For more than twenty years Berlin has developed a reputation as one of the most innovative cultural cities of the world. With its outstanding museums, film festivals, low rent spaces and galleries, the city attracts increasing numbers of artists, collectors, and connoisseurs. Around 600 galleries around the city provide a rich setting to experience the newest tendencies in modern art, but while this development has been remarkable for many reasons, it is interesting to note that during the same period a number of independent spaces have vanished and many of the crucial aspects of a dynamic contemporary discourse – such as questioning the relationship between art and the dynamics of the city, or relating the production of art to the potential of available space – have increasingly disappeared.

Measuring Potentials traces back this Berlin tradition of working and experimenting with unconventional available space in the city. By taking over the new shop of the P88 building in the center of the upcoming art district around Potsdamer Strasse, this exhibition addresses the potential of new architecture in the city, of yet-unused new space to pre-interpretation and to the surrounding development of neighborhoods as well as their likely future gentrification.

The works in Measuring Potentials choose different ways of addressing these dynamics. Some seem to ask questions about our own ways of measuring or setting ourselves in relation to certain formal patterns, objects or spaces, while others put focus on the question of potential.

What is our understanding of a potential? What hopes do we invest in the potential of a building or a particular area in a city? What could the potential of one work of art be in relation to a setting planned for an alternative function?

By approaching the question of aesthetics at the same time as social and political relevance, Measuring Potentials is an agglomeration of positions that thinks beyond the established pathway to open alternative routes into the hidden potentials of art and architecture.

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