The Next Day #153: Berlin Weekend Guide
Must-see events in Berlin: May 21-24, 2026. Cover photo: alice does computer music
I’m writing this from São Paulo, where I landed last night, which is why this issue is late. But the FOMO is real, and not just for the programme. Berlin is hitting 29°C this weekend (and it is raining and cold here) - the kind of temperature that makes the city remember it has lakes, rivers, and terraces. May you get many more of these before summer is over. Sorry, but we love talking about the weather.
And the stages are full: Rasha Nahas at HAU; Maggie Nicols at Schloss Britz. Mark So and Manfred Werder are performing outside the US and Mexico for the first time in twenty years. Falk Richter is turning his own archive into a theatre at the Gorki. Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama and Gert-Jan Prins in a small room in Neukölln. And on Sunday, the Karneval der Kulturen turns thirty with five thousand performers and twenty stages. Our Bloco do Urso hits at 3 pm. Free, loud, and completely worth abandoning any plan you had for the afternoon.
Go outside. ☀️
Lalai & Mateus
IF YOU DO TWO THINGS THIS WEEKEND
Rasha Nahas / Wooly Aziz [live]
Thursday 21.05 · 8 pm · HAU 1, Stresemannstraße 29 · €20-29
The Palestinian musician is presenting new songs from an upcoming album produced by Meshell Ndegeocello. The Ndegeocello connection signals something: Nahas already worked across electronic rock, poetic Arabic lyrics, and raw singer-songwriter territory with the clarity of someone who has never needed to explain her influences.
Kiezsalon opening weekend at Schloss Britz [frequency]
Fri-Sat, 22-23.05 · doors 6:30 pm · Schloss Britz, Alt-Britz 73, Neukölln · €10
Friday opens with Belfi & Reidy - percussive clarity threaded through microtonal guitar and electronics - and alice does computer music. Saturday is the reason: Maggie Nicols, founder of the Feminist Improvising Group, plays two intimate sessions in the piano salon at 6 and 6:30 pm.
RUNNING THROUGH THE WEEKEND
Year Zero: A Sound Sculpture by Ani Samperi [look/frequency]
Opening Thursday 21.05, 5–9 pm (performance at 8 pm) · On view through 30.05 · Errant Sound, Gerichtstraße 45, Wedding · €5.50
A 2-metre hollow steel sphere producing low-frequency mechanical drones — the body becomes part of the resonant field. Samperi activates it live on opening night.
HYBRID Festival [performance]
Fri–Sun 22–24.05 · 7 pm each night · Uferstudios Studio 1, Badstraße 41A · €10–20
Seven productions across three nights with performing arts meeting interactive technology in a programme where artists are also researchers. Viola Yip builds her own instruments and performs with them on Saturday. Ercklentz & Schmitz project live moving image onto sculpture on Sunday.
The Third Room: Mariam Rezaei [frequency]
Thu-Sat 21-23.05 · 8 pm · Callie’s Sound Studio, Lindower Str. 20 · €15
The Wire describes her as "one of the most technically adept and creatively daring artists to use the turntable." Three nights with Edward George (Black Audio Film Collective).
XPOSED Queer Film Festival [watch]
21–31.05 · Babylon, Sinema Transtopia, Moviemento and others.
20th edition with dez days of queer experimental cinema across ten Berlin venues - features, shorts and performances.
THURSDAY — 21.05
Tim Etchells & Lucy Railton: And Only When the Fog Begins to Clear [watch]
Thursday 21.05, 7 pm · KW Institute, Auguststraße 69 · €15-20
Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment) brings his text loop practice into dialogue with Lucy Railton’s cello improvisation. Overheard phrases, puzzling images, and unresolved questions drop into a spacious acoustic field. Part of the Iliggocene project running across Berlin institutions this season.
LA CASITA presents: Lyra Pramuk, Josiane [frequency/sweat]
Thursday, 10 pm · OHM, Köpenicker Str. 70 · €15
Lyra Pramuk's voice as layered, processed architecture - her live sets function as collective rituals. Josiane's house is rooted in Kinshasa and Berlin. HURRICANE ALEXANDER and 2001 Space Odyssey complete the night.
In My Room by Falk Richter [watch]
Thursday, 21.05, 7:30 pm. Maxim Gorki Theater, Am Festungsgraben, 2. €12-40
Falk Richter revisits his own archive - childhood memories, family images, political noise - and asks what a private room holds of the world outside it. Autobiographical and formally loose in a way that theatre rarely allows itself.
MORE ON THURSDAY →
↳ Die Gesiezte Tochter - Beatrice Moumdjian: Moumdjian transforms 150 family photos into objects tracing Armenian genocide, Bulgarian exile, and migration to East Berlin in the 1990s. Through August. Opening Thursday · 6 pm · Galerie Wedding, Müllerstraße 146–147 · free [look]
↳ ZK/U OPENHAUS: Open studios in Moabit with performance, video and works-in-progress from residents working on grief, civic imagination and remembrance. 7 pm · Siemensstraße 27 · free [look/gather]
↳ Andrea Grützner - Arkadia: Grassland photographs made with dichroic film between dry blades with colors that read as tropical heat or AI-generated imagery, insects alongside chimeric forms. Through 31.05 · Robert Morat Galerie, Linienstraße 107 · free [look]
↳ Klein - 8MM Residency Night 1: Klein and LYZZA - noise, hip-hop, moving image, identity. Two practices that rarely share a stage. Night 2 Friday with Solomon Garçon. 7 pm · 8MM, Schönhauser Allee 177b · €18 [live]
FRIDAY — 22.05
gamut inc: radiating - Record Release Concert [frequency]
Friday, 22.05 · 7:30 pm · Auenkirche, Wilhelmsaue 118A, Wilmersdorf · €10
gamut inc has spent fifteen years treating a pipe organ as a synthesis engine, developing its own algorithms and MIDI techniques to unlock what pneumatic systems can do. Radiating is their first studio album, recorded on Berlin’s second-largest organ, and the release concert is in the same church.
Mark So & Manfred Werder — km28 [frequency]
Friday, 22.05 · 8 pm · km28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28 · donation-based
Werder's scores are sometimes a single word with instructions that redirect attention to what already exists in the room. Werder and So have worked together for twenty years, exclusively in the US and Mexico. This is their first performance anywhere else.
MORE ON FRIDAY →
↳ Inside Archives - Museum für Fotografie: UdK students and Sudanese artists respond directly to Riefenstahl's Nuba photographs - working inside the archive, against the grain. Opening on Fri 22.05 · through 6.06 · Jebensstraße 2 [look]
↳ 20% Berlin's 495th Birthday Party: Andrew and Maurice record a live podcast episode in the back room, then the party opens up. RSVP required. 7 pm · Geist im Glas, Lenaustraße 27 · free [gather]
↳ Teshi’s Fine Hour: Avant-garde Anime Soundtracks: Max Binski guides a listening session on scores that pushed animation music. 6 pm · Atemporal, Boxhagener Str. 96 · €10 [watch/gather]
↳ Gezellig Sessions: Three singer-songwriters on a grand piano in the mirrored room above Clärchens Ballhaus. The kind of Friday evening that earns its wine glass. 7 pm · Spiegelsaal, Auguststraße 24 · €25 [live]
↳ Cassirer and the Breakthrough of Impressionism: Paul Cassirer brought Cézanne, van Gogh, and Manet to German collections. Major retrospective at the Alte Nationalgalerie. Through September. Opening on Friday · Alte Nationalgalerie, Bodestraße 1–3 · €8-16 [look]
↳ HAMAM NIGHTS: Cashu (Mamba Negra, São Paulo) brings industrial acid and political intent. John Talabot’s melancholic loop house. Luca Lozano digs into early-90s British rave. 10 pm · Panorama Bar · €25 [sweat]
SATURDAY — 23.05
Get Lost Vol. 7: Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama, Gert-Jan Prins [frequency]
Saturday, 23.05 · 8 pm · km28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28 · donation-based
Nakamura invented the no-input mixing board. Akiyama approaches guitar from single-note silence to dense drone. Prins works with electronics and percussion at the edge of control and accident. Opening reading by Rebecca Lane.
colectivo salo x Flutgraben [frequency]
Saturday, 23.05 · 6:30 pm - 6 am · Flutgraben, Am Flutgraben 2 · €20 · cash only
Ciro Vitiello & Ensemble plays distorted analog synthesizers, field recordings and orchestral gestures that drift between noise and dream-pop without landing in either. XIU XIU opens the late programme at 11 pm. Nova Varnrable, Pike and Eleftheria & Significant Other carry it through to 6 am.
Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (A Report to an Academy) - Directed by Oliver Frljić [watch]
Saturday, 23.05, 7:30 pm, Maxim Gorki Theater, Am Festungsgrabe,2. €12-40
Kafka's ape who learned to be human, staged by Frljić as a brutal interrogation of assimilation, conformity and the cost of belonging. Raw and deliberately uncomfortable.
Berghain Klubnacht [sweat]
Saturday 23.05 · 11:59 pm · Berghain / Panorama Bar, Am Wriezener Bahnhof · €30
Arthur Robert plays live in Berghain with loop techno of crystalline precision, no gimmicks, relentless forward momentum. Jump Source brings their debut album, Fold, to Panorama Bar live. JakoJako and DJ Nobu complete a night that doesn’t need the name of the club to justify itself.
MORE ON SATURDAY →
↳ JMSN + Thelonious Stokes: Detroit producer JMSN alongside Thelonious Stokes - live music, video and performance. Catharsis is the brief. 10 pm · Silent Green, Gerichtstraße 35 · €40 [watch]
↳ Staatsoper für alle: Verdi's Nabucco broadcast live at Bebelplatz on Saturday, Beethoven's 6th with Thielemann on Sunday. Sat 6 pm · Sun 1 pm · Bebelplatz · free [gather]
↳ 112 Years of Sun Ra / 102 of Marshall Allen: Film portrait Marshall Allen, 99, Astronaut screened with director Ari Benjamin Meyers, followed by a live Sun Ra tribute concert. Allen turns 102 two days later. 7:24 pm · Galiläakirche, Rigaer Str. 9 · €15–16 [watch]
↳ Delírio w/ Atosigado (Berlin debut): Atosigado (Tijuana/Hermosillo) - Mexican tribal, guaracha and cumbia through noise. Berlin debut, first European tour. 11 pm · Panke, Gerichtstraße 23 · door [sweat]
↳ takt x bleach: Amnesia Scanner and Dorian Electra in the same room is a specific kind of chaos. 10 pm · OXI, Wiesenweg 1-4 · door [sweat]
↳ Peer Gynt, directed by Vinge, Müller, and Reinholdtsen. Vinge, Müller and Reinholdtsen take Ibsen apart and put him back together wrong. Ambition, self-delusion, theatrical excess. 3 pm. Also on 25.05, 12 pm. Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. €30. [watch]
SUNDAY — 24.05
Karneval der Kulturen - 30th Anniversary [gather]
Sunday 24.05 · parade 1:30 pm · Frankfurter Allee / Karl-Marx-Allee · festival at Blücherplatz · free
Thirty years and five thousand performers. The parade that turns Neukölln and Kreuzberg into something Berlin rarely is: completely unguarded. Twenty stages, all afternoon. Go without a plan, but our favorite is the Brazilian carnival with the Bloco do Urso (3 pm).
MORE ON SUNDAY →
↳ Theke x Mesa Lobo: Garden party in Wedding with kebabs, seasonal pickles, MXPSM spritzes and music. 2 pm · Theke, Seestraße 13 · free [food/gather]
↳ Appendix.files Sunday Sessions: All live, all afternoon on a brick boat in Spandau. Ambi-club deep listening with Maude Vôs, DJ Strawberry, Slowfoam and Lint. 2 pm · Backsteinboot, Eiswerderstraße 18 · €16 [frequency]
↳ Meraki - Boat Cruise with Barbara Preisinger and Nicole on the Spree. 110 spots. 3 - 9 pm · Mühlenstraße 70 · €29 [sweat]
↳ Shared Space II - Voutchkova & Mencagli: Open day of showings and interventions with musicians from Berlin’s Echtzeitmusik scene. 2 - 9 pm · Roam Projects, Fischerinsel 10 · free [frequency/look]
↳ Harmony Rec. x Amniote Editions: Mama Snake, DJ TOOL, DINA, Andy Garvey at a former motor racing stadium with light installations throughout. 3 pm · C115, Messedamm 23 · €15–22 [sweat]
↳ DRONES: Ángeles Rojas on shruti box and tambura - sustained sound and voice stripped to breath in a church where arriving late is not permitted. 8 pm · Paul-Gerhardt-Kirche, Hauptstr. 47/48 · €12 [frequency]
↳ Oroko Radio: KdK 2026 - Rosa Pistola, HALFQUEEN: Accra-based non-profit radio celebrating soundsystem culture from Kingston to Addis Ababa. 8 pm · Zenner, Alt Treptow 15 · free (RSVP) [gather]
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SAVE THE DATE
↳ Ein Volksfeind (An Enemy of the People) - directed by Thomas Ostermeier: A doctor exposing toxic water sparks conflict in Ibsen’s drama on truth, fanaticism, and transparency in a profit-driven society. Mon 25.05, 8pm. Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Kurfürstendamm, 153. €9- 48. [watch]
↳ Sub_Bar Show #2: music experienced through low frequencies and air pressure rather than melody. Curated around Grischa Lichtenberger and Portuguese deaf artist Iruenia. Tue 26.05 · 6:30 pm · arkaoda · Karl-Marx-Platz 16 · €14
↳ Yoga in the sculpture garden: yoga class in the Neue Nationalgalerie sculpture garden, with Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculpture as backdrop. Sat 30.05 · 9:30 am · Potsdamer Str. 50 · €20 [wellness/gather]
↳ Dialoge - Reethaus: Sasha Waltz & Guests take over the full building in a site-specific performance rooted in Deep Listening and Authentic Movement. 30–31.05 · 4 pm & 8 pm · Reethaus · €45 [live]
↳ Grape Odyssey Wine Festival: Slovenian and regional winemakers at Kühlhaus Berlin, with tastings, producers in person, and an afterparty until 10 pm. TND readers get in for €20. 31.05 · noon–6 pm · Luckenwalder Str. 3 [gather]
↳ A Song for Esther: Candice Breitz stages a conceptual concert marking the absence of Esther Bejarano (1924–2021), Auschwitz survivor and antifascist musician. With Rasha Nahas, Peaches, Aeham Ahmad, Lie Ning and more. Sat-Sun 06–07.06 · 7:30 pm · HAU 1, Stresemannstraße 29 · €17-29 [watch]
↳ Breathing Concert with Adrian Kuipers and Anna-Maria Hefele at Passionskirche. Breathwork and live overtone singing at Passionkirche. Sunday, 07.06, 7:30 pm · Marheinekeplatz 1 · €55 [wellness/live]
↳ Satzwechsel: Kang Han reads at the Berliner Philharmoniker, members perform chamber works in dialogue with the text. 8 pm · Herbert-von-Karajan-Str. 1 · €18–41 [reading/live]