In 2024, Künstlerhaus Bethanien is celebrating its 50-year anniversary. It has always been a place of experimentation and innovation, and artists who work with sound have been among its guests from the very beginning. Its program has always been shaped by public exhibitions, concerts, performances, and discussion-based events. Guests working in the studios as part of the residency program have collaborated with artists from the city in many different fields. It is precisely such experimental and genre-transcending projects that have cemented Künstlerhaus Bethanien’s place as one of the most extraordinary art spaces in Berlin—and beyond.

Douglas Kolk (1963, Newark—2014, Boston) was a USA-born and based artist whose life and practice were closely intertwined with Berlin’s artistic milieu of the 1990s. Kolk’s work revolved around questions of identity, initially through small-format drawings and later through large-format collages combined with painting. The exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, featuring Douglas Kolk’s works from the collections in Berlin, marks his first retrospective in more than a decade, inviting us to rethink the current image of the 1990s pop culture. Kolk delved into processes of self-loss and self-recognition through identification with youth subcultures, to which he was particularly sensitive in terms of their visual dialects.