Berlin Art Week is a stalwart of Europe’s art calendar, where the directness of German art pulls an international roster of artists into the limelight. There are big shows, impressive displays of names and ideas. But do big shows mean big ideas? To go far, art, as Roosevelt put it, speaks softly and carries a big stick. This year the city’s art is polished, often beautiful, and safe, but within the galleries art risk equals reward.
As part of the nomadic, international Kyiv Biennial, curated by Sofie Krogh Christensen, Saodat Ismailova’s As We Fade (2024/2026) is a striking installation in which a projected image fades, gradually and generationally, as it is passed through each layer of cloth. It is a direct work, in the sense that the image as memory, event or reality loses detail and contrast each time it is revisited, a phenomenon data reproduction names ‘generational loss’. The biennial’s title, A Bird That Cannot Land, names why a Kyiv edition cannot be held in Ukraine, for obvious reasons, but it also signals the limits of art: were art an effective form of resistance it would be at the front line repelling invaders. Art’s impact works instead on the viewer’s perception of reality, in both emphasis and perspective, and, at a time of distraction and misinformation, to draw us back into focus.
Consciously, the scope of the biennial was wider than Ukraine, bringing together voices from ‘Middle-East-Europe’, post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Central and Southwest Asia, and the Mediterranean, with their ‘histories of dispute, coloniality, and imperialism’, a move that asks us to recognise the solidarity among the historical and existential threats we face globally. While most of the artists on show presented darker, meditative work, a few, among them Geta Brătescu and Joyce Joumaa, brought a conceptual fizz, with Joumaa reproducing a 2015 letter from the critic John Berger to Rosa Luxemburg. Alongside the text, Joumaa’s playful piece based on matches, Works of Centuries (2026), contrasts Berger’s reflections on Luxemburg’s fate with Luxemburg’s own descriptions of birdsong in her prison letters. Perhaps the matches encapsulate the exhibition as a whole, the birds on the boxes, the collected matchsticks floating above one larger match, giving flammable accounts of ideas across eras, or, as Luxemburg wrote and Berger later recognised, ‘I was, I am, I will be’ (Berger 2015).
Berlin’s art in 2026 is about directness and contrast, and after the tension of the Kyiv Biennial, Walter Dahn’s (1954–2024) show Let’s Get Married, Let’s Get Lost (2026) at Sprüth Magers feels like stepping into another era, its aesthetic rooted in a 1980s meta-technique, a discovery of symbolic, anti-stance art that uses the language of art against itself and perhaps against the viewer. And yet there is a resurgent feeling to the works, something familiar to the contemporary psyche with its drowned image-senses, a place where only gestures of violence and pastiche make sense, a cyberpunk meeting of old and new in which the act of tracing form becomes the work itself. This survey of his work (1984–2014) screams against the conventions of art, and perhaps even against the elevation of outsider movements, street art, art brut and pop into white-cube spaces. It is hard not to feel sparks of angry melancholy in the works, hats like desert burial markers, whimsical drawings, screen prints of snatched media, all signposting an inescapable anomie, reflecting a machine modernity that pursues its purpose far past the required destination. For all its spiritual exhaustion, there is a devilish glee in the extremity of hitting bottom. The lingering question is whether Dahn’s work transcends the time in which it was made. The artist died in 2024, and this, the first such retrospective overview, lets viewers assess his work across the decades and write their own coda.
If Dahn’s work found its end in wreckage and torn metalwork, Kira Freije’s constructed figures in Between Sunlight at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art signal something else. Are her growing fame and Turner Prize shortlisting signs of a thaw after the frosty winter of reductionist postmodernism? Her figurative works ask the viewer to complete the scene, to join the evolving action her sculptures suggest, and in enacting those poses this becomes an art that courts an active, holistic engagement, within structures no less rigid than the metal armatures she uses to suggest the wireframes of bodies, with expressions as fixed as those she casts from faces and limbs.
The way partiality and structure are played with in Freije’s work finds a resonance in the work of Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year (2026), Lucia Tallová, whose Moving Clouds shows at PalaisPopulaire. Here the artist draws a structural line between the architectural and the symbolic, to question how these structures frame the female experience, physically and psychologically. Her photographic works are housed in an impressive wooden structure, a balustrade around which other pieces recall fallen Greek columns, and the photographs have a resonance with the work of John Stezaker, in that images are cut and juxtaposed with others to claim a new meaning. Where Stezaker stayed bound within the frame and used that structure to remix the nature of the image, Tallová pushes out of the boundaries and often uses other materials, fabrics, and other frames, boxes and clocks, to operate in three dimensions.
While each piece is a perfectly contained world, balanced and satisfying, a distance reduces the connection; individually they feel present and personal, yet cold. The black-and-white imagery touches on the media aesthetics of different eras, recalling both school textbooks and the collage art of those eras, when the approach was fresh for its own sake, and which now can feel referential rather than contemporary. Where the show truly succeeds is in its scope: taken as a whole, the installation of the images in the wooden structure, and the way each piece works with and against the others, is stunning. Like stepping into a German Expressionist film, the movement of people through and around the exhibition becomes part of the presentation, a disembodied head, arm or leg glimpsed through angled panels echoing the disjointed bodies of her pieces. We become the scissors, the collagists, the makers of disjuncture, and in that vivisection the work comes alive.
If intimacy is hard won at PalaisPopulaire, then C/O Berlin takes a different approach, hosting shows by Carrie Mae Weems (The Heart of the Matter), Stelios Kallinikou (Cliffs Among Dreams) and Susanne Kriemann that offer three different perspectives on the photographic present. Carrie Mae Weems’s renown is built on the dramatic present of her Kitchen Table Series (1990), staged black-and-white portraits of domestic life in which Weems takes on a variety of roles to explore the complexity of the Black female experience. The show presents a solid summation of a career built before and after the series that brought her international acclaim. Restless in both subject and approach, Weems’s work is devoutly creative and expressive, and there is something reverential in how she approaches the intangible quality that makes a photograph ‘work’. While there isn’t a single piece that doesn’t demand attention, there are some that captivate. Her untitled work (2024–2025), in which she stands with her back to a light source, facing a wall that appears clouded by texture, has a solemnity and presence that is inescapable. Powerful in texture, composition and conceptual inference, a back to the door and window, a face to the light in cloud, a liminal space between shadow and light, it is a masterclass of commanding confidence. Is it political or personal? Weems has made a career out of pointing out that the distinction might well be a political luxury, one few could afford then as now.
No less politically charged is the work of Stelios Kallinikou, which traces the intersection of nature, politics and society. His pictures juxtapose the resilience of Cyprus’s landscape with the human, military and commercial structures on the island, and their sense of time and poise gives these anthropocentric moments their place within a larger timeline. Other works examine the idea of photographic capture itself, the means by which a record is made of a particular instant or event, for instance through the way erosion registers the forces at work in a place, reflecting those surfaces on which light plays, and which light itself is shown to alter, through blanching or growth.
Susanne Kriemann’s work uses geological processes to make her photographic prints. By burying a reactive ‘film’, or letting it react chemically or radioactively, she captures moments of events that occur over aeons. The results read as abstract paintings, yet once decoded the viewer begins to recognise a narrative of ongoing processes that have occurred, and will occur, far longer than the existence of our species.
The mix of these three photographers is a fascinating look at what photography is and can be. It is the sort of meta show that moves the conversation into what the medium can actually achieve, now that image-making itself has become a fundamental part of contemporary life. This is especially so in the West, where image-making is as much a part of social control, passport photos and passport control, speed cameras, social media, as it is of social capital, enhanced job searches, video conferencing. The pivot around the concept of time as a medium, process as a subject, and a political undertone is what makes these exhibitions worthwhile.
Similarly, the ever-ambitious Projections onto the East, a multivenue exhibition curated by Fabian Bechtle and Leon Kahane, scatters a political frame across the city, and its title reads nicely alongside Kyiv’s biennial in both tone and content. Its coup is a body of work by Helmar Lerski (1871–1956) at the Schinkel Pavillon, who settled in Palestine in 1932 and photographed faces there with a monumental, sculptural light built from sunlight, mirrors and reflectors, a method pushed to its limit in Metamorphosis through Light (1935–1936), 137 portraits of a single sitter remade again and again by the lamp. The results are sensational, and in their command of light possibly unsurpassed in the medium. His Palestine portraits, shown in the exhibition, first gathered as the series Arabs and Jews, lit Jewish settlers, Bedouins and Arabs with the same transforming beam, a humanist view making human faces monumental (Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme n.d.). Lerski also worked for Zionist cultural institutions such as Keren Hayessod and the Histadrut film workshop, directing the Zionist film Avodah in 1935 (Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme n.d.; National Center for Jewish Film n.d.), so whether his work was politically ambivalent or pointed in a particular direction is unknown. Whatever he intended, the work now carries a political frisson he could not have foreseen, and in the present climate those equal, unflinching faces feel stark and direct, but also open and hopeful. The curators speak about the work without directing interpretation, though both wear the knowing smile of curators who know they’re inviting broad discussion. It is a political tease, a provocation with a serious core. Spread across venues, the exhibition also contains a powerful work by Anastasiya Yarovenko, who has made a scent from the war in Ukraine. Referencing the cultural destruction of war, she has created a perfume that conjures the burnt remains of books and artworks after a bombing, and the acrid, bitter scent occasionally fills the space, given visual form in 55 dated glass bottles that mark the destruction of each day of the ongoing conflict, and the compounding generational loss of culture and history that results. The row of dated bottles recalls the serial archive of David Tremlett’s The Spring Recordings (1972), eighty-one labelled cassette tapes shelved as the record of a journey through Britain (Tate n.d.), though here the index is of destruction rather than birdsong, a resonance that returns in the Kyiv biennial’s own title, A Bird That Cannot Land.
Berlin Art Week 2026’s centrepiece was undoubtedly Maurizio Cattelan’s show Night (2026) at the Neue Nationalgalerie, but was the attention misplaced? While Cattelan has held a strong international presence over many years, some visitors have questioned whether it is justified. Credit where it is due, the artist has been making bold, attention-seeking work since the 1990s, and calling attention to the thin cloth of the emperor’s new frock that covers religion, culture and politics has kept his name in conversation for decades, so what is the problem?
The main criticism is that his approach has never been that new, nor that affecting. Headline-grabbing, yes, but artistically satisfying? For many outside the art bubble his work is understandable, and in taking a swing at the art establishment it aligns itself with those who feel alienated from the privileged view from the top of the plinth. Centre stage, or rather overhead, Never (2003), an animatronic child drummer Cattelan drew from Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), beats an irregular rhythm from the roof, flanked by People (2026), the taxidermied pigeons that line the roofline and roost in the rafters within, the latest of the flocks he has staged since the 1990s. In Grass’s novel, a boy reacts to the horror of wartime reality by drumming as a personal cry against the world. Crowding the facade to reach the vernissage, do we not resemble those pigeons, swivel-necked, pecking at crumbs? The gag is witty and the literary echo holds, and there is real pleasure in watching him bite the hand, but the art crowd enjoys a snub, and a provocation this well received costs its maker nothing. For all the noise around him this year, the amount of attention feels, while warranted, not particularly revelatory. That said, Cattelan is never less than puckishly clever and judged within his oeuvre he continues to delight.
Art in 2026 is set against a backdrop of struggle: signs of another global recession, the rise of the right-wing AfD in Germany, ongoing wars, and the open question of harmonious immigration. From all corners optimism is at a premium and apocalyptic isolationism a regular media currency, and yet there are signs of a communal dialogue of dissenting voices enacting commonality. Whether joining platitudinous fragments left by previous generations or some sort of ready-made vibe-politics, the hunger is there for a new progressive globalism. Can we read this in the disparate themes of dislocated biennials from Kyiv and São Paulo (Haus der Kulturen der Welt)? Does this cement Berlin’s internationalism in practice? While arguments could be made for and against the validity of these gestures, the fact is they happened. Having a geopolitical edge doesn’t make Berlin particularly unique; however there is a sense of engagement and manifest intent that does warrant attention. Moreover, these macro statements are juxtaposed against insect-sized analogies of perception and society, as in Arash Nassiri’s A Bug’s Life (2026) at Fluentum and Carsten Höller’s Fly on Amanita (2026) in the Passage at Hermannplatz, reflections on insect life, at once vital to the ecosystem, particular to itself, and ultimately ordinary, though remarkable in that ordinariness. Read as a whole, Berlin Art Week 2026 was an essay in existential discourse, but, perhaps cynically, does this mean it places art grounded in worthy causes above negative criticism?
Seeing so much art in so short a time, Art Week overwhelms, and honesty demands a caveat. Rushed between rooms, a viewer takes the measure of a surface and can miss the depth that only time reveals, so some of this work will reward a slower return than an onward Art Week schedule allows. But that said, some need no second look to land. Lerski’s faces and Yarovenko’s acrid, burning scent hit square in the chest, greatness that asks for no caveats at all. Between those poles sit a great many good ideas, often well presented, and almost all of them appreciable but a few of them feel truly life-changing.
Berlin Art Week is of course highly professional and superbly curated, which means much of the art on show is either accessible or established. But art is competitive, and at this level it often misses the threat of spectacular failure, the very thing that prefaces genuine success. That said, in many places Berlin dares to ruffle feathers, curators relishing work that won’t please everyone, an artist mocking the very crowd come to applaud him, but daring to displease is not quite the same as daring to fail. Is it perverse to want to see something laughably misguided, something horrible, to see ambition stretched so far it threatens to snap? Have we polished the danger out of art, or are artists themselves less inclined to risk their careers with inaccessible work? Or, more likely, hearing the call of big names, our tourist feet carry us to destinations with bucket-list appeal. The pull of an art week is being struck by the unexpected, and highlights like Lerski, Weems, Kriemann and Yarovenko reinforce why we return year on year. It is for the optimism and ambition of new moments.
For the major galleries and big names, the ambition is real, and Berlin asks the big questions more seriously than most art weeks dare to, all with a hard stare and a warm, self-mocking grin. Dahn’s wreckage still speaks across its decades, Weems shows that the personal and the political were never separable, and Cattelan’s pigeons are us on the steps of the temple, so the measure of this art is less whether it transcends its moment than whether it makes us feel that moment more sharply. Berlin Art Week 2026 was a success because it placed the bigger issues within a shifting, many-angled lens that sees things from many points of view, perspectives within which we can find out what this global moment means.
Berlin Art Week 2026, across Berlin, 9–13 September 2026. berlinartweek.de
Exhibitions
Maurizio Cattelan, Night, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 10 September 2026–7 March 2027. smb.museum
Walter Dahn, Let’s Get Married, Let’s Get Lost, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 11 September–24 October 2026. spruethmagers.com
Kira Freije, Between Sunlight, KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 13 September 2026–21 February 2027. kindl-berlin.de
Carsten Höller, Fly on Amanita, Passage Berlin, Hermannplatz Station (U7), 12 September–11 October 2026. berlinartweek.de
Stelios Kallinikou, Cliffs Among Dreams, C/O Berlin, 12 September 2026–20 January 2027. co-berlin.org
Susanne Kriemann, Im Fieber der Sonne flattern Schmetterlinge im Bauch, C/O Berlin, 12 September 2026–20 January 2027. co-berlin.org
Kyiv Biennial: A Bird That Cannot Land (incl. Saodat Ismailova, As We Fade; Joyce Joumaa), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 11 June–13 September 2026. kw-berlin.de
Arash Nassiri, A Bug’s Life, Fluentum, Berlin, 10 September–12 December 2026. fluentum.org
Projections onto the East (curated by Fabian Bechtle and Leon Kahane): Schinkel Pavillon (incl. Helmar Lerski), Berlin, 10 September–20 December 2026 (schinkelpavillon.de), in cooperation with the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (NBK), 10 September–8 November 2026 (nbk.org).
Lucia Tallová, Moving Clouds, PalaisPopulaire, Berlin, 10 September 2026–4 January 2027. palaispopulaire.de
Carrie Mae Weems, The Heart of the Matter, C/O Berlin, 12 September 2026–3 February 2027. co-berlin.org
Bibliography
Berger, J 2015, ‘A letter to Rosa Luxemburg’, New Statesman, viewed 18 October 2026, www.newstatesman.com.
Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme n.d., Helmar Lerski: Pioneer of Light, viewed 18 October 2026, www.mahj.org.
National Center for Jewish Film n.d., Avodah (1935, Helmar Lerski), viewed 18 October 2026, www.jewishfilm.org.
Trebuchet’s stay in Berlin was hosted by Hotel Bristol, with the trip supported by Kulturprojekte Berlin as part of Berlin Art Week. Written and edited independently; all views are the critic’s own.
Images by Trebuchet © Trebuchet
Writer and academic Cartagena works in the arts polishing bios and gallery notes in the pursuit of clarity. He also lectures, though with enough opacity to impart wonder.
