++++ They are called Interflug, Suicide Club, Art and Technology or Tuesday Bar and our situated in Central Berlin. Only insiders know where they are located and when they're open. They are designed for ephemerality. They can disappear from one day to the next in order perhaps to pop up once more at an even hotter hot-spot. These phantom clubs have become a fixed feature of Berlin's night-life. Those who know the most ‘in’ places and thus the ones which are best hidden, prove themselves to be insiders.
Nina Fischer & Maroan El Sani live in Berlin and know the clubs but their work for Manifesta does not show the night when the club is buzzing and the night-life is stirring. They photograph the entrances by day when the doors are closed and the clubs’ patrons are still sleeping off their intoxication or waking up with some embarrassment next to a person who looked rather different the night before.
The locked doors, dark back passageways, discreet staircases and crooked gates look as though they had a hang-over themselves and were avoiding the daylight because their eyes were burning. There is nothing to be sensed of the lively activity of the night. There is no sign to tell you that here is the entrance to one of the most desirable worlds. They are barred entrances in the middle of a pedestrian walkway, metal gates locked with chains, doors boarded over with wooden planks next to windows that have been bricked in. They are desolate, forgotten, lifeless places without identity in midst of garbage, crumbling plaster and old graffiti.
Fisher and El Sani have been working together since 1993 and with the precision of detectives, equipped with camera, computer and video camera, they pursue the question: What happens when people have left their terrain? They themselves describe their procedure very aptly as aura research. They scratch off the paint on the surface to see what is hidden behind it, to allow what is behind to come forth. In their film Berlin (sunrise) – Think of the future for ten seconds, for instance, they ask young people leaving a club (perhaps one of those mentioned above) in the early hours of the morning to concentrate for ten seconds on what the future will bring or should bring. On becoming introspective, the practised poses of coolness melt and for a moment something becomes manifest which is situated beyond the prescribed dress codes and the artificial templates of behaviour. It is probably similar with the entrances to the phantom clubs; they allow their masks to fall.
Frankfurter Kunstverein, until 25 August. jdv