenings and film screenings.

Each visitor’s experience will be different, although everyone will be invited to see at least one of the 13 feature-length films that have been cut from the footage. This, however, is only a portion of the material available to watch. A video-streaming platform, accessible in single-person booths, will show many more scenes, each tagged by character and theme, that let the viewer explore additional story lines.

Depending on the time, visitors might also be invited to one of an ever-changing series of talks and performances, including by Robert Del Naja of the band Massive Attack and the Venezuelan DJ Arca. Meanwhile, actors — or, as Khrzhanovsky calls them, “participants” — will be improvising (or perhaps, living) their Institute lives in the backstage areas of the two theaters. (At the Pompidou Center, actors will be living for a month in a Soviet-style apartment, watched by visitors through two-way mirrors, as part of a supplementary exhibition.)

Visitors to the theaters, who must be over 18, purchase “entry visas” rather than tickets: A three-hour pass costs 35 euros, or about $40; an “M1 visa,” which grants unlimited access over the monthlong run, is 150 euros. With passes for 24 hours or longer, visitors fill out a psychometric test, and the device that guides them through the installation will tailor its recommendations around the results.

What about the films themselves? Naturalistic and engrossing, they lure the viewer into the characters’ ethical dilemmas, scientific discussions and sexual encounters in real time. The human search for freedom — whether within a politically repressive society, a scientific laboratory or a marriage — is a constant theme.

At times, the films show humanity at its lowest: Mental breakdowns, incest and brutally degrading KGB interrogations all feature. It’s made more shocking by the knowledge that the people appearing onscreen aren’t acting, but rather responding to their lived conditions.

“Nobody is ever in the middle of the road with this project,” said Ruth Mackenzie, co-artistic director of the Théâtre du Châtelet. “You either find it provocative or exhilarating.”

Khrzhanovsky said it was the project’s confrontational nature that spooked officials in Berlin and forced him to scale back its ambitions. “If it’s not possible to build a bridge in Paris, or a wall in Berlin,” he added, “it looks like art exists somewhere in a ghetto, where you can do things — but not very visible, not very provocative.”

But Khrzhanovsky said he remained committed to “DAU,” despite the need to compromise on his vision. “For me, satisfaction is when the project will meet the public,” he said. “The public is the main collaborator in this phase.”

Collaborators from the creative scene, like Mackenzie, are already convinced of the project’s significance.

“I’ve worked on a lot of ambitious projects, but this is the only one that has had mythic status before it’s even started,” she said. “It’s the world premiere of something that’s never been done before.”

“DAU” runs Jan. 24 through Feb. 17 at the Théâtre du Châtelet and Théâtre de la Ville, Paris; dau.com.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9b116e1e-e406-491e-9b0b-2885f5ca6593" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/arts/dau-paris-berlin-ilya-khrzhanovsky.html">The New York Times</a>.

It Started as a Movie,  But As It Ballooned, Its Troubles Mounted

Between 2009 and 2011, director Ilya Khrzhanovsky created the most ambitious film set of all time.

It started as a movie, but as it ballooned, its troubles mounted

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Josie Thaddeus-Johns

Articles written by the author

Anything Goes in Berlin's Clubs. But Are Bouncers Killing the Vibe?

A step into the unknown, with virtual reality

It started as a movie, but as it ballooned, its troubles mounted