History
1937
Until that day in autumn 2015, on which Schnute, the last female city-bear was euthanized, several generations of brown bears – Berlin’s heraldic animals – had inhabited the Bärenzwinger [bear pit] for almost eighty years.
The Bärenzwinger was officially opened on the 17th of August 1939 with the four bears Urs, Vreni, Lotte and Jule. Urs and Vreni came from the world-famous bear bit of Bern and were gifts from the city of Bern on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Berlin in 1937.
Originally built for the city’s sanitation department in Köllnischer Park, the Berlin architect Georg Lorenz converted it into the Bärenzwinger.
Bound to an almost eighty-year history of the city, the Bärenzwinger was facing closure twice. All the bears except for Lotte were killed during the 2nd World War and the Bärenzwinger itself was buried under rubble. Thanks to the intervention of citizens, the area was cleared of rubble and reopened on the 29th of November 1949 with the bears Nante and Jette.
The preservation of the bear pit, located in the former East of the city, became a matter for debate shortly after the fall of the Wall due to its poor structural condition, until private donation initiatives finally set its restoration in motion.
Around the turn of the millennium, the keeping of the bears on the site encountered increasing opposition once again, this time because of doubts concerning the welfare of the animals. Criticism from animal welfare groups finally led to the municipal decision to discontinue the site’s usage as a bear pit after the death of Schnute.
Cultural Site
2017
The cultural use of the Bärenzwinger as a location for exhibitions and events, lectures and discussions has been made possible through the transfer of the property to the Department for Further Education and Culture of Berlin-Mitte and the provision of support through interdisciplinary funding. Artists and scientists will be able to develop exhibition ideas on-site and progressively present them by way of carefully considered site-specific interventions and installations.
The cultural program of the former bear pit is organized by young curators of the Department of Arts and Culture, to whom the Bärenzwinger will be made available as a place of practice and learning during their traineeship.
After having stood empty for almost two years, the Department for Further Education and Culture has assumed responsibility for a cultural monument, which was home to Berlin’s heraldic animals for more than 80 years and thus has developed a high degree of popularity and sympathy among the citizens of Berlin.
Its immense effect on creating identity among Berliners is therefore of great value, both for the future urban planning around the area of the northern “Luisenstadt” as well as for the nearby historical center of Berlin.
The aim is to develop the location as a public place of cultural learning and teaching as well as a knowledge base for urban culture. In addition, exhibitions, workshops and events will reference cultural urban design, the history of Berlin and contemporary art.
Curatorial Programm
2017-
2019
The curatorial program at Bärenzwinger from September 2017 to January 2019 developed from an analysis of the history of the area, the animals which inhabit it, its occupants and its critics. It opens up manifold forms and formats and explores the potential of the grounds for historical, environmental, cultural, and artistic interventions.
The program focuses on the role of the bear pit and bears within the scope of the cultural and social identity of the city, the architecture of the site and its urban integration, as well as engaging in discourse surrounding matters of ecology and animal welfare pertaining to the bear pit.
The bear pit, having stood empty for almost two years, still contains numerous traces of its former utilization as a long-standing domicile of Berlin’s symbolic bearers.
The Bärenzwinger exhibition program thematizes three core areas: The first, entitled “Traces of the Animalic” (Spuren des Animalischen), addresses the perceptible absence / presence of the bears. The second key aspect “Architectures of Segregation” (Architekturen der Segregation), sweeps through both the internal and external grounds of the bear pit. The third curatorial program entitled “Projections of Indistinguishably” (Projektionen der Ununterscheidbarkeit), ultimately develops ideas for perspectives and future scenarios of the bear pit.
2019-
2020
With “Fictional Odyssey”, the Bärenzwinger embarks on a journey that explores the challenges and possibilities of our present and future. The exhibition and outreach programme explores fiction as a cultural technique that enables the simulation and imagining of alternative realities. As such, it is fundamental to many of the metamorphoses we know.
Fiction as such is not arbitrary and draws its power from the skilful extension of the actually possible into the impossible.
The aim is to open up the Bärenzwinger as a place of interaction with history, art and culture to as many age groups as possible in order to awaken interest in artistic modes of action and formal languages.
The Bärenzwinger is a place for the citizens of Berlin, including artists and cultural workers as well as visitors. In its careful transformation from a bear enclosure to a cultural location for contemporary art, the project appeals to a heterogeneous and intergenerational audience.
2020-
2021
The Bärenzwinger is an exhibition space that has been exploring the traces of its past as a bear enclosure from a wide range of contemporary perspectives since 2017.
The building’s silent, intangible legacy still, however, hangs heavy in the air.
With the Bärenzwinger’s transformation into a cultural location, we’ve asked ourselves how to open up to the public not as an animal enclosure, but as a landmarked cultural site that inquires into present-day sociocultural issues.
Our work in 2020 largely consisted of watching and listening to the actors and actively reflecting on our own institutional conditions for a wide variety of opening processes.
2021-
2022
The programme presented a series of explorations into the less visible present and history of the Bärenzwinger.
Bricolage describes a practical as well as poetic process that Claude Lévi-Strauss contrasts with the Western engineer and that unfolds through play, improvisation, sampling and DIY strategies.
As Jacques Derrida points out, this juxtaposition is untenable and the engineer himself is a myth, a product of tinkering.
The programme proposed a reparative reading of the concept of “bricolage”. Through a process of opening, collaboration and conversation, bricolage was revised in a queer and anticolonial way.
Bricolage is suggested to cruise various scenarios, destabilize previous definitions to create new narratives beyond the Bärenzwinger’s dominant legacy as the home of the heraldic city bears of Berlin.
2022-
2023
“Ephemeris” can be understood as a form of diary in which the constellations of planets, stars and bodies are recorded. “Ephḗmeros” literally means “for a day” in ancient Greek and can be associated with the first forms of organizing days in accordance with seasonal changes, which evolved into physical records with names of time periods used as calendars.
In 2022 the space of Bärenzwinger was used by invited artists as a garden, a workshop, a performance stage, an archive and a pantry and a shelter.
The programme was characterized by ephemeral art forms and materials. Performative and action-based artistic practices occupied the Bärenzwinger and appealed to the senses through sound and noise, scent and touch.
2023-
2024
Gleaning, most simply put, is the act of gathering what was left on the land after the harvest. What is collected there is what has slipped through the established structures. It is a practice that is hopeful, takes on a considerate attitude and was, in Central-European tradition, done in groups.
In the modern day, the meaning and attitude of the practice might continue, but has been transformed and extended, as portrayed in Agnès Varda’s documentary film „The Gleaners and I“. One picks up a potato, an object, a thought and thinks: How can this be used? In times of (in)tangible scarcity, economic inflation, political uncertainty and a deep climate crisis, perhaps we can reach for this practice to connect with our social and ecological environment. Sometimes it means leaving something behind, holding space.
Because Gleaning is first and foremost a way of perceiving. It means keeping your senses open. Looking for the disregarded, something deemed unimportant at first glance. It balances between viewing and evaluating. When doing so we practice being attentive.
2024-
2025
Lines permeate our everyday lives in both visible and invisible ways: Lines construct the architecture of our cities, show us the way along roads, rivers, escapes and paths, grow from dots into writing and images, have always created a sense of beauty in nature and art as a basic component of the golden ratio, and mark places of separation and togetherness. Whether as an expression of individual paths, as a metaphor for relationships or as an abstract concept – lines offer a wide scope for interpretation, which the Bärenzwinger would like to explore with its 2024 annual program.
In four exhibitions under the title “Edges and Knots”, the Bärenzwinger explores lines as a fundamental element of networks in which knots stand for people or places and edges represent the relationships between them – based on graph theory, according to which knots represent individual points and edges the connections between them.
The negotiation of lines is particularly relevant in the context of Bärenzwinger. As a former kennel, it was created with its cage bars and moats to separate bears and visitors, animal enclosures and the city. At the same time, it functioned as a place of encounter between animals and humans, nature and culture. The Bärenzwinger thus exemplifies the duality of lines as boundaries and connections.
Based on this, the exhibition series invites us to reflect on the many ways in which lines – whether “natural” or human-made – shape our interactions with the world and with each other.
2025-
2026
Current cultural policy developments in Berlin and Germany, the successes that right-wing populist to far-right parties are celebrating with their agenda of exclusion in Western countries, as well as the escalating war scenarios and efforts towards militarisation worldwide are currently putting the idea and practice of benevolent cooperation and standing together to the test. The growing sensitivity to the concerns and vulnerability of citizens, especially healthcare workers, and a new culture of appreciation that emerged during the Covid pandemic seem to have disappeared after only a short time. Rather, in various social contexts, the question arises as to who belongs, and more importantly, who does not. What about charity in light of current social developments? Do we care for each other and if so, in what way and who feels this care? More importantly, who does not? Under the heading ‘Handle (with) Care’, the upcoming annual programme would like to take an in-depth look at current social policies and illuminate them with reference to historical-political, sociological and moral-philosophical discourses and trends.
In the context of feminist care ethics, the topic of care as an elementary but unseen and barely recognised resource has been critically discussed many times under the term ‘care work / care labour’. Every capitalist economy benefits from the socially unrecognised emotional and domestic care work of women and FLINTA* worldwide. Love, attention and care as essential characteristics of the affective labour of women* at home, at work or in social associations are still not valued by society and are commodified as emotions and affects. The ambivalent imbalance in who gives care and who receives it is reflected in heterosexist affect economies and lifestyles, for which the statistical discrimination in the gender pay gap is undoubtedly relevant: the woman remains bound to her caring role because her partner earns better and thus the material prosperity (‘material care’) of the family is secured (cf. Kirsten R. Ghodsee). Emotional labour (‘emotional care’) thus remains secondary to economic dependence. How we fall in love, for example, may not be decided by the heart, but by money. Instead, Gen Z, which revolves around itself, self-confidently articulates its need for ‘health’, ‘self-care’ or the ‘emotional care’ that it desires in friendships and partnerships on social media.
It cannot be denied that not all people in a society have the same access to all forms of support, supply chains and opportunities for advancement. Despite a growing awareness of the needs and concerns of disadvantaged or unseen groups of people, specifically ‘communities’, in the context of a change in identity politics in the cultural sector, many people are still marginalised in society. We use ‘communities’ in the plural, as the term has become common internationally as a self-designation for marginalised interest groups with experience of discrimination and reflects social diversification and heterogeneity.
Through lived solidarity for one’s own experiences of marginalisation and shared political values, a sense of togetherness develops in a community as an identitary core in which different people feel addressed and represented (see Diversity Arts Culture). Who is part of a community and how is one read or visible as such?
What is the point of “caring” for one another? In her essay “A manifesto for radical care of how to be a human in the arts”, curator and artist Tian Zhang talks about the undirected nature of care, cordiality and nurturing: “Care does not flow in one direction or even in reciprocity, but gathers where it is needed” (see the weblink to Zhang) and diagnoses: “Care is not just a feeling; it is action, process, practice, effect.”
Slavoj Žižek once pointedly formulated the ambivalent nature of the commandment to love one’s neighbor with his statement “Love thy neighbor? No thanks!”. In his remarks in The Plague of Fantasies (1997), he subjects the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbour as a form of “care” to a critical examination, in which it is contrasted with real human life practice as an idealized way of life and thus exposed as a self-deceptive and, above all, contradictory attitude. The weak points and limits of this commandment should become clear through the figure of the neighbor: Once a person we know well from a distance gets too close to us, the once familiar and pleasant idea of them becomes a threatening stranger with whom we have to deal in concrete terms. So what is it about unconditional love or, to put it more modestly, everyday kindness? It is almost impossible to feel equal sympathy for everyone. According to Žižek, love cannot be considered unconditional. Just as sympathy does not reach every person, neither does caring for one another.
As the former predecessor building of a city cleaning depot including a public sanitary facility around 1900 – before its commissioning and ideological conversion by the National Socialists as a highly symbolic bear cage from 1938 – the theme is inscribed in the fabric of the Bärenzwinger in an ambivalent and multi-layered way. Built with the remaining bricks of the former city cleaning depot, the Bärenzwinger undoubtedly fulfilled its role as a “care infrastructure” in its architectural and usage history, i.e. a facility that contributes to the maintenance of a city or region through its resources and measures. As a public cultural venue for contemporary art, the Bärenzwinger now seeks a conscious exchange with the neighborhood and nearby cultural actors and schools. As an institution of the Department of Art, Culture and History in the Mitte district office, the Bärenzwinger is also a municipal gallery in Berlin and thus integrated into another structural network with an overarching history of remembrance, which to a certain extent already bears “community care” in its name. “Community care” attempts to strengthen the agency of marginalized groups of people in particular, to counteract inequalities in the distribution of power and to guarantee access to exclusive spaces and structures through support and care.
The first municipal galleries emerged in the post-war years 1945-1949 in the course of the creation of the first art offices and were primarily responsible for the “care and registration of artists” in order to issue ration cards to artists, who were thus provided for via the cultural offices (Gillen, p. 13). The focus of this cultural policy in the post-war years was the substantial support of visual artists and the basic supply of culture to the districts. The creation of exhibition spaces took second place in these efforts (see also Bauer). Against this background, the Bärenzwinger is faced with the question of the extent to which its heritage as a care infrastructure and communal institution is reflected in the current gallery operations and in what way this heritage can be reshaped and further developed in future curatorial practice and mediation work. How can community arise and continue to exist here? What opportunities and problems does the Bärenzwinger face as an exhibition space in the center of the city and what role does it play as a public space for living together in Berlin-Mitte? We can also ask: Who belongs to the city of Berlin and to whom does it belong? Where does the Bärenzwinger as a space enable participation and how can this approach be further promoted? How is communality reflected here? How could the Bärenzwinger perhaps further implement “flows of care” (Zhang) in those areas that have not yet been touched?
Under the heading “Handle (with) Care”, the Bärenzwinger’s 2025 annual program explores in four exhibitions the question of how community is lived against the backdrop of current social and cultural-political developments, what holds us together and what divides us. The aim is to shed light on the gray areas and boundaries that keep certain groups of people at a distance and cut them off from care or make it impossible to include them in it.
The title “Handle (with) care” expresses the double meaning of the care theme: the human desire for rapprochement and care while at the same time being turned away and ignored by classism, discrimination and misanthropy. The premise that something or someone should be treated with compassion or care, i.e. with sensitivity, empathy and care, should be critically questioned and understood as an invitation to work together. However, this applies less in the sense of a moral, normative demand, i.e. the imperative: “Take care of each other!” Rather, it is our conviction that compassion and care are the cornerstones of human coexistence. However, we see this as a claim of our exhibition space and understand the motto as a performative impulse. The typographic bracketing of the “with” also refers to the subtle differences that sometimes define who or what belongs to our community/society, and its shape echoes the layout of the bear kennel.
The project aims to ask the overarching question of who needs the most help or care in our community and whether it is available to those people at all? Who decides and how unequally is care distributed in our society? Which lives do we see and which do we not? Which of them receive the protection they should actually receive and which socio-cultural and socio-political values systemically exclude compassion and protection? And last but not least: Who has a seat at our table?