Mike Nelson's Workshop of Regeneration

There are few exhibitions that manage to make one feel both claustrophobic and exhil­arated by empty space. Yet the vast void of Mike Nelson’s space that saw (platform for a performance in two parts) (2012) had this effect, forcing a contention between viewers, spaces and random environmental factors of light, movement and sound. space that saw became a place experienced as a collection of moments.

Located at Gartenstraße 6 in Berlin’s Mitte district, this work could have been initially understood as a giant found object: a former cabaret theatre and dining hall which opened in 1905 and closed around 1934. For decades quietly preserved in an unassuming back courtyard, the building is now a crumbling ruin. After a new owner recently cleared out the debris, Nelson set up a workshop and enhanced the space through a series of slight interventions, including rebuilding its collapsed stage. As the title suggests, the work was comprised of two performative parts that corresponded to two entrances to the building: the first led to the stage area and included Nelson’s workshop along the way; the second led to a vertical shaft, a light well, hidden within a former metal workshop.

The pungent, musty smell of rotting wood was immediately detectable at the first entrance. As one climbed the old staircase, there was a palpable silence in the hollow structure, and when there were sounds – the chatter of other visitors or the building straining against the wind – their precise location was vague. The revelation of Nelson’s workshop – visible only through a single windowpane in a locked door at the first floor, yet conspicuous through the sharp smell of fresh sawdust – functioned as an artist’s tool mark, a nod to his recent construction work and a reminder of his subtle intrusions into the space.

After ascending a smaller rusty staircase behind a door on the second floor, the viewer was suddenly thrust onto the stage in the old theatre and illuminated in a blindingly harsh spotlight. It was the best and most unexpected moment in the piece. Disoriented, one became at once subject and object, viewer and performer. Stepping out of the spotlight brought a gradual awareness of the cavernous enormity of the deserted theatre. It is rare for a contemporary exhibition to impart such a genuine sense of Rilkean awe. One confronted the crushing silence of the grand hall – the former location of much sound, festivity and life rendered bare and mute by the passing of time, confrontational in its emptiness.

The other ground floor entrance descended into the theatre’s former workshop. In a dark cavity at one side, there was a wooden ladder leading to the light well. With his title, Nelson references James Turrell’s Space that Sees (1992) and his own labyrinthine 2009 work Kristus och Judas: a structural conceit (a performance in three parts) (Christ and Judas …). While Turrell’s soaring work emphasizes the glory of the eternal, Nelson’s light well view was insular and fixed, encompassed by peeling, dirty walls. The confined space rendered the square of sky at the top stark and out of reach, and recalled the theatre’s proximity to the former Berlin Wall.

Due to the restitution policy after the fall of the Wall, the building ended up in the hands of a Czech consortium, then recently caught the eye of developers, who plan to renovate the space imminently. Nelson’s work inhabited a building in transition, caught between moments of decay and regeneration. It was an indexical sign of accumulated and discarded city space and of the constant processes of formation and loss of meaning. The old theatre, having outlived its use, exists in spite of itself. And in a brief time, it will be gone.

_{Main image: Mike Nelson, space that saw (platform for a performance in two parts), 2012, site specific installation at Gartenstraße 6, Berlin. Courtesy: the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin; photograph: Jens Ziehe}