The Brecht and Cruikshank Schnitzelshanke

Openings at Kunst-Werke always make for a great free party. Last night's was for a new show called 'Now and Ten Years Before'. It's about 'culture production' in squats and other semi-legal spaces in Berlin and New York, and looks at developments like gentrification in Mitte and the East Village over the last ten years. Kunst-Werke is closely tied to New York thanks to director Klaus Biesenbach's role as chief curator at PS1 in Queens, and KW parties always have a strong New York atmosphere which makes me a bit nostalgic. Tonight's was no exception -- videos about squats full of drag queens, OTT performances from bands called Shanke, Teardrop and Hanky who presented the kind of exciting sheets of white noise and screaming I used to hear from local scenesters like Spencer Sweeney's Actress when I lived in NY. I can't tell you which of those three the pink band pictured was, but someone told me they were from Hamburg. (Click the photo to see a little video of their performance.)

The bottom two photos show me sitting next to an artwork called 'Wifi Hobo', part of an installation called 'The Brecht and Cruikshank Schnitzelshanke (Jazz House, Cellar and Spaghetti House)' by Nils Norman and Stephan Dillemuth. The blurb tells us the wifi hobo is sitting outside 'a clandestine club located in London's murky pre-culture-region boho zone, in the outer reaches of East London. The scene is set where the remains of the day mingle and mosh. The audience, slipping into the primordial ooze of art and politics, slowly enter the play...' The other photo, where it looks like I'm caught in a big spiderweb, is in a big blobby wire creche out in the KW courtyard, next to the bamboo garden.