Catharsis Through The Looking Glass: Désiré Feuerle's Contemporary Take on Ancient Art

Since moving to Berlin last month, I've made it a goal to visit as many galleries and exhibitions as possible - I average a few visits a week to national art institutions as well as local openings. Methods of showcasing art in Berlin are not too different from New York or Paris; contemporary galleries have short term exhibitions on display, often accompanied by a permanent collection, or vice versa. Most are free or below ten euro to visit, many open all day for a good portion of the week, and highly accessible. What keeps me coming back to galleries and museums each week, aside from my love and interest in contemporary things, is the autonomy I can exercise once I'm in these spaces. Following my gut and intuition, I explore nuances and specificities within certain works I am naturally attracted to. I read retrospectives at my own pace, take the brochure of a new artist I discovered, take photos to commemorate the experience (and post on my Instagram story), and find a nearby cafe to sip an espresso and write my thoughts on the works in my journal. I visited the Feuerle Collection, in Kruezberg, Berlin, today, and had no such experience. I wouldn't classify the Feuerle Collection as a gallery or museum space, but rather a spiritual, sensory, and highly cathartic experience, which, after I underwent it, I felt like calling up all my friends and telling them about what I saw. I'll spare them though, and write about it here.

Shadow of Khmer Sculpture, photographed by ERCO Group

In the early '90s, German art collector and curator Désiré Feuerle championed the positioning of ancient, archaic art with the contemporary in exhibitions and shows in Cologne. This juxtaposition was new for the art world, as local and national critics and collectors began examining how to see the two within the same context. Feuerle justified his methods by saying that "all pieces were contemporary once. I make no distinction between the old and the new – what matters to me is quality. The spirit of a work of art is never lost, and that interests me. The person who created it is still present even hundreds or thousands of years later. That person created something immortal. That is beautiful, and that touches me.” In 2016, Feuerle and his wife Sara Puig began a new, permanent project in Berlin: the brick and mortar Feuerle Collection. The two purchased an abandoned telecommunications bunker, built in the height of the Second World War, and contracted architect John Pawson to renovate it according to their vision for the space as a permanent gallery. Today the bunker, stationed discretely on Hallesches Ufer, has little outward connection to what it holds on its insides aside from the collection's elegant logo, in small font, by the entrance.

I almost missed it as I walked down Hallesches Ufer, and once locating it, was struck by the building's elegant yet brutal soberness. A chic gallery attendant met me outside to inform me that the collection can only be viewed via scheduled, hourly tours, with a maximum attendant number of ten. I had just missed the previous tour, and would have to wait until the next one - I accepted this invitation eagerly, and waited in the first breaths of Berlin autumn until the tattooed, trench-coat-doting Germans and dapper French art collectors in tailored suits began lining up outside. Once we'd entered the grimly damp space and instructed to turn in our cellphones, we were given a torturously long introduction by the collection's art mediator. I use the word 'torturous' endearingly; myself along with a hodgepodge of cryptic, artistic characters waited anxiously among concrete columns, conscious of our underground orientation, sweating slightly in the dark humidity as we were briefed of the experience we would soon undergo. This surely was not what I had in mind when I off-handedly chose the Feuerle Collection as my Sunday morning gallery visit.

Feuerle Collection Exterior, photographed by Holger Niehaus

To enter the collection, all visitors are placed in a small, pitch-black hallway within the bowels of the renovated bunker and told to remain there for two minutes. As my eyes struggled to adjust, grasping for orientation, I was forced to look inwards and to see the frame of my body as my anchor point. A musical score by avant-garde piano composer John Cage pierced the darkness, again, tortuously. The composition, "Music for Piano No. 20," is experimental in that it lacks a certain rhythmic flow; it is a medley of simple and meandering piano keys with elongated, anxious pauses in between. The silence becomes a part of the score, as does our collective discomfort. This is the Sound Room, the first step into the conceptual labyrinth that is the Feuerle Collection. Meant to cleanse your senses before entering the main space, this first room invited us to accept silence and absence. Our human experience in those two minutes is melded with our environment; the damp air we breath in and out collectively, our temporary loss of sight in overwhelming darkness, and the space in sound which is left empty between piano notes. It is a visceral, sensory, and physical art - and above all, a cathartic one, as we were collectively alleviated from the inherent emotional weight of existing. In this subterranean space, highly disconnected from the outside world, one is given the space to see and be in a completely different way.

After the Sound Room, we are led to the first gallery space which hosts a grand collection of Imperial Chinese stone furniture from the Han and Qing Dynasties, as well as early Khmer statues dating back to the 7th century. Each work sits on a black pedestal scattered throughout the dimly lit bunker, harsh golden lighting casting dramatic shadows of the elaborate stone intricacies on the concrete floors. Above many of these archaic stone works, lacquer furnitures, and Khmer structures, hang contemporary, erotic, black-and-white photography by Nobuyoshi Araki. Women, bound and tied, hang upside down and inside out, flashing kinky, shameless smoulders under smudged black lipstick. Above a stone table dating back to the Qing Dynasty, an Adam Fuss daguerrotype of a deteriorating mattress is hung. The juxtaposition of these two items, centuries apart, in such close proximity is Désiré Feuerle's conceptual fuel. "When we do something in the collection, for instance, showing an imperial table that no one would normally look at, installing it with contemporary art makes it young and contemporary again," he says. I would add that the accompanying feelings and associations with each section in the collection work to round out Feurele's mission; the esoteric, rare and sobering Chinese works, with their heavy, brutal materialities, and Fuss and Araki's one dimensional depictions of grit with notes of grungy and dark sexuality push us to see each work differently. Araki and Fuss' dirty and degenerate subjects hold heavier artistic value next to Imperial Chinese stone - they are elevated to works worthy of their positioning, dignified and solemn. The Khmer sculptures become disturbingly contemporary, ornately twisted, darker and deeper as we see them mirroring the perverted positions of naked women.

Khmer Sculpture, Qing Dynasty stone table, Nobuyoshi Araki photography. Photo courtesy of ERCO.

Adam Fuss daguerrotype, Imperial Chinese Stone. Photographed by Holger Niehaus.

Within the first floor of the collection, a double sided mirror/window allows us to get an obscured view of a second room: the Lake Room. Natural flooding has turned this empty hall into an installation; a sea of black water embraces the concrete emptiness and is juxtaposed by rows of thick posts which pierce the water's surface. The Lake Room is elusive and frustrating as the eyes struggle to make sense of the subtle spectacle. As I examined the concrete posts being reflected into the lake, I caught glimpses of my own reflection in the glass panel separating us. I studied my face, eyes squinting to see the shrouded waters, and the dancing black lake which acted as a mirror for the concrete posts. The space between the lake and I was palpable, and I once again felt an intense emotional release. Similarly to the Sound Room, myself along with the diverse characters exploring the gallery space became an active participant in the installation as our experience within the space became blended with the art itself.

Feuerle Collection's Lake Room

Being in the echo-chamber that is The Feuerle Collection is a testament not only to the ways it is possible to view art differently, but to exist differently. The bunker becomes a laboratory in which Désiré Feuerle experiments on the human experience - he tests us to involve ourselves within the most cryptic concepts, to build our own stories and analyses, to view the ancient as contemporary, to see through a strange lens, and above all, to feel viscerally and embrace catharsis. If it is possible to see and be differently in Mr. Feurele's subterranean circus, it must be possible to carry these values above ground in our everyday lives. Since visiting the collection, I've had an interesting shift in perspective while exploring Berlin. I am no longer a visitor, passing through the city as I would a gallery. I am a participant in the city's story, and the relationship between my physicality and my environment matters. I view my surroundings, graffitied remnants of East Berlin's communist past as stories within themselves, certainly not void of history, but equally as contemporary items which form our external experience today. There is a certain beauty in these realizations, and in Désiré Feuerle's ability to create an experience which sparks such intense existential re-examination. I enjoy finding parallels in the ways we see art and the ways we live, and in the Feuerle Collection's case, how to live in a way that models how we see art. We tend to see art humanely yet passively, appreciating visual aesthetics yet being blissfully unaware of our own relationship to them. But Mr. Feuerle will not allow us to view his collection without intensely viewing ourselves, too.