Berlin filmmaker and installation artist Boris Hars-Tschachotin is showing photographs from his “Nocturnal Stages” series for the first time. Once a month for a year, he walked through the capital city at the moment when the light of day disappeared. The night creates an unfathomable cosmos of varying shades of black, condensing and intensifying everything that is seen. Dramatic spaces are created, with sharply contrasting light and dark. In these spaces, the remote corners of Berlin are presented as dazzling and expressive characters. Streets, buildings, and their dwellers sink into black, while elsewhere, they suddenly emerge clearly and vividly. The common cliché of Berlin as a pleasure-seeking, loud, restless, colourful city stands in contrast to these quiet, remote, and quite eerie places. At an even later hour, large parts of the city seem to have fallen out of time, filled with deep seclusion and tranquillity. In the course of these twelve night-time outings, a myriad of photographs was created, a selection of which we present here. A slide installation puts the visitors in a dream-like state; surrounded by a shroud of dark security, they enter the nocturnal theatre that is Berlin.

Installation photos: Marcus Schneider, Berlin