10th Berlin Biennale – “We Don’t Need Another Hero” at KW Institute of Contemporary Art
For the 10th Berlin Biennale, the exhibition architecture was developed for two of the venues, the Akademie der Künste and KW Institute for contemporary Art, responding distinctively to the existing spaces.
The KW is located in an old factory building from the Wilhelminian period, which was used as a margarine factory and has been used for cultural purposes since the German reunification. At the end of the 90s, an awkward attempt was made to transform the banal industrial architecture into a setting similar to a museum by adding an extension in the rear courtyard and breaking through a story ceiling.
In distinction to this, for the Biennale a sequence of spaces was worked with, all of which are particular in their form, revealing and commenting on the existing structure. The starting point was a wall located at 45° to the orientation of the rest of the building. This deviation, not atypical for coeval Berlin buildings, informed the further expression of the exhibition architecture and, through the resulting fractures, amplifies the irregularities of the building.
