Kunstschalter Berlin e.V.

After in 2000 the “Kunstschalter e.V.” Association handed over its official/legal cover to the project “KunstWerk Köln” and had such been renamed, eight people from Berlin and Cologne re-founded the “Kunstschalter e.V.” in Berlin, on June 06.2008:

<  Association to carry out artistic activities in public spaces.

By this the public might be guided directly to visual, performing and applied arts, and artists be given more opportunity to show their work in alternative locations that would otherwise come into contact with art hardly.
For this, suitable meeting and club rooms in the city of Berlin should be sought and created, and contacts and collaborations with artists, Berlin's art and cultural institutions, colleges, universities, industry, and public institutions of care and migration be maintained. Through the medium of art and concepts developed by artists it is a.o. aimed to improve the situation of people destabilized socially as a result of disease, discrimination, abuse or other reasons, to at best give a contribution to allow them access into the society again or increasingly.

In Berlin also, basically we will remain disinterested on the “Art Scene” contexts which by dictating slogan terms or glamorous Art rummage-"Events" largely removed from further reality: instead to perpetual self-adulation or assimilation into the commercial art market we primarily go for a strengthening of social skills, which in our view should be essential to art, while it rarely is the case, a social skill conveying an empathy and orientation for people's needs and a socially sensuous relevant use of artful means.

For this standing in particular are:

- The glass engraver and art activist Ulrich Eichhorn, having moved from Cologne to Berlin in 2008, who in Cologne with his "Kunstschalter" already for many years had deployed art in public space, and thus decisively for the Cologne “scene” influenced the city´s appearance.

- Social therapist and lecturer Lothar Riemenschneider , warped from Hamburg to Berlin in 2005, who for many years specifically was engaged in violence prevention and victim guard, by that not letting aside a synoptic view on societal causes of violence, civic mental and spiritual impoverishment and bourgeois complacency. 

- And sculptor Theresia Boehm, moving from Cologne to Berlin also in 2007, highlighting from below the “Berlin Scene”, if not as trained medical and surgical nurse she is about for the Berlin Caritas providing a low-threshold outpatient care for homeless.

With these three already around 20 people as members and supporters of the “Kunstschalter”, artists from Cologne, Berlin and other locations stand by when it should be about to bring people together in projects and to create space for the needs that often perish otherwise.

We would be delighted if you paid attention to our next projects, and supported us in this work by which we intend to use art as a medium.

For further information, interviews, statements, information we would available by appointment and on request.