BNKR will be open on Saturday and Sunday (2pm – 6pm). Karfreitag and Ostermontag we’ll go for some easter egg hunting. Happy Easter everybody! Photo: Dominik Gigler

"Die Macht der Medien ist bekannt und nicht zuletzt wegen der visuellen Kraft von Bildern so groß – besonders von Bildern, die Katastrophen zeigen. Offensichtlich merkt sich unser Gehirn aber weniger die konkrete Abbildung, als vielmehr deren Farbspektrum. Diesen Umstand hat sich das Architekturbüro Aas Gonzalez Haase zunutze gemacht, um daraus die „Catastrophe Colours“ zu entwickeln, die nun von June 14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff im BNKR - current reflections on art and architecture in München in den Raum übersetzt wurden." Thank you, form. Design Magazine! https://form.de/de/news/catastrophe-colours

"Bunker mit Aussicht. Der BNKR Space in München erkundet die Räume von morgen..." - Many thanks to MONOPOL - Magazin für Kunst und Leben / Sebastian Frenzel for having BNKR - current reflections on art and architecture in the latest edition of "Monopol Kunst und Kultur 2018 in Bayern". So happy! #Stefan Höglmaier #raumstation Architekten https://www.monopol-magazin.de/monopol-veroeffentlicht-einen-neuen-kulturfuehrer-zu-bayern

"The Catastrophe Colours 2018" by GEORG DIEZ Colours are everywhere, they are so present that they become invisible. They are taken from nature, in the materials that were used to make them, in the names that they still carry, and they are given back to nature, in the form of civilization, as a form of domination. Colours are contradictory in the sense that they mean everything and mean nothing at the same time. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: Red is red is red. To see colours is to see the world. To understand colours is to understand the world. There is an awkward imbalance between ignorance and information, innocence and sensibility. A few attempts have been made to categorize colours in order to form an aesthetic set that organizes the access to the world. Goethe, Gropius, Le Corbusier, among others, tried to show how the perception of reality and the creation of reality might be connected in this inherently modern process. They were somewhat romantic in their notion that a disorderly world might yield to a system of order. This is the modernist conceit. It is also the modernist limitation. What we see now, looking back at the modern period as our own antiquity, is a reductive model of reality, based on the mechanics of Newton, which corresponds to a simplistic sensibility when it comes to deciphering the world. What we need in the age of quantum mechanics is a more dynamic model that is able to incorporate contradictory realities and appearances. If modernity was all about demystifying the world - entzaubern is the German word for this -, the task now is not to re-mystify the world, this is reactionary politics in aesthetics as in practise; the task is instead to complicate reality, to mess with reality, to untangle and re-entangle reality and show it as the unruly web of informations that it is. Catastrophe Colours is in that sense a project that owes as much to the old as to the new. It is both a return to the premodern way of extracting colours from the world we live in and a reversal of the mindnumbing colouring of the world we think we live in. It is a questioning of our relation to the world and our ability to ignore or understand it. It is challenging the consumption, of colours, of reality, of the world, and it points to the tragedy that man‘s conquest always was and always will be. It does not peddle morality. But it is both heartfelt and humane. It is a political as much as an aesthetic project at the turn of the Anthropocene. The catastrophes in question are all man-made. They are industrial, like oil spills, atomic accidents, large scale killings of animals; they are natural in the sense that they show how human kind has messed with the order of things, like floods and storms and other disasters that can be traced to our rape of the world; they are criminal, like the wars that are fought in the name of power or the people, of interests both overt and clandestine. They are all toxic, one way or another, and the beauty that these colours show is only partly countered by the dark knowledge they are informed with. This dark blue isn‘t merely pretty, the promise of a sheltering sky, it relates on the contrary to the story of a sky that comes raining down on us, it is the colour of the crash of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. Or that light blue isn‘t actually a colour of boyish longing and innocence, it extracted from a photo of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in 2011. This purple is napalm, this yellow is a flamethrower used in the Vietnam War, this pink is napalm again, this darker grey is the destruction of Arbeen in Syria, this lighter grey is the shelling of Ariha, again in Syria: Disaster, we see, is our real nature, and if there is beauty, it is toxic beauty. What Aas Gonzalez Haase and June 14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff propose in this project is the mediatization of colours in a world overwhelmed by media. They use colours to tell the story of our time, as an access to our image-informed subconscious, to complicate the relationship between the interior (an object, the domestic, the private) and the exterior (a catastrophe, history, the political). They organize these colours and find patterns and correspondence in these families of colours that refer to specific events or categories like Vietnam War or Middle East. The colours in these categories relate to each other, they reference each other, they inform each other. This again is the consequence of a certain aesthetic of the time, as created in the media that is used and the images that are chosen. The colours of the Vietnam War seem like Pop explosions dating from a Pop era, because these are the images available, because this is the way the story of this war has been told, out in the open, fostering protest at home, mediated in an age where the information society began to take hold. The colours of the Syrian War by contrast are muted, like the discourse about this abominable war, specifically abominable through the ineptitude and unwillingness of the West to find an answer, to stop the war. The colours available reflect the state of media, society, politics, it is the aesthetic offered by the specific forms of photography, television and digital media. We are the perpetrators, this is the story behind those colours; we live with what we did and keep doing, this is the urgency in Catastrophe Colours. Each colour works like a time capsule, like a mind-bomb, in the words of the art activist Kalle Lasn. What Gonzalez Haase AAS and June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff start is a process in the course of which we can, if we want, come to realize how cruelty and beauty are connected; and that innocence is impossible. This sounds ominous and dire. And it is. At the same time this project reflects an attitude of morality infused playfulness: We behave like grown-up children on this playground that is the world. We see and we don’t see. But everything is there to see. It’s in the colours. Not Mountain Dew, but chemical spill. It’s the tragedy of time: We knew. These colours are memories from the future. The exhibition "The Catastrophe Colours 2018" is part of BNKR's program "Stop making sense, it's as good as it gets." curated by Ludwig Engel and Joanna Kamm (until July 2018). Many thanks to Aas Gonzalez Haase and June 14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff. Photo: Dominik Gigler

Last steps for the reading @volksbuehne_berlin tonight. So exciting! . . . . . #stopmakingsenseitsasgoodasitgets, #ludwigengel, #joannakamm, #armenavanessian, #volksbuehneberlin, #satinisland, #tommccarthy, #companyreport, #laurahopkins, #mariefrancerafael, #rotersalon, #bnkrgoesberlin, #satelliteevent, #time, #perception, #bnkr_space, #bnkrspace, #artspace, #bunker, #art, #architecture, #program, #transdisciplinary, #noncommercial, #munich, #muenchen

Tonight at @volksbuehne_berlin, 7pm: . Armen Avanessian & Enemies: #16 Tom McCarthy's Satin Island: Company Report" . Presented by Tom McCarthy and "Stop making sense, it's as good as it gets." . A cooperation between Volksbühne Berlin and @bnkr_space. . Cover: Peter Mendelsund . . . . . #stopmakingsenseitsasgoodasitgets, #ludwigengel, #joannakamm, #armenavanessian, #volksbuehneberlin, #satinisland, #tommccarthy, #companyreport, #laurahopkins, #rotersalon, #bnkrgoesberlin, #satelliteevent, #time, #perception, #bnkr_space, #bnkrspace, #artspace, #bunker, #art, #architecture, #program, #transdisciplinary, #noncommercial, #munich, #muenchen

Visit our current exhibition "The Catastrophe Colours 2018" (until 22.04.18) and take a look at the fantastic catalogue by Aas Gonzalez Haase. There's a limited edition and we just have some books left: "The Catastrophe Colours" (2014), Editor: Pierre Jorge Gonzalez, 120 g extrarough cold white, 202 pages. Photo / GIF created by Dominik Gigler. http://www.bnkr.space/the-catastrophe-colours-2018-gonzalez-haase-aas-and-june-14-meyer-grohbruegge-chermayeff/

BNKR goes Berlin! Can't wait to experience the full reading of Tom McCarthy’s novel ‘Satin Island’, staged as a company report, designed by Laura Hopkins: Volksbühne Berlin, Roter Salon, Thursday, 22.03.18, 7pm. http://www.bnkr.space/armen-avanessian-enemies-16-tom-mccarthys-satin-island-company-report-volksbuehne-berlin/

Flashback: "The Catastrophe Colours 2018" (07.03.2018). Many thanks to Aas Gonzalez Haase, Johanna Meyer-Grohbruegge, Sam Chermayeff, Ludwig Engel, Joanna Kamm, Marie-France Rafael, An Laphan, Kalas Liebfried, Dominik Gigler and especially to Stefan Höglmaier. Photo: Dominik Gigler

VIII, INT. BNKR - EVENING: The Catastrophe Colours 2018 - Marie-France Rafael in collaboration with An Laphan / Production: Kalas Liebfried FILM AS EXHIBITION / EXHIBITION AS FILM is a project in which the film-production time merges synchronically with the time of "Stop making sense, it’s as good as it gets." However the time of the movie is asynchronous to the time of the program. Over the course of the entire runtime of "Stop making sense, it’s as good as it gets.", filming process, montage and post-production become part of the program, thus turning the program into a movie set. The movie is 'on site'. In a recursive gesture, program, movie and site are turned into elements thus creating over and over again new situations in time and space. The project is part of BNKR's program "Stop making sense, it's as good as it gets." curated by Ludwig Engel and Joanna Kamm (until July 2018).

BNKR goes Berlin - join our first satellite event and experience a unique production of 'Satin Island' at Volksbühne Berlin... Armen Avanessian & Enemies #16: Satin Island: Company Report, 22.03.18, 7pm, Volksbühne Berlin / Presented by Tom McCarthy and 'Stop making sense, it's as good as it gets.' (www.bnkr.space) *** Tickets available at Volksbühne Berlin *** A full reading of Tom McCarthy’s novel 'Satin Island', staged (in keeping with the book’s corporate-anthropological milieu) as a company report, designed by Laura Hopkins. The actors Elena García Gerlach, Steffen Klewar and Jonas Zipf will be reading. On purchase of a unit of the event's stock, shareholders will have the right to audit the text’s full reading, alongside a power-point presentation. Coffee and biscuits will be free to all shareholders, and alcohol will be available for purchase. 'Satin Island' has been described as 'Kafka for the Google Age'. Its anti-hero, corporate anthropologist U., is a twenty-first century man-without-qualities, meandering his way from brainstorming session to government meeting to aimless speculation about cargo cults and dead parachutists, the meaning of buffering and the after-life of Ulrike Meinhof. Is there a logic governing our era? Could this be summed up, ‘named’? Or is it all just randomness, algorithm and glitch? The reading is part of the program 'Stop making sense, it's as good as it gets.', by Ludwig Engel and Joanna Kamm and a cooperation between Volksbühne Berlin and BNKR - current reflections on art and architecture Munich. Portrait Tom McCarthy: Nicole Strasser Credit Satin Island: Peter Mendelsund

Interview with Pierre Jorge Gonzalez (Aas Gonzalez Haase) by Deutschlandfunk Kultur about the current show "The Catastrophe Colours 2018" on view at BNKR until 22.04.18. Photo: Dominik Gigler