P. K. Helfried is not a Berliner. Not in the way Kennedy once claimed it from the podium, “I am a Berliner,” and not in the way graffiti kids wear the label like armor. In recent decades, the phrase “Ich bin kein Berliner” has been reclaimed by immigrant writers and artists each using it to critique or ironize Berlin’s myth of inclusivity. For others, the phrase signals cultural alienation and structural exclusion. But Helfried’s disavowal is different. It does not arise from being cast outside. It is a turning away from within. A refusal by someone who speaks the language, holds the passport, but rejects the illusion.
His paintings scrape against the city’s skin, exposing old wounds beneath layers of gentrification, spectacle, and repurposed myth. Like the raw urgency of Basquiat but stripped of performative cool, his marks are fractured, crawling with spectres. This is not the Berlin of techno utopias. It is a Berlin still reeling from its own ruins, a place where history stains even the empty spaces.
As a German, Helfried speaks in a visual dialect of grimy pasts and collapsing symbols. He paints Berlin as a site of dissonance, caught between nation and rubble, between revolution and real estate, between the remembered and the rebranded. His canvases operate like palimpsests, with gestures that scratch, burn, and bleed. The graffiti here is not style. It is aftermath.
To say “Ich bin kein Berliner” is to reject the Berlin of marketing slogans and hipsters' welcome signs. It is to inhabit a city that no longer recognizes its own reflection. Helfried’s works interrogate that loss. They hold up the mask of the modern metropolis and ask, what did you bury to become this?
In a time when everyone wants to belong, P. K. Helfried steps back, letting the city unfold in all its contradictions. His canvases are not claims of identity but documents of refusal. Refusals to forget, to conform, to perform. This is not the Berlin you pose with. This is the other Berlin. The one you could not forget.