Berlin Art Week: The Hit List 2024

Sept. 5, 2024

The 13th edition of Berlin Art Week kicks off next week from September 11th to 15th. Annually, Berlin Art Week becomes a platform for Berlin’s most important art institutions to present the latest of the city’s contemporary art scene. This year, the BAW Garten will open at Gropius Bau as the festival’s hub, offering a variety of workshops and events for locals and visitors alike. With over 300 events, including more than 70 exhibition openings, over 100 participants will showcase what Berlin has to offer.

To serve as a guide during these intense, art-filled days, we’ve complied a hit-list to highlight some of the most anticipated and exciting exhibitions and events, as well as our Curated Routes, specially designed in collaboration with Berlin Art Week. To help you fill in the moments between shows, check out our art-themed Hotel and Restaurant Guide.

Schering Stiftung

Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld: ‘Labor Lab’
Opening Reception: Wednesday, Sept. 11; 6–10pm
Exhibition: Sept. 12–Dec. 1, 2024
scheringstiftung.de
Unter den Linden 32–34, 10117 Berlin, click here for map

Although the names for female contraception range from the euphemistic (“the morning after pill” or “die Pille danach”) to the unflinchingly blunt (even non-German speakers, I would imagine, could guess what the “Antibabypille” does), the material form of the medication comes in the sleek, universalized design of a pharmaceutical capsule. Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld’s photographs, on display at the Schering Stiftung in the exhibition ‘Labor Lab,’ suggest a different way of imagining the drugs that are involved in regulating the reproductive cycle. Presented as matte enlarged c-prints, the images are created through the application of solvents—hormones, the morning after pill—to pre-exposed photo negatives. The result is a Rohrschach test in which the viewer projects his or her associations onto the crystalline image of the reaction between solvent and negative. Schönfeld’s art is not photography—the camera is involved in her process only peripherally—but it nevertheless sets itself the fascinating objective of capturing a picture of the hormonal unconscious.

Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld: ‘Labor Lab/ mother‘s milk,’ human milk on developed negative film, enlarged as c-print, 2024 // © Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Haus am Waldsee

Gisèle Vienne: ‘This Causes Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play’
Opening Reception: Wednesday, Sept. 11
Exhibition: Sept. 12, 2024-Jan. 12, 2025
hausamwaldsee.de
Argentinische Allee 30, 14163 Berlin, click here for map

Site-specific and staged as a theatrical piece, Gisèle Vienne’s large-scale exhibition at Haus am Waldsee features an installation of life-sized puppets alongside a series of photographs. Over the past 20 years, the artist, choreographer and director has created a complex body of work that reconsiders perceptual frameworks and invents artistic languages, paving the way for structural societal change. Her creations, both on stage and in her visual practice, are developed in collaboration with dancers and actors and are often animated by anthropomorphic figures and puppets to explore the sensuality, rage, creativity and subversive potential of counterculture and adolescence. ‘This Causes Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play‘ is part of a collaboration between Haus am Waldsee, the Georg Kolbe Museum and Sophiensæle, bringing Vienne’s work to Berlin in all its complexity for the first time as part of Berlin Art Week.

Gisèle Vienne: ‘Series PORTRAITS 48/63,’ 2024 // Photo: Gisèle Vienne

SAVVY Contemporary

Group Show: ‘SOCIETY: OR INFINITE REHEARSALS’
Opening Reception: Friday, Sept. 13; 7pm
Exhibition: Sept. 14–Nov. 1, 2024
savvy-contemporary.com
Reinickendorfer Straße 17, 13347 Berlin, click here for map

‘SOCIETY. OR INFINITE REHEARSALS’ is a research, exhibition and performance project focusing on artistic practices that engage with movement and its many meanings. Through the lens of movement, the project sharpens its focus on continuities of German and European colonialism, and how they manifest today in the West as concerns around diversity, multiculturalism, assimilation and integration. Featuring works by Heba Y. Amin, Kasia Fudakowski, Hiền Hoàng, Thomias Radin and Sung Tieu, among others, the exhibition takes dance as a methodology and works through “choreographies” that fixate societies in colonial, patriarchal, classist and casteist logics. While highlighting the coercive choreographies imposed on the most marginalized of bodies in any society, it also traces lines of more emancipatory movement(s) created and performed outside of these dynamics. The program kicks off with the opening on September 13th, featuring a DJ set by Calamidades Lola.

Hiền Hoàng: ‘The Next Pacific,’ From the project ‘Asia Bistro –Made in Rice,’ 2023 // Courtesy the artist

Gropius Bau

Rirkrit Tiravanija: ‘DAS GLÜCK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG’
Opening Reception: Wednesday, Sept. 11; 7pm
Exhibition: Sept. 12, 2024–Jan. 12, 2025
gropiusbau.de
Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, click here for map

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exhibitions take seriously his commitment to playing the role of the host: his installations from the early 1990s, for example, revolved around cooking meals for gallery-goers. In a wide-ranging retrospective of three decades of Tiravanija’s work, the Gropius Bau exhibition ‘DAS GLÜCK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG’ emphasizes artistically-crafted situations that offer space to eat, drink, play, rest and meet with other attendees of the museum. Notably, the installation ‘untitled 2024 (tomorrow is the question)’ activates the atrium of the Gropius Bau with eight ping-pong tables that are openly accessible to the public. Spanning both Tiravanija’s participatory works as well as his experimental 8mm-films and photographs, ‘DAS GLÜCK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG’ aims to become a place where people can come together and spend time with friends and strangers.

Rirkrit-Tiravanija

Wilhelm Hallen

‘Hallen 5’
Opening Reception: Saturday, Sept. 7; 11am–8pm
Festival: Sept. 7–15, 2024; 11am–8pm
Admission: € 12 (reduced € 6, family ticket € 18)
hallen.art
Kopenhagener Straße 60-72, 13407 Berlin, click here for map

‘Hallen 5,’ the fifth and largest edition of the annual Hallen exhibition, takes place over nine days at WILHELM HALLEN, starting on September 7th. Across the 9,000-square-meter industrial space of the former iron foundry, ‘Hallen 05’ features artworks presented by galleries, institutions and art collections, as well as an accompanying program of events for all ages. In addition to a comprehensive program for children, the opening weekend features a performance by Casey Spooner on September 7th and ‘The CVNTEMPORARY Mini Kiki Ball,’ a voguing contest with The Haus of Telfar and House of Juicy Couture on September 8th. Among the event highlights during Berlin Art Week is the Open Air on September 13th. Participating venues include Berlinische Galerie, Kestner Gesellschaft, Fluentum, Air de Paris, Peres Projects, ChertLüdde, Esther Schipper and Sprüth Magers, among others.

Casey Spooner // © the artist, Photo: Matthew Richards

Neun Kelche

Theresa Weber: ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’
Opening Reception: Friday, Sept. 13; 5-10pm
Performance: Saturday, Sept. 14
Exhibition: Sep. 14–Oct. 27, 2024
neunkelche.de
Pasedagplatz 3-4, 13088 Berlin, click here for map

During Berlin Art Week, Neun Kelche presents a solo exhibition by artist German-Jamaican artist Theresa Weber, titled ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder (All People Become Brothers),’ which explores the invisibility of Afro-German history and engages with the hypothesis that Ludwig van Beethoven may have had Black ancestry. The exhibition, which is conceived as a site-specific installation bringing together a collage wallpaper created specifically for the project space with textile sculptures hanging throughout the room, uses the speculative assumption that Beethoven had been of Black descent as a starting point for reimagining historical narratives and for anti-colonial resistance.

Theresa Weber: ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder,’ 2024, detail

transmediale studio

Ciara Barker: ‘Libraries of Rest’
Opening Reception: Wednesday, Sept. 11; 6-8pm
Exhibition: Sept. 11–22, 2024
zeitgeistirland24.com/event/libraries-of-rest
Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin, click here for map

The idea of rest as a fantasy of self-annihilation has occupied a preeminent place in the Western mind, ever since Hamlet busted out the line “to die, to sleep” in face of his tortured family life. There is a familiar paradox at work in the famous soliloquy: the fantasy of ego death, of reprieve from “the thousand mortal shocks / That the flesh is heir to,” really shows the ego at its most flailing and self-involved. Opening at silent green during Berlin Art Week, the exhibition ‘Libraries of Rest,’ by the Irish artist Ciara Barker, takes up the question of repose from a different perspective than Hamlet’s: how is one to rest in a deliberate fashion without asserting a personal transcendence of external crisis? Curated by Aoife Donnellan and with a soundscape by Mankyy, the immersive installations of ‘Libraries of Rest’ aim “to create an inclusive and comfortable space that considers alternative futures, divorced from productivity.”

Ciara Barker: ‘Fascination for the Outside,’ 2019 // Courtesy of the Artist

Galerie Thomas Schulte

Rebecca Horn: ‘Concert of Sighs’
Allan McCollum: ‘The World: A Moment in Time’
Opening Reception: Wednesday, Sept. 11; 6–9pm
Exhibition: Sept. 11–Nov. 2, 2024
galeriethomasschulte.de
Charlottenstraße 24, 10117 Berlin, click here for map

Few sculptures emphasize their quality as a spatial obstacle and physical hazard that one should literally avoid as Rebecca Horn’s. Her intricate complexes of falling ladders and suspended carving knives—with their jutted angles of junk and debris—make one think of all the nasty complications that may lead from an infected cut such as sepsis and gangrene (in 1964, Horn pulled out of the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts due to a severe lung poisoning). For Berlin Art Week, Galerie Thomas Schulte presents a new selection of Horn’s work entitled ‘Concert of Sighs’ that promises a further exploration of one of the German artist’s favorite themes: the relation between kinetic sculptures and danger.

Rebecca Horn: ‘Concerto dei Sospiri,’ 1997 // photo by Gunter Lepkowski. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin, 2024

FLUSS BAD BERLIN

Group Show: ‘50 Für Bad Berlin’
Opening Reception: Wednesday, Sep. 11; 6-9pm
Auction: Thursday, Sept. 12; 6–9pm register here for bidding on site
Exhibition: Sep. 12–15, 2024
flussbad-berlin.de
Bauakademie, Schinkelplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, click here for map

Fluss Bad Berlin is a civic urban development initiative aimed at making swimming possible in the Spree. In the Red Salon of the Bauakademie, it presents the group exhibition ‘50 Für Bad Berlin,’ which explores the fundamental significance of water and emphasizes the importance of free and equal access to it. The show features works by Rosa Barba, Elmgreen & Dragset, Simon Fujiwara, Katharina Grosse, Wolfgang Tillmans and Haegue Yang, among others, who express solidarity with Fluss Bad Berlin’s efforts to reclaim the Spree as a natural resource for the city and its inhabitants. On September 12th, all displayed artworks will be auctioned to the highest bidder. The proceeds will support the further development and permanent operation of a system to forecast water quality in the Spree and make this information freely accessible via an app.

Sophiensæle

Göksu Kunak: ‘INNOCENCE’
Premiere: Wednesday, Sept. 11; 8pm
Performance: Sept. 12–14, 2024; 8pm
Admission: € 15 (reduced € 10)
sophiensaele.com
Sophienstraße 18, 10178 Berlin, click here for map

In their upcoming performance premiering as part of Berlin Art Week, Göksu Kunak reflects on the policy of concealing and erasing and explores accident and scandal as phenomena. ‘INNOCENCE’—based on the Susurluk scandal, a notorious car crash in Turkey in the 1990s—portrays the crash as a moment frozen in time in which relationships are crystallized: a traffic accident as a neutral moment, neither good nor bad, but as dramatic as a soap opera. The opening performance of the work at Sophiensæle on September 11th will be followed by a DJ Set by artist Zuzanna Czebatul.

Göksu Kunak: ‘INNOCENCE’ // Photo by Ege Dandin

Spreepark Art Space

The Gray Voice Ensemble & Guests: ‘A Wonderful World’
Performance: Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024; 4pm
Exhibition: Aug. 25-Oct. 20, 2024
spreepark-artspace.de
Kiehnwerderallee 2, 12437 Berlin, click here for map

Presented by Kinderhook & Caracas at Spreepark Art Space, ‘A Wonderful World’ conjures an amusement park ride experience, leading visitors through soundtracks and scenes accompanied by ghosts of the past, present and future. The exhibition revolves around three newly commissioned audio-video works by The Gray Voice Ensemble, directed by composer and creative director Elisabeth Wood. Featuring footage shot largely within the Spreepark grounds, the videos show ensemble members and guests performing collectively realized songs amid the zone’s abandoned architecture and encroaching plant life. The curatorial team Kinderhook & Caracas—artists Sol Calero and Christopher Kline—have planned and constructed the installation in conversation with the ensemble, inspired by the derelict attractions of the former park. On Sunday, September 15th, a live performance is set to take place, in which a choir of alien ghosts performs a concert of songs from the ongoing exhibition ‘A Wonderful World.’