Maake Magazine

ARTIST-RUN

SAP Space

Donaustr. 50
12043, Berlin

Ilyn Wong
Johannes Knall

sapspaceberlin.com
Instagram @sapspace.berlin

When Ilyn Wong moved from New York to Berlin in 2016  to attend a residency, she didn’t expect to stay in the city for longer than 3 months. Flash forward five years later, she and her partner, Johannes Knall, started SAP Space in Neukölln. To get to the space, visitors pass through the ground floor hallway of a residential apartment building into a quiet courtyard. Part natural hideaway, part indoor gallery, SAP invites artists to collaborate with the material and conceptual possibilities of the garden. Ilyn and I spoke about the artist-as-curator, the labor of pinning down funding, the symbolism of soil versus dirt in the context of immigration, and the ever-evolving process of learning how to tend to the things one loves.

Interview with Ilyn Wong of SAP Space
By Miranda Holmes

MH: SAP Space has both an inside gallery and a garden. Did you fix this space up specifically to make a project space? 

Ilyn Wong (IW): The project space came about as kind of an accident. We [Ilyn and Johannes] saw this flat and loved that it had a garden, but were told that in order to rent the flat, we needed to also rent this free-standing back house. To us it seemed like a nice deal, but we didn’t really know what to do with it in the beginning. We thought that it could be a mixed-use space — part project space, part work-shop, part studio — which is why there’s this moving wall in the middle, which is pretty much the only addition we’ve made to the space. 

Because the stand-alone space has always occurred to us as an extension of the garden, and because the garden is something we collaborated a lot on during the pandemic, it seemed appropriate to anchor the project space around the idea of the garden as a conceptual topic. One of the nice things about using the garden as an art space is the collapsing between the iconography of the garden and of art — you’re like, is that artwork or is that just a pot? I’m sometimes frustrated by how messy the garden gets as a living, working space, but I think that juxtaposition with the white-cube indoor space is also really nice. 

MH: You’ve always collaborated with Johannes? 

IW: In the beginning, I was kind of ambitious about the collaboration, but that's something that we've had to negotiate. We have a business together, and we live together, so collaborating on SAP Space can sometimes feel like too many overlaps. What’s great is that we have really different strengths. For the most part, I do the programming and the communication, whereas he does the installing and other technical things. Also the fact that it is our home –  every time we have an event, it's like having a big party in our house, hosting our friends, meeting new people. This year, we weren't able to do very many events, but last year we did five. For the first and last exhibition last year we had a fire in the garden, which is quite cozy, and a good way to end the season. We take the winter to hibernate and regroup.

MH: Can you talk more about your programming structure? 

IW: In terms of programming, we decided that for the first few years, we want to just do group shows, or group events, and not solo presentations. Besides the events or exhibitions in the beginning and end of the season, let’s say April or October, whether it’s a show that I curate or a proposal by an outside organizer, it is important that both the inside and outside spaces are considered and used. 

MH: How are you funding the space? 

IW: I'm still trying to figure out the whole funding situation. We pay for this space as part of our rent.

As far as I understand, applying for the Project Space fund through the Berliner Senat (City Council) is only possible after you’ve been in existence for two years, so we haven’t qualified just yet. To be honest, as a foreigner, I’ve also found the funding landscape somewhat daunting, and probably haven’t taken all the opportunities that are available. 

In fact, funding has been the most challenging topic to figure out. I actually have no idea how other people manage to do it. I think a lot of people in Berlin fund their projects themselves or rely on state funding, but I feel like there are other creative ways to do it. For example, we collaborated with a project space in LA this summer, and I learned that some of them do art fairs as a way of funding, which I think is a good idea, but I think in general, project spaces in the US have to hustle a bit more because there isn’t really any public funding to speak of. But maybe that’s good, you know, to hustle. 

Earlier this year we did have a fundraising auction with both in-person bidding and online bidding. It was a lot of work, and we didn’t sell a ton of work, but it was a really good experience, and we’ll probably do something like that again next year. 

MH: How do you curate the artists who show at SAP? 

IW: I put together the first two shows at SAP Space by asking artists in my own networks. The first show was based on symbolic ideas of soil and dirt. The Nazis had this ideology of “blood and soil,” which is about purity. I wanted to disrupt this narrative, so I invited seven women artists I know who all live in Europe but are not originally from here to participate.  

After the first two shows, we had an open call, which was great, because I had felt awkward asking friends or acquaintances to participate in exhibitions that had absolutely no funding. The open call makes that part clear. Plus I got to meet a lot more artists through the open call. The open call had two options — people could just send in their portfolio to be considered in a group show, or they could submit a fully-formed exhibition proposal. 

Some exhibitions have also just happened more organically by talking to people.

I know that as a little DIY space, it’s not necessary to always have a short text that accompanies each exhibition, but that’s something I also insist on. For me, as an artist-curator, it’s just good professional practice, and as someone who also writes about exhibitions, it’s good to have a text for the press to refer to, in case they ever want to write about one of our shows. I think it’s also an important document for our own archives as well as for the artists who participate.

MH: What was your initial motivation for showing other artists’ work? Have your values for the space changed over time?

IW: I’ve co-curated exhibitions before starting SAP Space, and like the idea of artists-as-curators. I consider it as an extension of my practice. In the beginning, when we first moved in, I also thought that the space lends itself well to being shared. It almost felt selfish to just keep it to ourselves. I think a garden is, or maybe should be, always some kind of a communal space, or at least always considers the idea of private vs. public.  

Not being German and not having gone to school here, I also thought that running a project space would be a good way to connect with other artists. Maybe that sounds self-serving, but making community is always about bridging connections. A friend who runs a space also told me that it’s a good way to connect with curators that she wants to work with. I haven’t done that yet, but I should!

MH: Can you talk more about the conceptual framework of the garden? 

IW: The garden is a really rich space to think about a number of things including labor, colonialism, capitalism, domestication, extraction, etc… It is also a fictional version of nature, almost like a man-made version of nature that sits on top of nature. My own work was starting to go in the direction of thinking about ideologies around the construction of nature.

So far we’ve only done exhibitions, but initially our ambition was also to host non-art related workshops about sustainability or growing food or a number of other things. For example, we compost with worms. We have all these worms and it’s cool that they eat our food scraps. It would be neat to do a workshop about vermicomposting. Or another example is that I have a friend who is an herbalist, and I’ve asked her to give a workshop based on her experience in recovery from addiction and how she uses herbs in this context. 

I also think that with every gentrifying neighborhood, when art spaces start to pop up, they typically only engage with a certain demographic of people. It happened in Chinatown in New York, where the stark contrast between white-cube spaces and traditional shop fronts that have been there for generations was rather disconcerting. Neukölln has a huge immigrant population, and I think we might be able to connect with our community a bit more if we didn’t put all our focus on art, so that’s definitely a goal to diversify our programming. We try to invite neighbors in the building to our events, and some of them do come, but not many. This is definitely something we need to actively work on. 

As an immigrant myself with a racialized identity both here and in the US, I also want to be careful about any attempt that might seem a bit lip-service-y. In other words, I’m wary of attempts that propose efforts of “inclusion,” but by the same token, kind of flatten immigrant identities and experiences. This flattening happens to Asian identities a lot, so I wouldn’t want to do that in turn to the communities and cultures in which I don’t really have an adequate amount of engagement. 

MH: What workshops have you done?

IW: We’ve only done one workshop so far. One of the artists who showed here, Lucy Powell, did a workshop on mugwort, which was connected to an exhibition.

MH: How have different artists used the garden space? 

IW: Some artists do direct interventions in the garden. Milena Bonilla wrote poems on cardboard for different plants in the garden, referring to protest signs at political rallies. Another artist, Stefanie Loveday, used branches from trees of heaven, which are invasive plants that  grow all over the garden, as a musical instrument. Other relationships to the garden are more indirect. Nicky Broekhuysen, for example, showed paintings here that were abstractions of St John’s Wort, so we (the artist, the curator Sarah Davies, and I) planted St John’s Wort directly outside the space opposite the painting.  

I have this idea that maybe one day we can host long term projects, too. These might include somebody cultivating a plant  from beginning to end and then making something from it. 

MH: Have there been any unexpected challenges along the way? 

IW: The most unexpected challenge for me so far has been managing expectations and setting boundaries. Starting next season I will have contracts of participation. I think that having a document of agreed-upon parameters will be really good going forward. We’re just a DIY space in our backyard, so we really don’t have the budget or bandwidth of a gallery with staff and  resources. Some artists understand that and are easy and flexible, whereas some have had more demands than we have the capacity to give. On the flip side, we’ve also had artists who were a bit too wishy-washy, maybe thinking “oh this is just a project space,” and that affects my work and, by extension, our integrity as a space. So, hoping to have that a bit more clear in the future.

MH: It's just nice to hear that you don’t have to have it all figured out before you start a space. You learn as you go and sometimes it's a painful way of learning, and you say, I'll never do that again. And sometimes you get to learn new skills along the way. 

IW: Yeah, it’s important to remember it works differently for everyone. 

At the end of the day, this project is about collaborating and making something together. I think our space is pretty special, and really great things can happen here if everyone works harmoniously together. I think a lot about what one of my grad school professors said: Be collegiate to your peers, because they are the people who are going to be your contemporaries and give you opportunities. So more than anything, as much as it is important for me to put on good shows, I also have to remind myself to just have fun and be kind to the people we work with, because right now, we’re fortunate enough to have this space to share, so hopefully in the future, people will share what they have with us.

MH: Yeah, it’s a nice metaphor of the garden, actually. You just have to plant your seeds and then see what grows.

Find out more about SAP Space on their website and on Instagram @sapspace.berlin