It’s Ber­lin Art Week: With the big fairs abc and Pre­view, the mul­ti­tude of insti­tu­tional part­ners and the heaps of exhib­i­tion open­ings all over the city, I have a pleas­ant, but quite stress­ful week. But I was par­tic­u­larly happy to spare some time to pay a pop-up exhib­i­tion a visit, that found an unusual spot: a former women’s prison, that is aban­doned for some thirty years now.

Elisa and I took a ride to Kant­straße, where, behind an unre­mark­able facade, in the second back­yard lies a prison made of bricks, that dates back to 1896. Dur­ing the Third Reich, many women from the res­ist­ance move­ment “Rote Kapelle” were imprisoned here. Years later, the prison was still in use by the Ger­man Gov­ern­ment, until it closed down in 1985. Since then, a private owner bought the premises and kept everything intact – but closed to the public.

The Lon­don based art pro­ject Platform79 had the chance to plan and con­duct an exhib­i­tion at this unusual site, that lasts for only a week: They invited artists to develop ideas how to use the build­ing in an artistic approach and to install their pieces reflect­ing the his­tory and mood of the space. Platform79 used only a few rooms and cells through­out the whole build­ing for their exhib­i­tion, but opened the rest for the pub­lic as well. In that way, art takes a step back and merely high­lights cer­tain details.

There were some pieces that played well with the some­what strange notion of this former and now aban­doned prison: The Brit­ish artists Kite & Las­lett arranged mir­rors in the court­yard and invite people to join a spe­cific obser­va­tion point to exper­i­ence the install­a­tion as a pan­op­ticon sim­ilar to those known to prison his­tory. Ant­o­nio Riello installed in one of the cells a sound piece of child laughter, that both quietly and uncan­nily fills the whole floor. Malin Holmberg used a pee­p­h­ole in one of the walls to guide the visitor’s view to a room hid­den behind, where one of her paint­ings is shown.

How­ever, most of the other pieces shown are not site-specifically made and thus do not or do not wholly reflect the struc­tures found. Of course, the venue dis­tracts a lot from the art shown, but given the fact that it unob­trus­ively invaded the build­ing, the whole exper­i­ence stays con­sist­ent nev­er­the­less. In fact, Elisa and I went curi­ously and gingerly through all the floors and all the cells, in deep amazement of the his­tory still vis­ible there. The occa­sional art com­pleted the exper­i­ence, how­ever, it didn’t con­sti­tute it.

The prison, which is situ­ated at Kant­straße 79, will be closed to the pub­lic soon again: Platform79’s non-profit exhib­i­tion will only last until Sunday, so make sure to drop by in time, leave a dona­tion for these great and self-sacrificing people until they head back to Lon­don, and dis­cover this unusual place!