Kunst im Untergrund 2022/23: Neue urbane Öffentlichkeiten Art in the Underground 2022/23: New Urban Publics

The works, visible in public from June through August 2023, link Berlin’s underground with urban spaces above ground, as well as featuring on in-train info screens throughout the network. Like the 2020/21 edition of the competition, »Art in the Underground 2022/23: new urban publics« will focus on the qualities, limits, and potential of urban space, exploring it via a range of artworks. This time, taking its cue from the association of public squares with the common good, as a place to meet and talk, three Berlin locations and their underground stations serve as the settings for artistic interventions: Kottbusser Tor, Strausberger Platz and Rotes Rathaus. All three are architecturally striking, as well as being cut across by streets or spanned by an elevated railway. These urban spaces have different usages: traffic, shopping, communication, relaxation. The selected works seek to amplify and highlight these usages, making each site into a protagonist—as sites, occasions, and objects of alternative political self-organization.

Irene Fernandez Arcas is interested in the healing potential of art; focusing on the neoliberal exploitation of self-care, body, and mind, her work examines the desire to achieve intimacy and make connections in urban settings. A digital project by the collective image-shift from Sandy Kaltenborn, Athena Javanmardi, and Paco Camberlin counters the oversimplified media image of Kottbusser Tor as a problem zone with a view of its many-layered social fabric. Julieta Ortiz de Latierro’s three-part project consists of a photographic intervention at Kottbusser Tor subway station, a one-day workshop in a nearby park, and a video produced as part of Art in the Underground and shown on in-train info screens throughout Berlin’s public transport network. In Sunny Pfalzer’s durational performance at Strausberger Platz, three performers explore the tensions between gender diversity and the binary gaze with which queer bodies are confronted in public space. With Chargé, Sinzo Aanza, Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Falonne Mambu, Nada Tshibwabwa, Ralf Wendt, and Elsa Westreicher, six artists from Germany and the Democratic Republic of Congo, come to Strausberger Platz with performances, literature, sound works, and graphics that criticize exploitation and consumerism. In a wrestling performance in front of the Rotes Rathaus, Liminal Beast of Prey bring together education and entertainment; embedded in an urban science-fiction story, the show presents characters metaphorically fighting battles that otherwise often remain invisible.

The prize jury consisted of Stéphane Bauer, Anna Ehrenstein, Kerstin Honeit, Ute Müller-Tischler, Harry Sachs, Viron Erol Vert, Lorena Juan, Mirko Winkel, Isabelle Meiffert.