Sven Marquardt, Berghain’s most famous bouncer, stares in. "Really?" They both shook their heads, sadly. Reporter Gavin Fernando pictured after spending 24 hours at Berghain nightclub in Berlin. Trying to look casual but dignified, I excused myself, took my girlfriend's hand and went the right way. An exciting piece of Berlin's cultural history from the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall to the vibrant present. As I got my bearings, I realised I'd somehow managed to walk into a corner on the direct opposite side of the room from the ticket booth and door leading to the coat check. With Sven Marquardt, Frank Knster, Smiley Baldwin.
He pointed to the sign and raised an eyebrow. "I'm really sorry, I don't speak German," I said. "Um," I said, my voice breaking like the fast-food employee in The Simpsons. Eventually, like a bumper car pushed into a corner, I found myself before a blond man in a T-shirt, guarding a door. Getting confused, we both turned and bumped into each other, lost in a maze of heads and tattoos and metal gates. Suddenly I was staring into the chest of another gigantic figure shouting orders in German, and my girlfriend was being asked to approach a desk. Looking bored, Shovel-jaw waved us through. My non-German-speaking girlfriend, guessing, held up two fingers. As I shuffled into the spotlight, hastily removing the H&M earflap cap that in Berlin brands me thoroughly as a tourist, Shovel-jaw yelled something. When I went a few weeks ago, two girls in front of me with chic facial studs were denied entry for no apparent reason. In the interests of keeping the club a mix of gay and straight, men and women, stylish and laid-back, open to foreigners but with a German underground feel, Berghain engages in explicit social engineering to keep its reputation as the world's best club. The club has its roots in the gay scene but most nights has a very mixed crowd – and it's exactly this variety that the bouncers are trying, it appears, to maintain. "Getting turned away from Berghain happens to everyone," says Felix of the Circus hotel's restaurant, Fabisch, which also employs a former Berghain doorman. If you answer correctly, you will most likely get in. But how do Sven and his friends choose? No English-speakers? No girls in groups of more than three? No plaid shirts? The only consensus among Berlin's clubbers is that it has nothing to do with how good-looking, stylish or "cool" you are. When standing in front of the bouncer, he might ask you what DJs are playing (welcher DJ spielt). Tell you to leave and never return.Īt peak hours – 4-10am, depending on the night, when the queue can stretch hundreds of metres and two hours into the distance – as many as 50% of eager club-goers are turned away. The bouncers take a look at your face and do one of two things:ġ. (Here's a video of Sven in artiste mode, looking significantly more cuddly, I can assure you, than he does in a dark corner of an old power station at 4am.) He's difficult to look at for more than a second because of the tattoo of barbed wire crawling over his face. His name, appropriately, is Sven, and he sits on a chair behind the first two, dark and hulking, long hair flowing, bullets of metal stuck into him at various points. And the last guy you can't even see until you step, blinking, into the spotlight. The next is 7ft tall, bald, with a sloping forehead, wearing a stevedore cap and jackboots, like a cartoon of evil. A winding cattle pen funnels you in pairs towards the door, where the bouncers loom, radiating all the approachability of an IED. The photography exhibition follows on from similar events that Marquardt has hosted in Belgrade and Sydney, as well as a separate recent event in New York.The whole entry process is creepy. Berlin has always been the setting as well as the inspiration for my pictures and projects.” It was at the end of the 1990s that my camera again became a stylistic device for expressing our attitude towards life. “In a city in transition after the wild eighties and the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had for the first time put my camera aside. “For more than thirty years, club culture has determined both my life-as a curator of countless nights-and, of course, my life as a photographer,” Marquardt commented. It’s set to take place from 18-21 May at ArtsDistrict Brooklyn, with the opening night being accompanied by performances from a number of house and techno artists, as well as a video art installation in collaboration with Tavy Hornbrook. The exhibition, entitled ‘Disturbing Beauty’ will see him exhibit a selection of his first photo works captured in 1980s East Berlin, which will be presented by Galerie Deschler Berlin.
He’s better known for being the doorman of Berlin‘s infamous Berghain nightclub, but Sven Marquardt is also an accomplished photographer, and has just announced an exhibition taking place to coincide with New York Art Week.
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