Chelsea-Louise Berlin is a London-based artist, author, and cultural archivist whose multidisciplinary practice explores youth culture, collective identity, and the visual languages of subculture.

 

Working across installation, drawing, sculpture, photography, print, and publishing, her work examines how informal creative practices shape cultural memory.

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Emerging from London’s club and design scenes of the 1980s, Berlin studied Art and Design at Chelsea School of Art. Her early work, developed under the title Art of the Subconscious, responded directly to club environments, music, and movement, resulting in drawings, banners, prints, garments, and site-specific interventions.

 

These projects established an ongoing interest in embodiment, repetition, and collective experience.

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Central to Berlin’s practice is The Berlin Collection, an extensive archive of flyers, clothing, printed matter, drawings, and ephemera from the mid-1980s onward.

Originally produced for short-term use, these materials are re-presented through installations, sculptural works, and publications, transforming social history into active contemporary artwork.

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Berlin is widely recognised for her contribution to the landmark exhibition Sweet Harmony: Rave Today (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2019), where her large-scale installation #TurnOnTuneInGetOnOne became a focal point of the exhibition.

 

The work brought together over 1,400 original objects from 1986–1997, presenting rave culture as a powerful creative and social movement. The installation is currently being developed for future touring presentations.

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Alongside exhibition work, Berlin treats publishing as an extension of her artistic practice.

 

Her books Rave Art, Tart Art, and The Bench document youth culture, graphic design, sexuality, and everyday experience, combining personal narrative with archival research. Rave Art is now in its third edition, with a fourth forthcoming and a new book in the pipeline.

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Berlin’s work has been exhibited or sold internationally and included in institutional collections such as the Museum of Youth Culture.

 

Across all projects, she explores themes of unity and division, pleasure and power, and the relationship between personal memory and collective history.