Pop-kultur

For three days, Kulturbrauerei stops functioning simply as one of Prenzlauer Berg's major cultural complexes and becomes something closer to a laboratory for contemporary pop culture. Pop-Kultur distributes concerts, performances, conversations, installations, films and works created specifically for the festival across the many rooms and courtyards of the former industrial site. Since its launch in 2015, that breadth has been fundamental to its identity. Music remains at the centre, but the programme continually reaches towards visual art, literature, political and social discourse, new forms of representation and the creative processes behind finished work. Rather than simply accumulating headliners, Pop-Kultur brings together artists, ideas and audiences that might not ordinarily occupy the same programme.

Musicboard Berlin established the festival in 2015, with the inaugural edition taking place at Berghain, whose combination of rooms and industrial spaces already pointed towards a format unlike a conventional outdoor festival. A year later Pop-Kultur moved through several venues in Neukölln, before finding a more permanent home at Kulturbrauerei in 2017. That move proved decisive. The former brewery contains theatres, clubs, concert rooms, courtyards and spaces of very different sizes within walking distance of one another, making it possible to operate as a multi-venue festival without scattering the programme across Berlin. Attending Pop-Kultur consequently means repeatedly moving indoors and outdoors, changing scale and encountering performances that may demand a completely different kind of attention from whatever came before.

Musically, its territory is deliberately difficult to contain. Pop, indie, electronic music, post-punk, experimental rock, hip hop and numerous peripheral scenes appear within an international programme that places particular value on artists with distinctive creative languages. Across its history, performers such as Sophie Hunger, Neneh Cherry, Thurston Moore, John Grant, Anna Calvi, Mogwai, Hot Chip, Arab Strap and The KVB have appeared alongside emerging, experimental and harder-to-classify projects. Berlin and German artists also occupy an important place. That coexistence allows the festival to approach pop not simply as a musical genre but as a changing cultural space where mainstream forms, subcultures and experimentation continually overlap.

One of Pop-Kultur's defining elements is its Commissioned Works programme. Selected artists are invited to develop pieces specifically for the festival, meaning that part of the schedule consists of work that cannot simply be encountered again at the next stop on a European festival tour. These commissions can take the form of music, performance, interdisciplinary collaborations, installations or audiovisual pieces shaped by the possibilities of Kulturbrauerei and by the freedom of working outside the standard touring format. Conversations, readings, films and discussions sit alongside them, addressing questions around creativity, identity, the music industry, representation and society. A single visit can therefore move from a band performance to a conversation, an experimental stage work and an electronic set without any of those elements functioning merely as filler.

A professional and developmental dimension is equally embedded in the project. Pop-Kultur Nachwuchs connects younger international talent from different creative disciplines with experienced artists and industry professionals through workshops, talks and opportunities for exchange, while other festival initiatives have focused on accessibility, diversity and participation within cultural life. This interest in examining who creates culture, who gains access to it and whose voices are given space distinguishes Pop-Kultur from an event designed exclusively around consuming live music. Its programme can demand curiosity as well: recognisable artists routinely sit beside projects that many visitors may be encountering for the first time, making the tension between familiarity and discovery part of the experience.

Kulturbrauerei ultimately provides an ideal container for that philosophy. Its brick courtyards and numerous rooms allow audiences to move from a substantial performance to something almost intimate without leaving the complex, while Berlin continues immediately beyond its entrances. Pop-Kultur has never required fields, camping or a monumental main stage to establish an identity; its scale comes instead from how many different cultural conversations can coexist within a concentrated area. When the final performances finish and audiences emerge back into Prenzlauer Berg, the experience resembles less a journey through a conventional line-up than a temporary map of scenes, disciplines and ideas. That organised curiosity is perhaps the clearest expression of what Pop-Kultur became.