Rooms That Break Their Own Rules

The Berlin Opernwerkstätten—a former opera workshop in Mitte—became something stranger than itself last year, and it’s doing it again. Seven thousand square meters of installations from artists primarily interested in making solid reality feel negotiable: Leandro Erlich, whose work I’ve followed since his impossible-architecture pieces, alongside Clemens Behr’s geometric constructions, Maser’s large-format work, Dean Chamberlain’s light paintings, and Philip Beesley’s responsive organic environments. Add the collectives AlexandLiane, Anna Burns & Thomas Brown, Transforma, and 3Destruct, and what you have is less an exhibition than a spatial argument about what rooms are allowed to do.

What draws me to work like this—installations that warp perspective, dissolve walls, make you uncertain what you’re standing on—is that they force a renegotiation with the body. You can’t just look. You have to move, reposition, recalibrate. Photography becomes almost beside the point, which makes it quietly funny that a camera brand is sponsoring the whole thing. The best shots from a show like this are the ones that fail to capture it, where the frame confesses its own limits.

Photographer Christoph Neumann was there for the opening, moving through the geometry alongside the recognizable faces. I’d want to go through it slowly, alone, early, before anyone else arrived to stand in the way.