Entering the Boros bunker - A mind-altering artistic journey

Walking into the massive Boros bunker in Berlin's Mitte is like walking into an ancient, alien tomb.

This forbidding concrete monolith, built by the Nazis in 1942,  is now the home of an eccentric private art collection. 

Inside the building's almost anthill-like network of  underground corridors and crypts, numerous swirling shapes and colors spark the walls into lurid illuminations.

 

A flood of phantasmagoric images washes over the senses - kinetic sculptures twisting with reptilian menace, multimedia installations flickering with layered meanings.

Each new room opens like a portal into a new creative artistic mind - and the story about the building is as exciting as the art which is  displayed inside it.

During the war, the bunker sheltered several thousand  civilians from the massive, nightly bombings that hit Berlin.

In 1945 the Red Army repurposed the building for prisoners of war and it later became an East German warehouse. After the wall tumbled down, the now empty  building was squatted by kids, and during the Nineties it was  turned into 'Bunker',  one of the world's most notorious sites for raves and fetish parties on the burgeoning techno scene.

After what the authorities thought was a particular offensive hardcore sex party, the 'Bunker' was forced shut down, and the huge concrete building fell into disrepair for several years, before it was discovered in 2003 by the German advertising executive Christian Boros, who was looking for a place to exhibit his vast private collection of contemporary art 

When Boros bought the building, he hired a young architect, Jens Caspar from the Berlin firm Realarchitecture, to reinvent what was thought of as just a massive, concrete slab, too large to be demolished.

 Floors were taken out to turn the claustrophobic narrow chambers into double height galleries - and on top of the building, barely visible from the streets below, Boros got a 450 square meter penthouse, which is now the living space for his family.

The many rooms in the former bunker, still with their Nazi markings and the splatter on the walls of the sweat from numerous rave parties,  now contain some of Boros' many pieces of contemporary art, and the exhibits are  totally renewed every four years (next time will be in 2026)

 Boros describes the vast building below his penthouse as 'not a museum, not an institution; rather, it is our hobby-cellar.'

And inside this vast hobby cellar a few people are allowed to wander - for security reasons always in groups of ten.

 We were among today's lucky few to follow the pathways winding into galleries that dare you to plunge into their subconsciously unsettling depths.  

Just when your grip on objective reality has been utterly undone in one chamber, you walk into another where kaleidoscopic vistas open to shipwreck your senses anew.

 By the time Rita and I finally stumbled back into the lobby, we both agreed: The venture deep inside the Boros Bunker had both unmade and remade us.

Some of the photos in this article are supplied by the Boros Foundation. It is not allowed to photograph inside the proper exhibition, and unfortunately - the works we found to be the most spectacular, were not among the photos offered