30 years ago, on a December evening in 1994, Dan Graham presented a lecture in Berlin at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin (today UdK Berlin). The lecture inspired the development of his first sculpture in which visitors could sit down and have a coffee — Café Bravo. This functional sculpture, featuring reflective stainless steel panels and two-way mirror glasses, marked a new phase in the early history of KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Since then, it has become one of KW’s most iconic commissions.

Café Bravo mirrors both the institutionalization of KW Institute for Contemporary Art and the rapid transformation of Berlin during the paradigm-shifting 1990s. Its architecture draws on commercial typologies that became markers of a dysfunctional city striving for professionalization: corporate atriums and generic shopping malls.

The lecture Post-Wall Arcadia by Raoul Zoellner is a tribute to Dan Graham (1942-2022) and his Café Bravo, which he realized with architect Johanne Nalbach. As an extension of KW, unboxed, the presentation offers new insights into the archive of KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Excerpts from the video documentation of Dan Graham’s 1994 lecture will be interwoven with historical fragments of the 1990s and reflections that Dan Graham shared in further essays.

Raoul Zoellner, who grew up in Berlin and studied at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, is the director of the Boros Foundation. He explores new forms of guided tours and developed the mediation formats KW, a hike, and KW, unboxed for KW Institute for Contemporary Art.