For the past decade, during each Berlin Art Week photographers have captured and documented not just countless works of art, exhibitions, and events, but also taken pictures of those attending all these events and exhibitions, looking at the artworks: the visitors themselves.
Art viewing relies on a strange dialectic of togetherness and solitude, something that has become especially clear over the past year and a half when museums, galleries, and exhibition spaces had to close as part of the lockdown. What was missing, what was lacking from the experience before the computer screen at home was not just the immediate physical aspect of many artworks, but also the shared public spaces in which the works are normally viewed, all of us on our own, in contemplation, but then also together and ideally also in exchange with others, with friends and strangers. And as self-evident as that seemed all these years, the possibilities and availability of this activity called art viewing, solitude in togetherness, this loose next to/with one another in the face of art, is something that we should recall once again in all its fragility.
For art viewing. For art’s beholders.