Berlin Carousel
The Academy as Living Artistic Practice

Over a period of five weeks, more than 50 international artists from various disciplines will be working on artistic projects at the Akademie der Künste, which will be presented to the public as part of a non-linear composition developed by Arnold Dreyblatt.

Since the 1990s, Arnold Dreyblatt has worked with the scoring of overlapping time sequences in order to make artistic processes visible. In doing so, he draws on John Cage’s Theatre Event No. 1 (1952), in which artists performed simultaneous activities amongst the audience within predefined time frames, as well as on Lawrence Halprin’s use of the score as a means of fostering “spontaneity and interaction” that are “not directed towards a specific outcome” (see The Rsvp Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment, 1970).

Berlin Carousel takes up Cage’s processes of circulation and further develops the idea of a non-centred composition. Dreyblatt envisions the Akademie der Künste as a temporary “working academy”, in which more than 40 Akademie members and invited artists from all disciplines engage in process-oriented research, discussion, performance and interaction. The open project space in an exhibition hall of the Akademie building on Hanseatenweg, conceived specifically for the project by the collective raumlaborberlin, becomes both a place of production and a space in which the boundaries of artistic categories are crossed and expanded.

A schedule displays when individual artists or groups are active in the space. Over a period of five weeks, visitors are invited daily between 2 and 7 pm to observe artistic practice in progress and to participate in it. At evening events, the participating artists and collectives will present both the events developed within the space and further works. Interdisciplinarity, as well as time- and process-based art forms that can be experienced within this open working process, form the core of the project.