When I saw the posters advertising the Stroke Urban Art Fair 2012 around town I knew straight away that I would enjoy it. After all, Berlin’s thriving Street Art scene is the reason I was drawn to the city in the first place. Running over 4 days at the Postbahnhof in Berlin, Stroke attracted a […]
Robert Montgomery – Echoes of Voices in the High Towers
Robert Montgomery’s poems, displayed on billboards, appear in the urban environment and therefore must surely constitute Street Art but they are so different from the most popular forms of the genre that they really stand out. When I read a blog post on Little Thoughts about a number of his works on display in the […]
Topography of Terror (Topographie des Terrors) in Berlin
The Topography of Terror (Topographie des Terrors) consists of three main elements: the Indoor Exhibition; the Outdoor Exhibition (referred to in the site’s literature as the Exhibition Trench); and Berlin Wall Monument, a remaining section of the wall. The ground on which the exhibitions stand was the site of the Gestapo, SS and Reich Security […]
Border Experiences: Everyday Life in Divided Germany
Built in 1962, the departure hall for the border checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse train station soon became known as the Tränenpalast (Palace of Tears), as it was frequently the sight of tearful farewells. Here, those bound for West Berlin were subjected to passport checks, baggage searches and probing questions. After the fall of the wall the […]
Gestalten: Mark Jenkins – Glazed Paradise
As I left Barcomi’s Deli, my lunch spot for the day I noticed what I thought was a bookshop across the courtyard and wandered in to have a look around. Gestalten is a bookshop but it’s so much more too. The building I had entered is also a gallery and there was a Mark Jenkins […]