Eighteen years after reunification, Berlin is still struggling economically, but its empty storefronts and deserted factories attract artists from all over the world. The affordable space also generates a rare phenomenon: artist-run galleries and project spaces that host exhibitions and collaborations outside of the commercial art market. These projects range from the cleanly professional to the exuberantly grungy, but each venue exhilarates in its own quirky way, presenting underrepresented art and unusual curatorial approaches.

As alternatives to the white cube, artists reconfigure buildings such as abandoned butcher shops and bombed-out department stores. The new After the Butcher project turns a former meat-processing plant into a space for site-specific installations, while the artists of super bien! host exhibitions in a glass greenhouse. General Public animates a derelict building with shows, film screenings, and performances, and the collective Chaos Computer Club set up an interactive LED display in the windows of an empty office building, enabling passersby to generate light shows with their cell phones. Far more common, however, is for artists to open project spaces in their spare bedrooms; Croy Nielsen, for example, is an exhibition venue in an expansive apartment in Prenzlauer Berg.

Other artists occupy conventional gallery spaces, but fill them with esoteric exhibitions. Sparwasser HQ, which is run collaboratively by artists and theorists, lights up a storefront in Mitte with conceptual and political projects. A few blocks away is PROGRAM, a nonprofit space melding art and architecture with exhibitions of wall paintings, labyrinthine installations, and video projections. In the shadow of the Alexanderplatz TV tower, the artist Lena Ziese founded Jet, which currently hosts thematic exhibitions on the subject of failure.

Currently, the Brunnenstrasse galleries — many of which were originally founded by artists — are drawing the largest crowds. For these producer-galleries, artists band together, hire a director, and each hold solo shows during the year. Diskus, founded by nine young sculptors from the Dresden Art Academy, is one such gallery, as is Amerika, which primarily represents artists from the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. A collaboration between curators, Curators Without Borders is an experimental, international space, while Artnews Projects, an extension of artnews.info, hosts traveling, concept-based exhibitions.

Besides the vast range of exhibitions, a plethora of alternative symposia, lectures, and publications expand the art scene. The most prominent discussion forum is the United Nations Plaza — organized by ten artists including Martha Rosler, Liam Gillick, and Walid Raad — which hosts free seminars probing contemporary art production, but many exhibition spaces hold additional lectures and screenings. Alternative publications that add to the dialogue include Mono.Kultur, Texte Zur Kunst, and 032c. Although many Berliners bemoan the increasing commercialization of the art scene, the reality for now is that in a city of few buyers, the commercial galleries remain observers, rather than rulers of this experimental playground — one of the few that is still generated by artists, for artists.

-BR