Bornholmer Hüttenwirt, 2023, click to watch
Friederike von Rauch & Stefanie Schweiger

Chez Berlin (2022-23)
The photographers Anna Lehmann-Brauns, Friederike von Rauch, and Stefanie Schweiger explore the parts of the bar that are completely silent and where it stands for itself. As viewers, it is impossible to resist being pulled into these scenes. You can almost feel the coolness of the beer glass between your fingers and smell the stale air of the bar. Spiritually the feeling is somewhere between stupor and Zen—meditations at the bar.

Lehmann-Brauns, von Rauch, and Schweiger are unusual chroniclers of bar life since they do not frequent bars themselves. They approach this strange world with care, sensitivity, and often even tenderness—and this particular attitude is what allows the special magic of the corner bar to come into focus.
Sometimes the bars are glamorous as in Stefanie Schweiger’s portraits of bartenders, who rule over their domain like kings or queens. While the bartenders in her portraits vary greatly, you can tell they have all seen a lot—and they have heard a lot from people who pour their hearts out at the bar after their fourth or fifth beer.
“Never get involved, never give advice—just listen,” is what Matthias Gerhus says. He learned this from his father, whose bar, Bornholmer Hütte, he took over thirty years ago. “I always say: you can tell me everything. I am bound to confidentiality, but most importantly I forget. As soon as all of the guests have left, I delete everything from my work memory.”

Bartenders are chroniclers without a pen. They are firsthand witnesses to fashions, pearls of wisdom, jokes, wisecracks, pick-up lines, neuroses, conspiracy theories, fears, and delusions, decade after decade. They experience history every evening.

In their first joint work, Stefanie Schweiger and Friederike von Rauch dedicate themselves to the subject of corner bars in cinematic form. They have created videos with an unmoving camera, mostly deserted situations, which take the viewer into the various bars of Berlin through their sound backdrop. Through silent shots, they have opened up new levels of perception of their city.

“Scenes in a corner bar in Berlin, where the afternoon light lazily pervades the semidarkness of the space. The lights of a jukebox flash on and, only a few seconds later, off again. The slot games beep their greetings to no one in particular. A lace curtain flutters softly in the wind. Faraway voices can be heard, snippets of conversation, a finely woven soundscape consisting of people chattering, coughing, and clinking their glasses.
Not much happens in the videos by artists Friederike von Rauch and Stefanie Schweiger. Nor do you see what you might expect in pictures of a bar: people, cigarettes, regulars, the barmaid, a schnaps glass—people with their heads on the bar, with their arm around someone’s shoulder, laughing, sobbing. The crack of dawn. A foot making its way out.”
Angela Köckritz

Photography, 2023 © Friederike von Rauch
75 × 75 cm, fine art print or wallpaper (various sizes)

Videos, 2023 © Friederike von Rauch & Stefanie Schweiger
Haze, Lace & Doppelkorn — 24:39 min, colour, sound
Stammtisch — 4:07 min, loop, colour, sound
Kupferscheune — 1:12 min, loop, colour, sound
Bornholmer Hüttenwirt — 25:29 min, colour, sound, subtitles

Exhibitions
2024 — Chez Berlin, Museo Internacional del Barroco, Puebla, Mexico
2023 — Chez Icke, Ortstermin, Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany
2023 — Chez Icke, Kommunale Galerie Berlin, Germany