Apr. 24, 2025
For its 21st edition this year, Gallery Weekend Berlin will see more than 50 participating galleries open their doors to the public and present both new and existing works, from May 2nd to 4th. Peripheral to the main event, gallery spaces, museums and institutions all across the city will also be opening new exhibitions and hosting performances and events alongside the official program. As a peripheral event, Sellerie Weekend is once again helping to cast visibility on the work of independent artists and project spaces. To help you navigate your way through this year’s selection, we have curated our own top picks for the upcoming weekend.
Sprüth Magers
Michail Pirgelis: ‘Seven Springs’
Cyprien Gaillard: ‘Retinal Rivalry’
Exhibition: May 2–June 7, 2025
spruethmagers.com
Oranienburger Straße 18, 10178 Berlin, click here for map
Two exhibitions at Sprüth Magers bring together artists whose practices examine the imprint of time on materials, environments and perception, unfolding parallel meditations on memory and movement. In ‘Seven Springs,’ Michail Pirgelis works with parts of decommissioned planes from “aircraft boneyards”—aluminum surfaces worn by time and marked by colorful logos and faded insignias—transforming them into wall-based sculptural works that reinvigorate and challenge the conventions of post-minimalism, the readymade and conceptual art. In parallel, Cyprien Gaillard presents ‘Retinal Rivalry,’ a sensorial 3D film composed of two sequences: one meandering through the final day of Oktoberfest, the other descending beneath Cologne Cathedral into ancient Roman ruins. Shot in ultra-high-definition at 120 frames per second, this dérive through decaying architectures and layered urban geologies foregrounds the instability of perception and the layered, often invisible histories embedded within the contemporary landscape. Together, both exhibitions trace the movement of time through matter—airborne or subterranean.
Michail Pirgelis: ‘Raised Arizona,’ 2025, aluminum, titanium, lacquer // © Michail Pirgelis, courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers, photo by Ben Hermanni
Hamburger Bahnhof
Klára Hosnedlová: ‘embrace’
Exhibition: May 1–Oct. 26, 2025
smb.museum/…/hamburger-bahnhof
Invalidenstraße 50–51, 10557 Berlin, click here for map
In an amorphous, poignantly corporeal installation that stretches out across the museum’s foyer, Klára Hosnedlová unveils ‘embrace’ at Hamburger Bahnhof on May 1st. Suspended beneath the hall’s cast-iron columns, up to nine-meter-high flax-fiber tapestries, site-specific objects, organically shaped reliefs and expansive embroideries transform the museum’s historic architecture into a layered, affective environment. The monumental, materially heterogeneous installation brings together personal memory, references to post-communist architecture and elements of speculative fiction. Drawing from her Czech heritage and Berlin-based practice, Hosnedlová interweaves performance and craft, embedding traces of past interventions into a sculptural landscape that invites reflection and immersion. ‘embrace’ marks the artist’s largest institutional exhibition to date.
Klára Hosnedlová: ‘GROWTH,’ 2024, installation view Kunsthalle Basel // © Klára Hosnedlová, Kunsthalle Basel / Zdeněk Porcal
Trautwein Herleth
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): ‘Degenerate Art (Transsexual)’
Exhibition: May 2–June 7, 2025
trautweinherleth.de
Kohlfurter Straße 41/43, 10999 Berlin, click here for map
In a dialogue between formal abstraction and queer intimacy, everyday objects and digital interfaces are transformed into sites of vulnerability and resistance at Trautwein Herleth. The solo exhibition of Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), whose work was created anonymously until 2018, intertwines personal narrative with art historical dialogue. Born in 1989 in Dallas, Texas, Kuriki-Olivo studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and earned an MFA from Yale University. Her multidisciplinary practice spans performance, installation and sculpture, often incorporating elements from popular culture to explore themes of identity, transformation and societal structures. In this exhibition, Kuriki-Olivo juxtaposes art historical references to Minimalism, Color Field painting and Pop Art with contemporary digital symbols, such as those from the location-based social networking app Grindr. This body of work reflects her ongoing exploration of how trans and racialized identities intersect with systems of representation and legibility, inviting viewers to reconsider the boundaries between personal experience and cultural symbolism.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): ‘Nothin New,’ installation view New Museum, New York, October 12, 2023 – March 3, 2024
Sophiensæle
Anton Kats / ILYICH: ‘After Hope’
Performance: Apr. 30 & May 2–4, 2025; 8pm
Installation: May 2–4, 2025; 12–4pm
Admission: € 10–25 (reduced € 10), tickets
sophiensaele.com/after-hope
Sophienstraße 18, 10178 Berlin, click here for map
A constellation of radios, voices and frequencies fills the space—fragments of resistance, lullabies for the end of something. In ‘After Hope,’ Anton Kats / ILYICH transforms Sophiensæle into a zone of sonic and political excavation. By day, the ‘Cemetery of Melodies Alive’ installation invites visitors into a dense soundscape—three radio channels weave together the voice of Susanne Sachsse with spectral transmissions, melodies and static, recalling lost solidarities and unfinished revolutions. By night, the project shifts into a live performance: part concert, part testimonial, part gathering of ghosts. Driven by the urgency to respond to the ongoing global fascistization, the work embraces the temporality of transmigration: a nonlinear understanding of time in which birth, death and rebirth loop and bleed into one another. Aboard ‘Vishwa Asha,’ the vessel that steers this sonic journey, audiences are invited to drift through a tide of voices and echoes. Through storytelling, sound and movement, Kats builds a fragile, flickering archive that asks not what remains after hope, but what becomes possible in its wake.
Anton Kats / ILYICH: ‘After Hope’ // Photo by Silke Briel, retouching by Igor Kritskiy
St. Matthäus-Kirche
William Engelen: ‘Godspeed in 4/4 Time’
Exhibition: May 2–Sep. 7, 2025
stiftung-stmatthaeus.de/godspeed-in-4-4-time
Matthäikirchplatz, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
Concurrent with the events of this year’s Gallery Weekend, Dutch artist William Engelen’s ‘Godspeed in 4/4 Time,’ a large-scale sound installation commissioned for the foundation’s 25th anniversary, transforms Stiftung St. Matthäus into a resonant calendar. Encircling the gallery space beneath the church’s balconies, 366 metallic pipes of varying lengths and materials, each pipe corresponding to a day in 2024, form a distinctive, “graphic score” that blends architecture and sound into a synaesthetic encounter with the site. Activated through concerts and interventions by percussionists including Evi Filippou and Robyn Schulkowsky, workshops and a video collaboration with artist Dagmara Genda, the installation turns time into a sonic experience.
William Engelen: ‘Godspeed in 4/4 Time’ // © William Engelen
artspring berlin
‘[ˈapɡəˌfakt] – something is broken here’
Open Studios: Saturday, May 3–4; 12–8pm
Festival: May 2–June 1, 2025
artspring.berlin
Various Venues
For its ninth edition, artspring berlin returns to Pankow under the title ‘[‘apga,fakt] – something is broken here,’ foregrounding the escalating precarity facing Berlin’s independent art scene. This year’s title directly addresses the worsening conditions for artists in Berlin, focusing on the fallout from recent cultural budget cuts and the steady erosion of affordable studio spaces. With the suspension of key support mechanisms like the FABiK exhibition fee fund and an ever-decreasing number of workspaces, many visual artists now face existential threats to their practice. In 2025, the festival mobilizes around 350 artists across open studios, exhibitions, readings, films and, for the first time, an extensive sound art program. Throughout May, spaces from the Theater unterm Dach to the Park-Klinik Weißensee and Bornholm’s garden colonies become sites for visual, sonic and performative interventions. Highlights include ‘schallern’ and ‘Über Klang,’ exhibitions probing the intersections of sound and visual art and ‘IST SITUATION 25,’ a group show centering artists who’ve recently lost their studios. Jointly, they signal both the fragility of the current moment and the urgency to act.
artspring berlin, open studios // Photo by Sandra Köpke
Ruinart Champagne & Art Bar
Julian Charriere
Exhibition: May 1–4, 2025; 1–9pm
ruinart.com
PalaisPopulaire, Unter den Linden 5, 10117 Berlin, click here for map
During Gallery Weekend Berlin, Ruinart opens the Champagne & Art Bar at PalaisPopulaire. Every year, selected artists enter into a dialogue with nature through the theme ‘Conversations with Nature,’ inspired by the rich terroir of Champagne. The 2025 artist, Julian Charrière, explores the intersection of geological history and ecological precarity. His series of photolithographs, tinted with pigments derived from local limestone and crushed coral, gestures toward the Lutetian Sea that once covered the Champagne region. This work, spanning performance, video, sculpture, and photography, interrogates the entanglement between humanity and the natural world. An installation reflecting on the Champagne terroir’s geological memory and the contemporary vulnerability of coral reefs will be shown at Galerie 4 Rue des Crayères, Reims, from summer 2025. In Berlin, the exhibition is accompanied by champagne masterclasses delving into Ruinart’s recent ecological initiatives, including the new Cuvée Ruinart Blanc Singulier, which gestures toward a sustainable reconfiguration of tradition (EnjoyResponsibly).
Julian Charrière: ‘Poriteslobata,’ 2025 // @DR
Capitain Petzel
Monica Bonvicini: ‘It is Night Outside’
Exhibition: May 1–June 7, 2025
capitainpetzel.de
Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin, click here for map
With ‘It is Night Outside,’ Monica Bonvicini’s first solo presentation at Capitain Petzel, the artist stages a cinematic architecture of disquiet—borrowing affective registers from Antonioni’s melancholy mise-en-scène and Bergman’s inner fracturing—to explore the thresholds of embodiment, discipline and domestic space. From alienation to intimate psychological depth, Bonvicini examines the relationship between women and the environments they inhabit. She challenges the static nature of objects and their contexts, revealing a quiet but profound struggle for agency and transformation. In the lower gallery, a two-channel video unfolds in a half-domestic, half-institutional twilight interior, where performers enact silent rituals of withdrawal and repetition. Above, monolithic cylinders with powder-coated steel structures wrapped in a relief of tightly buckled leather belts impose themselves like sentinels of discipline and desire. Glass hooks, impossibly delicate, hold not coats or hats but various pieces of feminine underwear—transforming the act of hanging into a quiet inquiry into how vulnerability is displayed and archived. Balancing material pliancy against structural severity, Bonvicini’s works choreograph an architecture of unease in which bodies and built forms converge in states of intimately calibrated constraint.
Monica Bonvicini: ‘It is Night Outside,’ 2025, two-channel video installation
NOME
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: ‘Uncensored’
Exhibition: May 2–July 26, 2025
nomegallery.com//uncensored
Potsdamer Straße 72, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
At NOME, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley brings her digital world-building into the physical space of the gallery, expanding on her ongoing exploration of visibility, erasure and the construction of Black Trans archives. Known for her interactive game-based works, she applies that same logic here; through paintings, folding screens, garments, and video, to create an environment that feels more navigated than simply viewed. Referencing horror aesthetics and glitch graphics, the works present fragmented, unstable figures that refuse legibility on conventional terms. Interactivity remains a central concern. Not only is the viewer present; they are addressed and sometimes even excluded. Instead of treating visibility as a solution, Brathwaite-Shirley leans into complexity and contradiction, pushing us to question the systems that determine who gets seen, how and on whose terms.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: ‘WE CAN’T LET THEM DO THIS AGAIN,’ 2025, ink and acrylic paint on paper, 237 x 150 cm // Photo © Marjorie Brunet Plaza, courtesy of the artist and NOME
OFFICE IMPART
Anna Ehrenstein with Sunny Pfalzer, Lucy Tomasino, Alexa Evangelista, Josh Davila:
‘Cripto Sirenas’
Exhibition: Apr. 30–June 20, 2025
officeimpart.com
Waldenserstraße 2–4, 10551 Berlin, click here for map
Rather than imagining the future as sleek or utopian, ‘Cripto Sirenas’ at OFFICE IMPART plunges their viewers into a crypto-authoritarian dystopia shaped by speculative finance, digital surveillance and techno-mythology. Co-created by Anna Ehrenstein alongside Sunny Pfalzer, Lucy Tomasino, Alexa Evangelista and Web3 researcher Josh Davila, the project centers on the “Crypto Ballerina”, a hybrid figure of resistance who navigates identity through performance, liquidity and code. Combining video, installation and performance, the exhibition explores how blockchain imaginaries collide with bodies, borders and capitalist fictions. The work draws from activist strategies and diasporic aesthetics, while also interrogating the rhetoric of decentralization that so often masks new forms of control.
Anna Ehrenstein with Sunny Pfalzer, Lucy Tomasino, Alexa Evangelist: ‘Bitcoin Baile,’ 2024, (stills) 360 degree video, 23:34min // Courtesy the artist and OFFICE IMPART
DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM
Zuzanna Czebatul: ‘All the Charm of a Rotting Gum’
Exhibition: May 2–June 21, 2025
dittrich-schlechtriem.com
Linienstraße 23, 10178 Berlin, click here for map
In her first solo exhibition at Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Zuzanna Czebatul dismantles the architecture of power both literally and symbolically. In All the Charm of a Rotting Gum, she takes the Pergamon Altar, now temporarily absent from Berlin’s museum circuit, as both subject and ghost. Rather than reconstructing it, she reimagines it: less as cultural treasure than as a contested monument whose afterlife is shaped by nationalism, extraction and aesthetic canonization. Czebatul juxtaposes this with a large-scale relief that fuses elements of riot gear and Christian sacred geometry, collapsing the distance between divine protection and state control. Materials associated with permanence, such as cast metal, stone and industrial polymers, are pushed into states of tension and artifice. Throughout, the exhibition probes visitors to reflect on the mythologies built into the structures we collectively preserve and what happens when their foundations begin to rot.
Zuzanna Czebatul: ‘All the Charm of a Rotting Gum,’ 2025, studio view (detail), Ihlow, Germany // © Zuzanna Czebatul, courtesy of DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, Berlin
Galerie Molitor
Diane Severin Nguyen: ‘Spring Snow’
Exhibition: May 2–June 7, 2025
galeriemolitor.com
Kurfürstenstraße 143, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
At Galerie Molitor, Diane Severin Nguyen’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery unfolds across a fractured temporal field, where continuity and rupture operate not as opposites but as interdependent forces. Born in Carson, California and based between Los Angeles and New York, Nguyen has developed a practice that spans photography, video and sculpture, consistently probing transformation as both a formal-material investigation and a philosophical concern. Here, new bodies of work trace purity as a site of tension—never still, never whole, always emerging through contrast. A dual-channel video installation anchors the exhibition: on one screen, snow falls through dense jungle, staging an impossible image of climate and time colliding; on the other, children’s garments sway on wire hangers, animated by an invisible choreography. Between these scenes, fragmented songs and intermittent timestamps create syncopated rhythms, casting the viewer into a temporality that resists resolution. Throughout, Nguyen gestures toward purity not as essence, but as effect. Something glimpsed only in the dissonance between what is and what is not.
Diane Severin Nguyen: ‘Victory,’ 2025 // Courtesy the artist and Galerie Molitor, Berlin
