We begin in North Mitte, where the model feels most codified, and where it immediately meets its mirror. Andrea Fraser at Nagel Draxler turns the institution into the subject. Matti Braun at BQ threads quiet materials into expansive, cross-cultural worlds. Daniel Hölzl at Dittrich & Schlechtriem exposes the armature of the display itself. At neugerriemschneider, Thilo Heinzmann, Michel Majerus, and Ho Tzu Nyen move between gestures to archive to cinematic myth. Ulrike Theusner and Allistair Walter at Eigen+Art push figuration to the limits of intensity. Louis Fratino at Neu stages intimacy as insistence. Andrea Zittel at Sprüth Magers molds life into a workable place, sketching the system’s promise and its exclusions.
Next, we cross into Wedding, a district marked by both displacement and reinvention: Mischa Leinkauf at Alexander Levy intervenes in the city’s flows, along with André Masson at Levy Galerie, where psychic terrains redraw national maps. Arhun Aksakal at Ebensperger splices narrative and rupture.
In Charlottenburg, scale and canon carry weight but remain contested. New in town, long in the biz: We visit the show for Max Mayer’s very first Berliner opening with Ei Arakawa, who turns performance into a volatile grammar of relation. A group show at Société multiplies the present. A.R. Penck at Michael Werner sharpens a language of signs. A group show at Société multiplies the present. Katharina Grosse and Grace Weaver at Max Hetzler saturate surface and stance. Robert Colescott and Christelle Oyiri at Buchholz pit satire against memory-work.
Passing through South Mitte, Julia Irlinger and Dan Walsh at Thomas Schulte stretch abstraction into spatial grammar. Scherben invites you to Lesbian Legacies #2 – Archive Affections, a duo exhibition by Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Millie Wilson, and the second chapter of the three-part project Lesbian Legacies curated by Scherben and Birgit Bosold. Thomas Zipp and Carrie Mae Weems at Barbara Thumm bind psychiatry, race, and history in a charged dialogue. Tanja Wagner convenes a group show centering care as method and resistance as form.
In Kreuzberg, the street’s optimism remains audible: a group show at Heidi as a fleeting chorus; Jesse Darling at Molitor with precarious infrastructures; Adam Pendleton at Pace voicing subtle poetics; and Monsieur Zohore at KOW turns humor into leverage. We make a break at ChertLüdde for shows outside of the official Berlin Art Week program with Tyra Tingleff and Sandra Paulson. We land in the works of Pieter Schoolwerth at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, where figuration fractures the system and its residues, and Carolyn Lazard at Trautwein Herleth, where she reframes what may be considered as shared resources.
Through these passages, three urgencies recur:
Displacement through speculation; the invisibility of labor; the struggle over ownership—of space, memory, and the future.
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Fig.1
Day 2 | The City is Not for Sale
Friday 12 September, 17.00–2.00h
AWe gather first at Café Tiergarten for orientation, tea, and cake (17.00h)—a pause to exchange perspectives and map the city as a network of encounters. We interview neighbors, artists, and curators, reflecting on the night ahead: what does it mean to inhabit a city under pressure, and how can artistic gestures trace survival, solidarity, and speculation? As the collective of activists and scholars who comprise Architects for Tempelhofer Field remind us: scarcity cannot destroy solidarity, repetition can become possibility, and dialogue reveals our innate anti-capitalist soul as it shines through our consumerist habits.
Featured Night unfolds between the remnants of yesterday and the fantasies of tomorrow. It stages a dance of ruins—not the sterile choreography of the model, but the improvisation of the street, where excess and scarcity collide, and survival itself becomes movement. First stop:Galli’s Pazienza at Grotto. Here, fragility is treated as a source of strength. Visitors engage with the artist in a dialogue about patience and the poetics of slow gestures, while residents recount local histories of decay and renewal, and curators reflect on ephemeral interventions that resist permanence. We move forward to Pickle Bar (18.00h) for Selin Davasse’s Corpus Iuris Artis: III. The Appeals. The performance transforms choreography into law.
At n.b.k. (19.00h), the exhibitions of Margarethe von Trotta, Nora Turato, Stephan Crasneanscki, and Patti Smith interrogate authority across media. Film, text, and performance scatter narratives, reminding us that archives and institutional memory are never neutral—they are contested terrains. We hop on bikes or take an Uber to Between Bridges (20.00h Uhr), Sofía Reyes opens a portal of hallucinations (Alucinación), while Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino turns the residency into a rehearsal for queer resilience. Conversations explore urban imaginaries and strategies of care and survival, as neighbors recount instances of community solidarity and curators observe intersections of ritual, resilience, and performance. Around the corner, Refuge Worldwide presents Humans in Transit, giving voice to stories that are often silenced—from Libya to the central Mediterranean—while inviting guests into conversations about the layers of migration and the ethics of representation.
The 36-headed exhibition Polyphonic Views, part of this year’s Spatial Festival at Funkhaus Berlin, explores performance beyond physical acts, using space and sound to dissolve boundaries between artwork and audience. Finally, at Flutgraben | Fortuna, The Deluge (curated by Lee Plested in collaboration with Matthias Krause Hamrin) conjures water as ruin and renewal. Conversations explore its symbolic and material presence, before the afterparty with from-disco-to-disco legend Eric D. Clark and DJ Puddle. Improvisation and reflection let the evening ripple outward.
Through these passages, three urgencies recur:
Ecological crisis: made visible in debris, exhaustion, and the afterlife of materials; artistic precarity: rehearsed in gestures of fragility and persistence; collective imagination: necessary to navigate futures beyond the logics of exclusivity.
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Day 3 | Fractured Authorities: Institutions, Archives, and the Private Gaze
Saturday 13 September, 12.00–22.00h
Institutions promise safety, yet their silences are often louder than their proclamations. They rather curate authority and control through their structures, collections, and acquisitions. This itinerary traces how Berlin’s cultural landscape stages power—through museums, foundations, and private spaces—and how artists fracture those claims of inevitability.
To walk this route is to practice another way of reading institutions: not as monuments of authority but as terrains of contradiction, where memory becomes rehearsal, interruption, and refusal.
We begin at the Julia Stoschek Foundation (12.00h), where the sweeping survey of Mark Leckey, Enter Thru Medieval Wounds, traces pop culture, youth, and media across two decades. Leckey draws us into these mediated experiences, revealing how perception and memory are shaped—and unsettled—by technology, quietly undermining the authority of the institutional frame while opening space for alternative narratives.
We visit kennedy+swan’s exhibition at the Schering Stiftung for an in-house tour (13.00h) examining who defines value and visibility. Across media, their work exposes the subtle operations of control embedded in institutional and social frameworks.
Lunch at Hamburger Bahnhof (14.00h) is followed by a talk with Petrit Halilaj (15.00h), whose fabulistic display of European ruins transforms history into a fragile and imaginative record. The body, thus, becomes both archive and refusal, a site where memory and imagination collide. At Galerie Wedding (16.30h), Pınar Öğrenci’s Cemetery of the Nameless confronts erasure and anonymity, insisting on stories marked by migration, struggle, and survival. Interventions by Cana Bilir-Meier and Nnenna Onuoha at Sinema Transtopia dismantle the purported objectivity of archives, revealing the partiality and politics embedded in institutional knowledge.
At C/O Berlin (18.30h), a conversation with Julian Rosefeldt situates performative gestures within institutional frameworks, examining how art negotiates authority, narrative, and historical expectation. The evening closes with a tour through Private Collections (20.00h), where the act of collecting itself becomes contested ground, revealing how intimacy and possession can unsettle institutional authority and rehearse other genealogies.
Through these passages, three urgencies recur:
The ways institutions capture history yet remain haunted by what they cannot contain; the performativity of archives, where power and memory are continuously negotiated; the necessity of embodied resistance, where gestures, stories, and performances refuse to be subsumed under institutional authority.
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Fig.3
Day 4 | Coming to Terms with Today’s Berlin
Sunday 14 September, 11.00–21.00h
The last of four marathonic parcours traces Berlin’s contested spaces—sites of history, memory, and power—and their entanglement with contemporary artistic production. From monumental institutions to intimate studios, the tour foregrounds the tensions that shape the city today: the fluctuation between remembrance and reinvention, visibility and exclusion, provocation and reflection. To come to terms with Berlin is to confront its histories, to inhabit its contradictions, and to explore how art, memory, and embodied experience intertwine in shaping the present.
To walk this route is to practice another kind of remembering: gestures that pause, meander, and refuse to conform. Here, memory itself becomes choreo-poetic, creating fleeting solidarities in the cracks of institutional walls.
We begin with brunch at the Humboldt Forum (11.00h), where, together with curator Michael Dieminger, we look at colonial legacies and the ethics of representation, and their project ‘South-to-South: A Meeting on African and Afro-diasporic Technologies’. Outside of the BAW program, Helga Paris’ intimate portraits at Fotografiska (12.00h) widen perspectives on urban life, capturing the subtle textures of everyday experience.
An Open House at the Boros Collection (13.00h) highlights the intersection of private and public. On the site of a former bunker, we raise questions about space, secrecy, and access. Haus der Kulturen der Welt (14.00h) presents Global Fascisms, reflecting on the circulation of authoritarian ideologies locally and globally. A brief snack at Weltwirtschaft (15.00h) allows participants to exchange impressions before moving on to engage with performance and participatory works.
At 16.45h, Yoko Ono’s
Bells for Peace marks the city with sound, ritual, and collective listening. Across Berlin, visits to Stiftung St. Matthäus:
Licht aus Licht, Gisela Getty:
Ashes to Rishikesh at Ryan Mendoza Studios (18.00h), and Luiza Prado:
Send Nudes (The Fall of Cyrene) at Neun Kelche explore memory, intimacy, and corporeal politics.
The day concludes at haubrok foundation (19.30h), where light, furniture, and monumental works by Carol Bove, Martin Boyce, Christoph Büchel, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Douglas Gordon, Stefan Kern, Carolyn Lazard, Ghislaine Leung, Tobias Madison, Jonathan Monk, Philippe Parreno, Markus Schinwald, Florian Slotawa, Franz West, Johannes Wohnseifer
, and Heimo Zobernig invite reflection on accumulation, display, and aesthetic negotiation. Here, the exhibition itself stages the tension between preservation and transformation—asking how today’s Berlin can acknowledge its residues while rehearsing other futures.
Through these passages, three urgencies recur:
Colonial residues embedded in Berlin’s cultural memory; archives captured as tools of authority rather than of emancipation; the necessity of embodied resistance, where protest choreographs memory beyond official scripts. 