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Berlin (dpa) - The man sporting designer stubble and trendy sneakers is being strict with the queue of people outside the entrance to a dilapidated Berlin apartment building: "You have to wait a moment, there are too many people in the flat."
Inside visitors are flicking through a photo album on a long, wooden dining table. The flat's resident is nowhere to be seen.
The tenant, Burkhard Baltzer, had better get used to having strangers poking around his living space: they're going to be there from 12 to 7 pm every day except Mondays until May 28.
Baltzer's apartment at Auguststrasse 23 is one of the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art's 12 venues, all except one located along the 920-metre street in the city's Mitte district.
"What we are trying to do is to open doors and point to spaces which are there under the eyes of everyone but are not being used," Massimiliano Gioni, one of the Biennial's three curators, tells reporters in Ballhaus Mitte ahead of the Biennial's official opening on March 24.
"We want to give the viewers the chance to experience both art and reality hopefully with the same intensity and eventually discover that reality can be more interesting than art and vice versa," the well-groomed Italian curator and art critic explains.
He is speaking on behalf of his two fellow organisers, the American editor and curator Ali Subotnick and Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.
It is unclear whether the latter's claim of being unable to speak is due to a visit to the dentist's that morning or whether it falls into the category of art or reality: Cattelan is a notorious prankster not averse to passing off interviews with other artists as his own.
The Ballhaus itself is an Auguststrasse institution immortalised in Alfred Doeblin's 1929 novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz".
The haunting upstairs Mirrored Ballroom is the location for a work by one of the more than 70 artists represented in the exhibition, "Kiss" by the British conceptual artist Tino Sehgal, in which a writhing couple simulate love-making on the floor in the middle of the empty room.
Reopened in 2005 for the first time since the war, the ballroom with its huge fractured mirrors and broken stucco feels like it has just been liberated by the Red Army.
The many layers of Berlin's history are evident in the 12 venues, only two of which are conventional art galleries.
In particular, the curators appear to want to focus on the street's history as a former centre of Berlin's Jewish community.
The largest and most impressive of the venues, the former Jewish School for Girls, is testimony to the former vibrancy of the pre-war Jewish community. The massive brick building was one of the last commissioned by Berlin's Jews before the Nazis came to power.
"Everyone who has seen the building has been hypnotised by it," Gioni says. "It can tell in 2,000 square metres the history of 80 years."
The metal detector and security check at the entrance remind visitors that Jewish buildings in Berlin still need to be protected. Inside, paint hangs in flaps from the ceilings of the dingy corridors and brick-effect wallpaper is peeling off the walls of deserted classrooms.
An amateurish mural of Bertolt Brecht points to the building's post-war use as an East German secondary school.
An empty shower room with water nozzles suspended from the ceiling has sinister connotations when one remembers the fate of Berlin's Jews, as does Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski's life-sized reconstruction of a railway wagon, perfect in every detail, which stands in a disused classroom.
Other elements of Auguststrasse's past are clear at another venue, the St. John the Evangelist Church. The now-deconsecrated church was damaged during World War II by an Allied firebomb and its congregation was dissolved in 1978 after church attendance in the GDR dwindled away.
Inside, a black flip board akin to an airport destination board, hangs on the wall, a work by the Belgian artist Kris Martin. But the constantly-flipping tiles are blank and this particular board has no information, evoking ideas of journeys to unknown destinations, or perhaps the futile hope of escape to another place.
After a couple of hours wandering from venue to venue, any division between the exhibition and its environment has become hopelessly blurred, and the visitor sees everything in the street through new eyes.
Is what looks like a porter's office in the Post Office Stables really an elaborate installation? Is the vacuum cleaner in the school's stairwell supposed to be there?
What about the posters along the street satirising the Biennial as a "competition for elderly people" or the Polish-speaking midgets in Bavarian-style costumes with video screens on their backs handing out flyers in front of the Ballhaus?
Maybe reality is more interesting than art after all. The problem - or indeed the attraction - with the Biennial is knowing where one stops and the other begins.
For more information, check the internet website www.berlinbiennale.de
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
