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    in Street Art

    “Transcend” by Snik in Gloucestershire, England

    Artistic duo Snik is back with a new mural entitled “Transcend” for Cheltenham Paint Festival in Gloucestershire, England. The artwork features their signature stencil technique. As stencil artists, they are traditionalists. Where others have moved on to the digital techniques, using laser cutting and computers to support their work, SNIK have remained true to the origins of their craft. They still painstakingly hand cut their complex multi-layered stencils.

    Nik Ellis and Laura Perrett the artists behind Snik are based in Stamford, UK. They have been working across the globe for over a decade, perfecting their skills to become one of the most progressive artists of their kind.
    Snik’s bold aesthetic is characterized by frozen scenes of dynamic action. Their work focuses on the ordinary, such as tangled strands of hair or the folds and textures of fabrics. These subtle aspects are elevated to hint to a deeper meaning. A meaning that remains elusive, for the viewer to draw their own meaning from.
    Check out below for more images of the stunning mural.

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    “Opera” by Edoardo Tresoldi in Reggio Calabria, Italy

    Italian scenographer and sculptor Edoardo Tresoldi recently presented Opera, his new public art permanent installation last September 12th on Reggio Calabria’s seafront, promoted and commissioned by the local Municipality and the Metropolitan City.

    Opera was created to celebrate the contemplative relationship between place and human beings through the language of classical architecture and the transparency of the Absent Matter. The open wire-mesh structure – consisting of a colonnade of 46 pillars peaking at 8 meters within a 2,500-square meter park – will offer a new monument fully crossable and accessible to locals and visitors alike. The installation will be part of one of the largest European public spaces and aims to become a new landmark in the region.

    During the opening weekend a series of free music, performance and poetry events was held. The sound installation by Italian musician and composer Teho Teardo narrated the fusion between Opera and the site through a sound design articulated through the different moments of the day: morning, sunset and night. In addition, poetry events curated by Italian poet and writer Franco Arminio and a secret concert by the well-known Italian songwriter Brunori Sas.

    Opera is a monument to contemplation through which the place further defines itself. Tresoldi plays with the grammar of classical architecture – as well as with the transparency of the wire mesh – to research new visual poetics in dialogue with the surroundings and the viewer. The pillars, Western cultural heritage’s founding archetypes, compose a courtly frame allowing for a further interpretation of the park.

    The installation generates a mental agora that leads visitors into an ever-changing perceptive dimension thanks to the park’s varying heights and depths. Operaopens up relationships in several directions within an already materially open space: the perspective corridors run towards the landscape while the transparent pillars define an open structure that accommodates, accompanies and defines the spatial experience and establish a direct relationship between earth and sky.

    Opera is Tresoldi’s second installation in Calabria after Il Collezionista di Venti in 2013, and the second major permanent public artwork in Italy after the Basilica of Siponto in Apulia, commissioned by the Italian Ministry of Culture in 2016.

    Take a look below for more images of Opera. 

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    ‘Thank You for Keeping New York City Alive’: A Group of City-Wide Art Installations Are a Tribute to Oft-Forgotten Service Workers

    The past six months have opened a lot of people’s eyes to the importance of unsung, so-called essential laborers. For Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1939–), the fundamental need to honor such workers has been at the heart of her work for decades.
    Since 1977, Ukeles has been the official artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, where she famously shook the hand of each and every one of its 8,500 employees in an 11-month-long performance titled Touch Sanitation (1979–80). She told each worker “thank you for keeping New York City alive.”
    Now, her message is being be amplified across the city, with public art installations in Times Square, on the facade of the Queens Museum, and across 2,000 digital-advertising spaces in the subway system. The new project, titled For ⟶ forever…, addresses service workers, and acknowledges the never-ending nature of their labor.
    “The work isn’t going to be done,” Ukeles told Artnet News. “It’s not like you work, work, work so hard and it’s finished, like a painting.”
    Mierle Laderman Ukeles, For⟶forever… (2020). Photo ©Mierle Laderman Ukeles by Ian Douglas/Times Square Arts.

    Ukeles’s messages, although digital, are handwritten in a nod to the personal nature of her work. But at 81, she’s firmly in the at-risk category, and has been largely confined to her apartment in Israel.
    Her last trip to New York was in March. Upon her return home, she watched events in New York unfold from across the ocean. As the city reopened, friends would update her on the state of things.
    “They kept talking about how clean the subway is,” Ukeles said. “That’s because workers are in there making it safe for people to come back. And in the process of making it safe for people to come back, they expose themselves.”
    Mierle Laderman Ukeles, For⟶forever… (2020). Photo ©Mierle Laderman Ukeles by Marc A. Hermann/MTA New York City Transit.

    When the Queens Museum, where she had her 2016 retrospective, approached her, together with Times Square Arts and MTA Arts & Design, she was eager to make a public artwork calling attention to and celebrating the service workers who had kept the city running.
    “Many people are out there thanking health workers. They are truly heroic. But this piece is about service workers,” Ukeles said. “They need to be honored.”
    The roots of Ukeles’s interest in menial labor and its never-ending nature can be traced back to 1969, when she composed her Maintenance Art Manifesto.
    Mierle Laderman Ukeles, I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976), installation shot (2016). Photo by Hai Zhang, courtesy of the Queens Museum and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

    The year before, she had given birth to her first child, and quickly realized that parenthood constrained her in a way that didn’t apply to the male artists she considered her heroes. “I realized Jackson [Pollock] doesn’t change diapers,” Ukeles said.
    The defiantly feminist manifesto boldly proclaimed that all her household tasks and other chores, which had to be done again and again as part of the routine maintenance of everyday life, would henceforth be considered her artwork.
    “I was working like a lunatic, trying to be an artist, trying to be a mother,” Ukeles said. The manifesto “developed out of being so pissed off that people didn’t see what I was doing. What I was doing as a mother wasn’t seen.”
    ArtForum published the Maintenance Art Manifesto in 1971, and Ukeles made good on its words. In 1973, she mopped the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, for a performance titled Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside.
    Then Ukeles turned her eye to the invisible labor of others, documenting—and thereby elevating—the activities of 300 maintenance workers at the Whitney Museum for I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976).
    Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-1980. Image courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

    She sent a selection of press clippings to the sanitation commissioner, who extended an invitation to scale up. Why settle for 300 maintenance workers, when you could work with 10,000? (The position was and is unpaid.)
    “I felt like I had been invited to come up to the major leagues of maintenance world,” Ukeles said.
    Greeting each sanitation worker helped spotlight the contributions of a labor group that is often invisible, even though, unlike office workers, they work out on the streets.
    “We are, all of us, whether we desire it or not, in relation to sanitation, implicated, dependent if we want the city, and ourselves, to last more than a few days,” Ukeles in wrote in the Sanitation Manifesto! (1984).
    “The streets of New York used to be an accumulation of weeks and months of garbage, and people would walk around on that,” Ukeles said. No more—and for that, we have service workers to thank.
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    The Fantastical Films of Hayao Miyazaki Will Be the Focus of the First Show at the Long-Delayed Academy of Motion Pictures Museum

    Los Angeles’s long-awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has revealed the details of its inaugural exhibition, the first North American retrospective celebrating the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (1941–) and his six-decade career.
    The artist and filmmaker behind such beloved movies as Castle in the Sky (1986), Princess Mononoke (1997), and the Oscar-winning Spirited Away (2001), Miyazaki co-founded the acclaimed animation studio Studio Ghibli in Tokyo in 1985.
    “Miyazaki’s genius is his power of remembering what he sees. He opens the drawers in his head to pull out these visual memories to create characters, landscapes, and structures that are bursting with originality,” Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki said in a statement.
    The exhibition’s curators, Jessica Niebel and J. Raúl Guzmán, have worked closely with the studio to put together the show, which features some 300 storyboards, character artworks, film clips, and other objects from the making of Miyazaki’s films. Much of the work has never been seen outside Japan. (Studio Ghibli has its own museum, which opened in Tokyo in 2001, but has never let another institution curate a show based on its work.)
    The exhibition, which opens April 30, 2021, will be divided into seven sections, with film clips as well as drawings and production materials such as imageboards.
    “These are basically concept drawings, both for character design, but also to create the settings and the locations,” Niebel told the Art Newspaper. “This is how Miyazaki starts process[ing] his creative thinking; he says that he works with a lot of fragments that kind of slowly come together to form something more holistic.”
    Hayao Miyazaki. Photo by Nicolas Guerin.

    The show will highlight Miyazaki’s collaborations with one of his Studio Ghibli co-founders, the late Isao Takahata, and his early work on the TV series Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974) and Lupin the 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), his first feature film.
    In an immersive environment, viewers will be invited to lie down in grass and enjoy animations from the animator’s films in an installation inspired by a scene in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), in which the main character decides to leave home while reclining in a field and watching the sky above.
    The show, which will be on view for at least a year, will be accompanied by a 256-page illustrated catalogue.
    The recipient of an honorary Academy Award in 2014, Miyazaki came out of retirement in 2016 to work on his last film, the forthcoming How Do You Live?.
    The official museum of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been a long time coming. Originally slated to open in 2017, it was pushed back to 2019, and then to 2020. The price tag of the museum’s Renzo Piano-designed home has ballooned over the years from $388 million to $482 million.
    Following “Hayao Miyazaki,” the Academy Museum will present “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971,” a first-of-its-kind exhibition on the history of Black filmmaking in the US.
    See more photos from “Hayao Miyazaki” below.
    Imageboard, My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Hayao Miyazaki. ©19848 Studio Ghibli.

    Layout, Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1989 Studio Ghibli.

    Imageboard, Ponyo (2008), Hayao Miyazaki. ©2008 Studio Ghibli.

    Imageboard, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1984 Studio Ghibli.

    Imageboard, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1984 Studio Ghibli.

    Film still, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1984 Studio Ghibli.

    Background, Castle in the Sky (1986), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1986 Studio Ghibli.

    Imageboard, Castle in the Sky (1986), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1986 Studio Ghibli.

    Film still, Castle in the Sky (1986), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1986 Studio Ghibli.

    Imageboard, My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1988 Studio Ghibli.

    Film still, My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1988 Studio Ghibli.

    Film still, Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1989 Studio Ghibli.

    Key animation, Porco (1992), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1992 Studio Ghibli.

    Imageboard, Porco (1992), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1992 Studio Ghibli.

    Film still, Porco (1992), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1992 Studio Ghibli.

    Background, Princess Mononoke (1997), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1997 Studio Ghibli.

    Imageboard, Spirited Away (2001), Hayao Miyazaki. ©2001 Studio Ghibli.

    Film still, Princess Mononoke (1997), Hayao Miyazaki. ©1997 Studio Ghibli.

    Background, Spirited Away (2001), Hayao Miyazaki. ©2001 Studio Ghibli.

    Imageboard, Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Hayao Miyazaki. ©2004 Studio Ghibli.

    Background, The Wind Rises (2013), Hayao Miyazaki. ©2013 Studio Ghibli.

    Film still, The Wind Rises (2013), Hayao Miyazaki. ©2013 Studio Ghibli.

    “Hayao Miyazaki” will open at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 6067 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, April 30, 2021. 
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    This Year’s Garage Triennial Was Curated Entirely Through Personal Connections as a Commentary on Russia’s History of Corruption

    The second edition of the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art opens to the public today at the Garage Museum in Moscow.
    As you might expect for a country as large and diverse as Russia, putting together an overview of contemporary artistic production is a monumental task. The sprawling inaugural show in 2017 was the result of a crack team of six curators scouring 42 cities and towns across 11 time zones for talent.
    This time, the curators took a more unorthodox approach. Leaning into the geographical spread that informed the inaugural triennial, curators Valentin Diaconov and Anastasia Mityushina asked the more than 60 artists who took part in 2017 to pick the artists for the second edition. Naturally, a number of artists nominated friends and family, while others chose to auction or raffle off the coveted position. 
    This was all fine with the curators, who asked only that these connections were made explicit, and that selector and selectee worked together on some dimension of the presentation. The results are being published on the triennial’s website, and include strange collaborations such as Maria Alexandrova’s documentation of a long drive to a remote Siberian village with the grandmother of her nominee, Anna Tereshkina, and Roman Mokrov’s chaotic promise to watch the kids while his nominee, his wife Maria Obukhova, worked on her art.
    Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Yuri Palmin ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

    Co-curator Valentin Diaconov tells Artnet News that the resulting eclectic triennial, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” highlights the important role that relationships play in Russian culture. Diaconov says the triennial’s semi-official slogan is “Corruption and Love.”
    “Corruption has been a driving force for Russia since time immemorial, but we often forget that the corrupt politicians and individuals do it all for love—an apartment for grandma, a private jet for a lover,” Diaconov says. “This works fully in this show: you practically buy a place for the closest friend with your enthusiasm. It works beautifully—this level of trust has paid off, and the quality of the work reflects the quality of relationships.”
    The offbeat approach to the selection process also reflects the curators’ suspicion towards the idea that there could be one single way to evaluate art in a multinational state with as much cultural and social diversity as Russia. To that point, not all of the artists included in this edition are Russian. The final lineup includes a Japanese artist, Ikuru Kuwajima, and several artists who were born in the USSR but hold passports from Western countries.
    “I personally believe that there is no national art anywhere in the world and every artist is a complex amalgam of influences from different communities of religion, online activities, educational background…,” Diaconov says. “So, to define who is a Russian artist is a thankless task.”
    “A Beautiful Night For All the People: the 2nd Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art” runs through January 17, 2021, at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. See more pictures of the exhibition below.
    Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Yuri Palmin ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

    Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Yuri Palmin ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

    Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

    Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

    Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

    Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

    Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

    Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

    Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

    Svetlana Hollis, Hot and Cold (2020). Production photograph. Photo by Valeria Suchkova. Courtesy of the artist.

    Sanya Kantarovsky, Two Suns (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York.

    ::vtol::, Guest (2019). Multimedia installation. Photo: ZARYA Center for Contemporary Art, Vladivostok. Courtesy of the artist.

    Anna Tereshkina, Portrait of My Grandmother (2015). Courtesy of the artist.

    Leonid Kharlamov, Fragments of the installation Black Obelisk (2020). Courtesy of the artist.

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    ‘The Challenge Was to Articulate a Voice’: Watch Artist Omer Fast Splice Together CNN Clips to Convey a Personal Message About 9/11

    The opening notes of Omer Fast‘s 2012 video work CNN Concatenated sound almost identical to the swelling chords and staccato notes of CNN’s actual theme music, right down to the God-like voiceover that says, with great import, “This is CNN.”
    After that introduction, Fast’s work diverges into a compilation piece, where each word is spoken by a different newscaster, spliced together to form phrases that Fast himself wrote in the aftermath of 9/11. Fast actually began the piece months before the terrorist attacks, he explains in an exclusive interview with Art21, by gathering short clips from the Cable News Network without knowing exactly what they would become.

    Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Omer Fast: ‘CNN Concatenated.’” © Art21, Inc. 2015.

    He had moved to Germany just weeks before when he “heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center, and realized that the piece, in a sense, would have to change too,” he told Art21. Fast wrote a script that comes together in the video, phrases formed by simple words spoken in an entirely different context.
    “Where do our responsibilities begin? Where do we go from here? Who can we trust?” are just a few of the questions posed in the video, questions that remain largely unanswered as the 19th anniversary of the attacks approaches. While Fast pored over the VHS tapes he’d ordered from CNN, “the challenge was to articulate a voice,” he told Art21, a definitive voice that “speaks through it at the same time.”
    Watching the video, there is a cognitive dissonance between the script Fast composed and the talking heads that speak the lines, but the artist insists that the work succeeds when you are able to tune out the background noise and the faces. Once that happens, Fast says, his voice comes through—and “that voice, it’s a pretty scared voice” he says, referring to it as his doppelgänger. “It’s a pretty urgent, demanding, aggressive, scared voice.”
    Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series “Extended Play,” below.
    [embedded content]
    This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

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    A Glossy Art Show at Berghain Nightclub Counters Cynical Expectations and Offers a Moving Love Song to Berlin

    By most accounts, Berlin has fared pretty well in ensuring continuity for its diverse art scenes since the spread of the coronavirus. However, while artists and freelance cultural workers swiftly received financial support from the Berlin Senate with few questions asked, the city’s night clubs—at least as crucial to Berlin’s identity, creative industries, and cash flow as art, if not more—were struggling to stay afloat when they received emergency funds. The legendary techno club Berghain, perhaps Berlin’s most famous institution, decided to do things differently.
    With many of its employees on kurzarbeit (short-term work leave), the monumental former power plant stood nearly empty since cleaning up after its last party on March 7. With few other options on the horizon, the club’s reclusive owners approached the Boros Foundation, one of Berlin’s esteemed and outward-facing private art collections, with an idea: why not host an art exhibition until the dancing can resume?
    At the exhibition’s press opening on Monday, Berlin’s culture senator Klaus Lederer described the moment when, amid sensationalized articles about collectors fleeing the German capital and headlines predicting the end of Berlin’s reign as a cultural hotspot, Lederer received a text message from collector Christian Boros: “We should talk. Don’t worry, it’s nothing bad.”
    The result of that SMS is a three-way collaboration called Studio Berlin, a 117-artist show that occupies nearly every corner of the multi-level club. All works on view are by artists living in the German capital and most were produced since the onset of the pandemic. This mammoth undertaking is supported by the city with an injection of €250,000 ($294,300). Tickets for visits guided by Berghain employees and Boros employees cost between €18 and €20 ($21 to $24). The club is open again.
    This a good moment for a full disclosure, followed by a confession: I used to work at Berghain until 2008 and before that, at its predecessor, Ostgut. In an unrelated chain of events, my husband became the manager of the club’s own record label, Ostgut Ton, three years ago. Like many Berliners, I have a personal history with the place, and strong views about the club thanks to the formative moments and absolute freedom I experienced there. 
    Accordingly, I was ready to dislike the exhibition before I even entered. I rolled my eyes at the predictable artist list, and the inevitable mentions in news articles of how visitors can finally circumvent the club’s tough and opaque door policy. With an architecture that’s so dominant and fetishized, there are too many traps, I thought, especially when attempting a show that’s aiming to be accessible to a wider public, not the art-insider audience that will first line up to see it. I was relieved to be proven wrong.
    Studio Berlin / Boros Foundation, Berghain, Berlin (2020). © Rirkrit Tiravanija. Photo: © Noshe

    A Love Song to Berlin
    There are artworks at every corner of the club, but strikingly, rather than feel over-crowded, the art enables the viewer to take note of the care and inventiveness that went into every detail of the club’s interior. On the main dance floor, this densely installed show offers reflections on the temporary absence of bodies. On several elevated platforms usually packed with sweating club-goers, French-born artist Jimmy Robert has draped, folded, and layered photographs of himself captured mid-movement. Over the course of the show, the artist will re-shape the sculptural, bunched-up prints. Next to it, elongated steel pieces by Jesse Darling resemble exhausted figures. And across from the DJ booth, between the club’s famous Function One speakers, sits an inflatable plastic bubble by artist Puppies Puppies, perhaps marking the ultimate spot on the dance floor where one becomes engulfed by warm sound and warmer bodies.
    To the back of the dance floor, in one of the rubber-and-steel lounging structures, a photograph by Josephine Pryde shows a severed bovine tongue on a butcher’s hook, apt viscera for a club notorious for its dark rooms. (Finding out later the work’s title is Trump’s Tongue gave it a different spin.)
    One of the few permanent works in the entire exhibition is in the bathrooms on that floor, where Cyprien Gaillard engraved a work into the stainless-steel partition wall. Titled The Land of Cockaigne, it’s both an homage to the Breughel painting of the same title, and (when sounded out phonetically) a cheeky reference to the reason why people rarely enter the club’s bathroom stalls alone.
    The other permanent installation is a floor piece called Shoegazing by Christine Sun Kim, who is deaf: The artist patterns the vibrations of the bass on the dance floor at the upstairs Panorama Bar. Both will join the club’s already permanently installed collection of art, not far from a trio of large Wolfgang Tillmans photographs that have presided over Panorama Bar for years.
    The empty Halle. No pictures are allowed during the exhibition. Photo: Stefanie Loos AFP via Getty Images.

    In the Halle, a part of the building that’s only open on special occasions, the exhibition feels less specifically related to Berghain itself, and more evocative of the self-organized exhibitions Berlin artists have put up over the decades in unused buildings all over the city. A site-specific installation of mirrors by Olafur Eliasson, however, provides an unexpected new perspective on the club: Berghain not only bans photography, but also mirrors—you won’t find them in the restrooms or anywhere else. It gives clubbers the profound freedom of not seeing themselves. Eliasson’s piece multiplies the viewer’s image endlessly, such that one’s only glimpse of themselves inside the club, fittingly, is trapped in infinity.
    Indeed, Studio Berlin offers a new experience of Berghain also for those who know its nooks and crannies well. And perhaps unsurprisingly, my favorite moment was admittedly personal. A video installation by Jonas Brinker shows a deserted, unfinished tourist resort in Egypt that is now populated by stray dogs. It’s a poignant metaphor for an entire world suddenly forced to a screeching halt by a virus. Yet on a much smaller scale, it’s also a reversal of realities: under normal circumstances, the day crew of welders and builders as well as the people in the offices bring their dogs to work during the week. Here, four-legged creatures (including my three-year old Brussels Griffon) running around the club would actually signal business as usual.
    At its best moments, Studio Berlin feels like a love song to Berlin. The city has risen from the ashes many times over and has always managed to adapt and reinvent itself, attracting new creative energy each time around. It takes a certain type of artist, musician, thinker, and doer to thrive rather than get lost in the freedom this city affords. But once you get it, it’s hard to imagine being anywhere else.
    Studio Berlin at Berghain is on view until the end of the year. Book your tour here. 
    Learn more about the events going on at Berlin Art Week here.
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    In Pictures: Here’s What It Looks Like to Visit a New York City Museum After Six Months of Lockdown

    After months of an at-home, eye-watering art diet of digitally-mediated exhibitions, New Yorkers were finally able to resume museum going starting the last week of August.
    The phase-four reopening meant that institutions, which had been on lockdown since mid-March, could once again operate with visitors—as well as hand sanitizer, face masks, and temperature checks. Though the Met and MoMA are used to welcoming tens of thousands of visitors each day, now they can only host a fraction of those numbers.

    People outside the Metropolitan Museum as the city continues phase four. Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images.

    As more reopenings continued throughout Labor Day weekend, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Natural History Museum, photographers captured the surreal images of a socially-distanced art-going public.
    At the Met, for the first time ever, artist-designed panels greeted visitors instead of exhibition advertisements, and banners by Yoko Ono proved hopeful and inspiring. Meanwhile, at MoMA, a tribute to artist Milton Glaser, who died earlier this summer, welcomed post-lockdown visitors with a classic New York logo.
    See images of the new normal, below.

    Painters pose for a photo after installing an oversized presentation of the iconic “I Love NY” logo designed by Milton Glaser inside the west end of The Museum of Modern Art lobby. Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images.

    A woman walks past Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm Number 30 in the newly reopened MoMA. Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images.

    A visitor in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night at MoMA. Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images.

    A security guard stands at his post at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images.

    A worker checks the body temperature of a visitor outside the Metropolitan Museum as the city continues Phase 4 of re-opening. Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images.

    A visitor is seen in front of Mexico City-based artist Hector Zamora’s sculptural installation at the Met. (hoto by Selcuk Acar/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

    Visitors walk through an exhibition at the newly reopened Whitney Museum of American Art on September 3, 2020 in New York City. Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images.

    Visitors walk through an exhibition at the newly reopened Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images.

    Visitors at the Met. Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images.

    A fully PPE’d young girl visits the Met as it reopened to the public. Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images.

    Sheryl Victor-Levy and her daughter Sidney Levy pose inside the lobby of the Museum of the City of New York. Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images.

    Members of the American Museum of National History. Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images.

    People line up inside the entrance on reopening day at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images.

    People wearing face masks visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images.

    At the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images.

    A visitor looks at a piece in the “Collecting New York Stories” exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images.

    Two friends in face masks sit in front of Claude Monet’s paintings at the Metropolitan Museum during its first day open to members since March on August 27, 2020. Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images.

    Members of the American Museum of National History enjoy exhibits on September 02. Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images.

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