Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
BUNKER ART
The vibes of war, vegetables and whips still hangs over the 80-room labyrinth of the
& Sun; Oranienburger Tor, Friedrichstrasse, M1, Friedrichstrasse)
, a Nazi-era bunker turned
shining beacon of art thanks to Christian Boros, advertising guru and collector of art
by practitioners currently writing history. Boros purchased the concrete behemoth in
2003 and, after years of painstaking renovation, began sharing selections from his
private stash in 2008 with an enthusiastic public. Many years later, a spot on a guide
uided
touur (also in English) is still one of the hottest tickets in town and should be booked
weeks, if not months, ahead.
Since 2012, the second hanging has kicked off with Boros favourite (and Berlin res-
ident) Olafur Eliason, whose brass-and-mirror Orientation Staris cleverly juxtaposed
with Colour Experiment No 10. Wolfgang Tillmann is represented with around three
dozen photographs, including portraits of techno DJ Richie Hawtin and Kate Moss
posing with broccoli. A major eye-catcher is Ai Weiwei's 6m-tall Treewhose installa-
tion required cutting out ceilings and walls. Boros is also big on championing new
artists, which is why not-yet-household names like Alicja Kwade, Lidén, Thea Djord-
jadze, Michael Sailstorfer and Danh Vo are also featured quite prominently.
During the tour you'll also be peppered with fascinating nuggets about the history of
the war-scarred shelter with its preserved original fittings, pipes, steel doors and
vents. Built for 2000 people, its dank rooms crammed in twice as many during the
heaviest air raids towards the end of WWII. After the shooting stopped, the Soviets
briefly used it as a POW prison before it assumed a more benign role as a fruit and ve-
getable storeroom in East Berlin, a phase that spawned the nickname 'Banana
Bunker'. In the 1990s, the claustrophobic warren saw some of Berlin's naughtiest
techno raves and fetish parties.
