Kunsthaus Tacheles
Facade of Kunsthaus Tacheles at Oranienburger Straße
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| Established | 1990 |
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| Location |
Oranienburger Straße 54, 56a Berlin, Germany |
| Type | Art gallery, Art house |
| Website | Official website |
The Kunsthaus Tacheles (Art House Tacheles) was an art center in Berlin, Germany, a large (9,000 m2 (97,000 sq ft)) building and sculpture park on Oranienburger Straße in the district known as Mitte. Huge, colorful graffiti-style murals are painted on the exterior walls, and modern art sculptures are featured inside. The building houses an artists collective which is threatened with eviction.
Originally called Friedrichsstadtpassagen, it was built as a department store in the Jewish quarter (Scheunenviertel) of Berlin, next to the synagogue. Serving as a Nazi prison for a short while, it was later partially demolished. After the Berlin Wall had come down, it was taken over by artists, who called it Tacheles, Yiddish for "straight talking". The building contained studios and workshops, a nightclub, and a cinema. Outside, the garden featured an open-air exhibition of metal sculptures as well as galleries and studios for sculptors and painters. A part of the garden still remains open to the public.
The house was finally closed on September 4, 2012. Tacheles Metallwerkstatt, the sculpture park, was open until March 2013, when the financial group Nordbank decided to make money out of it.
A developer called the Fundus Group bought the site from the Berlin government in the mid-1990s. Because it was in no hurry to do anything with the building, it gave the artists a 10-year lease in 1998 at a nominal rent of 1 DM (about 0.50 EUR).
This contract was then extended but expired at the end of 2009, at which point the artists again became squatters. By this time, the Fundus Group had become insolvent, so the Hamburg-based HSH Nordbank, to which the Fundus Group owed money, decided to sell the property.
There was a division inside the Tacheles. ‘Upstairs’ lived the artists from the coterie around organizer Martin Reiter, chairman of Tacheles e.V., the association that was formed in 1994 but went bankrupt in 2010. ‘Downstairs’ around 20 businesses like High End Kino 54 and Café Zapata, together with the Johannishof artists not represented by the e.V., formed Gruppe Tacheles.
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Wikipedia