Giulia Pines visits Sammlung Boros, a private collection of contemporary art housed inside a World War Two bunker…
It is the quintessential Berlin tale: an empty and derelict space falls into the hands of adventurers in the early 90s, soon after the wall comes down.
They do the best they can with it, hosting a series of not-so-legal clubs that enrich and contribute to the burgeoning techno scene, writing Berlin into the history books once again.
Exhibitions also take place there, as a local art scene grows up around it. Then, one day, the pioneers are out and the space is on the market. But the structure cannot be torn down in order to rebuild on the land, indeed can barely be changed at all, and anyone who buys it will have to be half mad, very creative, or perhaps a little of both.
The structure in question is a hulking bunker that sits on the north side of Mitte’s Reinhardtstrasse. Just steps away from the main tourist drag on Oranienburger Strasse, this is a decidedly less chaotic stretch of roadway, the only disruption the sound of nearby jackhammers and creaking cranes as new luxury condos go up all around it.
The bunker has been snoozing away somewhat quietly in the decades after the war, built in 1942 to protect several thousand citizens from air raids, used as storage for fruits and vegetables during East German times, and finally, playing host to the aforementioned sex and techno parties, remnants of which can still be seen in the form of fluorescent paint markings.
The new owners of the space, of course, also lend their name to the art collection they display within its concrete walls: advertising executive Christian Boros and his wife Karen. True to form, they might be the only two crazy dreamers with enough of a wild imagination—and indeed, enough money—to take the bunker, this “hateful building” as even Christian himself calls it, and turn it into something completely new.
“It could not have had anything better happen to it,” he says with a half smile, as if he knows the whimsy of his own words.
The two of them were there last Thursday to present their second exhibition in a press preview before the public opening this week.
To watch him talk of his own art collection is to watch a man at once amused by, and assured of, his own passion; when he describes a piece, he often cocks his head and looks slightly off to the side, as if trying to recollect what he first saw in it, and why it delights him still.
His wife, an art historian, is a bit more pragmatic, approaching the pieces from a more objective, academic angle, conveying a love for them that comes out of an educated appreciation. A bit more conscious of her and her husband’s place in the current Berlin art scene, perhaps, and what they and their project represent to those who came before, she quickly reassures us, “we didn’t kick out the club, no no! They were already gone long before we came.”
In the year…