BERLIN: Writing Graffiti

In June 2018 for the first time ever the attempt was made to exhibit the history of graffiti in Berlin. The exhibition was prepared together with writers and photographers from the writing scene, showing excerpts from 1983 until today. In December 2019 the exhibition traveled to Belgium to show an updated and improved version at the Manufacture111 in Brussels called BERLIN: Writing Graffiti. While the last years show was only addressed to writers from the scene, this time it will be exhibited to the public.

The accompanying catalogue sums up the exhibitions huge content on 112 pages. Besides the timeline mentioning influential writers from each period, the publication consists of even chapters focusing on four decades of writing in the capital. Although every part starts with an explanatory text in which the cities graffiti evolution is depicted from first pieces on the Berlin wall in 1983 until 2019 subways which run for weeks, the catalogues main focus are photographs.

Never before published material of members from the DENOTS crew skating in front of their first pieces in 1985, the earliest painted subway from 1986, posse shots from the legendary Friedrichstraße-Corner or influential events like the Berlin wholecar invasion of the ONE MORE TIME crew in 1991: BERLIN: Writing Graffiti shows a representative average of a more than 35-year-old history with selected events and places, developed techniques and important artists.

Without claiming to present a full and comprehensive picture, the curators anyway managed to point out how Berlin made its way from a behindhand start in the 1980s, to a booming style leader city in the 1990s, but also an experimental melting pot in the 2000s and eventually to the often mentioned worlds graffiti metropolis which it might be today.