Find the Monkey!
I’m beginning the new year off with this GeoLoc Challenge brought to us by our friends at QuizTime on Twitter. For those looking to hone their geolocation skills, I highly recommend following taking advantage of their challenges.
This challenge calls for us to find out exactly where and when this was painted which I readily accepted. As usual, I examine the image on my own to see what I can extract from it. While I’m no expert on graffiti or urban art, I know enough to know that all artists have “tags” that they always incorporate into their works. I spied with my little eye, in the upper right-hand corner of this work, something that resembles a tag to me.
After working out all the different possiblities of what the name pictured above could be, I arrived at “MALEEK”. In this day and age, it seems that all visual artists are active on social media, so I figured a search for Maleek’s Instagram would be a good start. I searched “#Maleek” on Instagram to see what would show up. Right at the top of the search results was source image! Clicking on it took me the post on Maleek’s page.
Based off the caption, this piece was painted in the summer of 2022. The hashtags, #berlin, #südstern and #körtestraße, provide an approximate location. I decided to try googling “Maleek Berlin” and fortuately enough the first search result directed me to one of Maleek’s works on an open-source public art map site called Street Art Cities.
The newsstand signs above the the painting are identical to that of the Instagram post along with surrounding vegetation and the features of the building behind this newsstand. Right under the picture is the exact location: Körtestraße 2, 10967 Berlin, Deutschland (52.491706162528985, 13.41195679729616). For a final verification I plugged the address into Mapillary to get clean street view of the location and everything matched!
