Playing with Space

The walls aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Three steps into the first installation at Berlin’s Opernwerkstätten and the geometry stops making sense. This is the OM-D Photography Playground in Mitte, seven thousand square meters of work designed specifically to do this—to make space fold, perspective shift, your sense of where you’re standing completely collapse.

The artists are people I half-know—Leandro Erlich, Clemens Behr, Maser, Philip Beesley—and collectives like Transforma and 3Destruct. All of them working with how light and color and materials arrange themselves so that space becomes something other than what it was. You walk through and suddenly you don’t know where you are or what you’re looking at or why your camera sees something completely different from what your eyes are telling you.

I spent hours just moving through the spaces, taking pictures, getting dizzy. Some pieces only work from inside them, at the center. Others only work from far enough back that your brain can’t quite process what you’re seeing. A few work because you’re genuinely lost and don’t know which way is the entrance.

It’s free to visit, which feels almost aggressive for the scope of what’s there. The address is Zinnowitzer Straße 9 in Mitte, open until 7 most nights. Go if you’re interested in how space actually works and how a photograph can lie about it. It’s the kind of thing that stays with you.