Hi there,
For this Berlin Art Week guide, I invited Tamara Ganem, one of my references in art. She has a unique repertoire and always shows me new things. Tamara went through the programme and picked what feels truly unmissable in a week that spreads across more than 100 museums, galleries, collections, project spaces, and an art fair.
This edition features the 12th Positions Berlin Art Fair, taking place from 11 to 14 September at Tempelhof Airport Hangar 7. Thursday’s Gallery Night runs until 10 pm. Friday’s Featured Night adds tours, performances, talks, and parties. My personal pick for Friday is Soft Power by Anahita Sadighi at Haus der Visionäre.
Tamara Ganem is a director, producer, and artist who has been part of the art market for over ten years. Two years ago, she moved to Berlin and since then she has been building bridges between the city, Europe, and Brazil.
See you at an opening or a party?
Lalai
Words by Tamara:
Berlin Art Week is back from 10–14 September, transforming the city into a stage for contemporary art with exhibitions across museums, galleries, and off-spaces. At the center of it all is the BAW Garten, this year hosted by Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of Contemporary Art. It’s the perfect place to begin your journey: free, filled with music and screenings, and featuring one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the week just inside the museum. Hamburger Bahnhof is not only a starting point; it’s also a place to return to between exhibitions.
BAW Garten & Hamburger Bahnhof
This year’s Berlin Art Week Garten takes over the outdoor space of Hamburger Bahnhof, making it the heart of the festival. Each day, Caique Tizzi creates an artistic and gastronomic journey through an edible atlas, transforming fruits, plants, seeds, and vegetables into landscapes that trace the Earth’s latitudes.
From Wednesday to Sunday, the curatorial platform Trauma (formerly Trauma Bar und Kino) sets the tone for the evenings with “Sundowner,” daily DJ sets from 5:30 to 8:30 pm that bring the spirit of Berlin’s club culture into the Garten. As night falls, Videoart at Midnight turns the space into an open-air cinema, presenting a four-night program of video works by artists featured in this year’s Art Week.
Inside the museum, Petrit Halilaj presents his first major institutional solo in Berlin. Alongside drawings, sculptures, and new site-specific works, the exhibition features his first opera, developed with the Kosovo Philharmonic. The project takes Syrigana, a 3,000-year-old archaeological site near his hometown in Kosovo, transforming it into a collective space of memory and imagination.
BAW Garten & Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstraße 50, 10557 Berlin. 10-12.09, 10 am - 10 pm; and 13-14.09, 11 am - 10 pm.
Exhibitions
Charmaine Poh: Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take
Opening: Wed, 10.09, 7 - 9 pm. Thu, 11.09, 11 am - 7 pm; Fri-Sun, 12-14.09, 11 am - 6 pm. Artist Talk: 13.09, 2:30 - 3:30 pm. Palais Populaire, Unter den Linden 5, 10117 Berlin.
Charmaine Poh, Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2025, presents “Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take.” Her first institutional solo exhibition worldwide centers on a newly commissioned three-channel video installation, The Moon is Wet, alongside earlier works exploring femininity, queerness, and resilience in Southeast Asia.
Márcia Falcão - Corpo de Cor
Opening: Thu, 11.09, 6 - 10 pm; Fri-Sun, 12-14.09, 12 - 6 pm. Contemporary Fine Arts, Grolmanstraße 32/33, 10623 Berlin
If you like painting, I recommend the European debut of Brazilian artist Márcia Falcão. The exhibition “Corpo de Cor” features voluminous oil-painted nudes, painted with raw urgency and firmly grounded in Brazilian feminist and social perspectives.
Issy Wood - Magic Bullet
Opening: Wed, 10.09, 6 - 10 pm; Thu-Fri, 11-12.09, 2 - 7 pm; Sat-Sun, 13-14.09, 11 am - 7 pm. Schinkel Pavillon, Oberwallstraße 1, 10117 Berlin.
Issy Wood stages her first large-scale solo in Germany. Her new series, described as “perverse realism,” responds directly to the pavilion’s unique architecture, bringing seductive yet unsettling visions to the fore.
Jordan Strafer - Dissonance
Opening: Wed, 10.09, 6- 10 pm; Thu-Sun, 11-14.09, 11 am - 6 pm. Fluentum, Clayallee 174, 14195 Berlin
Jordan Strafer stages her first institutional solo in Germany with “Dissonance.” Expanding her ongoing film trilogy Loophole, Strafer transforms the former military complex into a surreal 1990s talk show set, including live filming during the opening.
Out of the many gallery shows, I’m picking one focused on individual pieces by an established artist, and another defined by its overall atmosphere, where the experience itself is the point.
Anselm Kiefer – Wasserfarben
Opening: Thursday, 11.09, 6 - 10 pm; Fri-Sun, 12-14.09, 12 - 6 pm. Galerie Bastian, Taylorstraße 1, 14195 Berlin
Galerie Bastian brings together twenty-one watercolours by Anselm Kiefer, spanning decades of his practice. Rarely seen and never before exhibited in Germany, they offer an intimate counterpoint to his monumental canvases.
Tauba Auerbach - Clepsydra
Opening: Thu, 11.09, 6 - 10 pm; Fri-Sat, 12-13.09, 11 - 6 pm; Sun, 14.09, 12 - 6 pm. Esther Schipper, Potsdamer Straße 81E, 10785 Berlin.
Tauba Auerbach presents a new exhibition that unfolds across painting, weaving, glass, video, and sound. Best experienced as a whole, the show reflects their fascination with structures and connections that stretch from the microscopic to the cosmic. I suggest you take time to digest this exhibition; it’s not something to rush.
Cornelia Parker. Stolen Thunder (A Storm Gathering)
Opening: Saturday, 13.09, 6 - 9 pm. Sun, 14.09, 12 - 6 pm. KINDL, Am Sudhaus 3, 12053 Berlin.
For Saturday, I will choose KINDL, which reopens with four exhibitions on 13 September, including the one I’m most excited about: a monumental site-specific work by Cornelia Parker in the Kesselhaus. Known for deconstruction and transformation, Parker expands her practice to the industrial scale of the space.
Open House: Boros Collection
Sunday, 14.09, 1 - 6 pm. Boros Collection, Reinhardtstraße 20, 10117 Berlin. Tickets are sold out.
On the final day of Art Week, the Boros Collection opens its bunker for walk-ins, now a Berlin ritual. Boros Collection #4 brings together works by Anne Imhof, Alicja Kwade, Cyprien Gaillard, Amalia Pica, Julius von Bismarck, and more. For me, it's an ideal way to close the week.
PERFORMANCE
This Berlin Art Week edition presents several special performances. Here is my special selection across three different places:
Jefta van Dinther—Unearth
Sat-Sun, 13-14.09, 4:30 - 8:15 pm. St. HAU - Elisabeth Kirche, Invalidenstraße 3, 10115 Berlin
At HAU, performance takes center stage. I suggest taking a look over the weekend at St. Elisabeth Church, Jefta van Dinther stages Unearth, a choreography for ten dancers exploring the body as material and questions of belonging and mortality.
Boglárka Börcsök & Andreas Bolm: subjoyride
Wed, 10.09, 8 pm; Thu-Sat, 11-13.09, 9 pm. Sophiensæle, Sophienstraße 18, 10178 Berlin. Tickets: from €12-25.
Sophiensæle presents Subjoyride by Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm, inspired by the eccentric Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, whose radical practice blurred poetry, sculpture, and performance. Alongside it, Oliver Zahn’s Crowd Control restages police tactics from simulated protests, exposing the choreography of authority.
Perform! Festival
Wed-Sun, 10-14.09, various times. Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Straße 50, 10785 Berlin. Free admission.
The Perform! Festival returns for its fourth edition. Every day, Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece I & II (1969/2025) is staged once on the museum’s terrace. On Sunday, Isaac Chong Wai presents The Horizon We Can Never Touch, joined by a new work by vAL.