Sofia Hallström speaks with the artists and musicians shaping this year’s edition of Berlin Atonal and shares what not to miss each night.
Köpenicker Straße’s former East Berlin power station, Mitte — constructed between 1960 and 1964 and later reimagined as Kraftwerk — no longer generates electricity, but now serves as an industrial arena for sound and image. Its concrete walls, exposed beams, and thirty-metre-high ceilings form the backdrop for Berlin Atonal 2025, a five-day surge of new commissions, premieres, installations, and after-hours performances.
The sonic programme varies widely: from Bendik Giske’s ecstatic saxophone compositions to Amnesia Scanner’s hyper-digital onslaught, Gavsborg and Tikiman’s bass-heavy experiments to collaborations by Mark Fell and Okkyung Lee, John T. Gast, Moin, Djrum, Malibu, Heith, Billy Bultheel, and many more. The festival debuts 3rd Surface, a new platform inspired by pre-club social spaces that brings together a line-up of internationally acclaimed artists whose works experiment with sound, performance, and installation.
Anne Imhof, famed for her 2017 Venice Biennale performance FAUST with the German Pavilion, presents the soundtrack to Wish You Were Gay (WYWG). Showing on Night I at Atonal, this is sonic work exploring tension, alienation, and personal history with broader existential and queer themes. Jeremy Shaw, meanwhile, will present the soundtrack to Phase Shifting Index on Night II — a hypnotic sound originally accompanying a seven-channel video installation that stages para-fictional documentaries of subcultural movement rituals. Jenna Sutela’s Pond Brain, to show on Night III, is both instrument sound piece that originally recorded a head-shaped bronze bowl filled with water that registers environmental vibrations, that produces sonic resonances. The work will also be released as a record edition in 2026. Cyprien Gaillard’s Retinal Rivalry is made up of organ recordings, field sounds, and time-manipulated audio. The audio work will be presented on Night IV, the work shifts between documentary fragments and disorienting abstraction that takes viewers on a passage through Germany’s urban fabric, tracing its history and social complexity. Finally, French-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa’s LILA is a work that uses the voice of Senegalese French singer Le Diouck to collectively heal the audience. Catch it on Night V.
Beyond sound and moving image, highlights include Joanna Rajkowska’s hallucinatory Emergency Lights, Palestinian film director and artist Kamal Aljafari’s archival film, A Fidai Film, and Syrian printmaker Mouneer Al-Shaarani’s rare poster works from 1977, each expanding the festival’s scope into politics, memory, and visual culture.
At a moment when institutions across Germany are increasingly censoring political discourse, particularly around Palestine, Berlin Atonal remains committed to uniting experimental sound with political urgency. “It’s shocking, because Berlin was always seen as a place of freedom. But there’s resilience here. Atonal was one of the first to speak out against Israeli occupation and genocide. They made a statement early on and lost state funding,” performance artist and musician Billy Bultheel tells me. “It’s risky, but necessary.” This year’s programme does more than stage experimental sound — it probes how art can reckon with collapse, grief and erasure while opening space for collective imagination. Atonal’s charge lies in its refusal of silence of all forms.
Artistic director Laurens von Oswald situates Atonal inside Berlin’s shifting cultural landscape: “The festival has a history: it existed in the eighties but stopped around the time the Wall came down. Afterwards, there was a sudden influx of people looking for new forms of music; that’s when techno really took hold, as the soundtrack to East and West meeting.” Relaunched in Kraftwerk thirteen years ago, Atonal became less about revival and more about creating a space for sound and image to come together. “Our focus is working with artists, facilitating experiments, creating conditions for risk-taking,” says von Oswald. “Berlin is special because artists actively choose to be here. Many in our audience are artists themselves, so the dialogue is embedded in innovation and new ‘grammars’ of art and music. That’s the crux of Berlin Atonal.” Von Oswald grins: “Honestly, the totality excites me. The programme is deep, maybe too much even, but everything has its place.”
Few works will hit as hard as Basma al-Sharif’s O, Persecuted, a film that brings together Palestinian militant cinema with the hyper-saturated reels of YouTube ephemera. “I’m Palestinian, and when I encountered this archival material, it struck me as both a testament to our struggle for liberation and also something that had been buried,” she explains. “Rather than lamenting past failures, I wanted to propel it into the future, to expose the brutality of what we’re facing today.” Fragments of Kassem Hawal’s 1974 film Our Small Housesare spliced into al-Sharif’s celluloid paintings and hardcore techno, before ending with Tel Aviv party footage shot during Israel’s 2014 military offensive. The result is a highly impactful, sensory confrontation. I ask al-Sharif what entry points she imagines for those new to her practice: “Letting go of expecting to understand. My work is driven more by visceral experience than intellectual clarity. I want people to feel the sound, colour, and texture. To go in not knowing, and to leave not necessarily knowing more.” In Berlin, where censorship against Palestinian narratives has intensified, the inclusion of her work is an act of defiance. “Most institutions won’t show work that even references Gaza,” she says. “This invitation was such a surprise, and a relief. It feels brave, and it feels right.”
Multidisciplinary artist and musician Billy Bultheel brings the second chapter of his monumental series, The Short History of Decay, to Night III. Titled Fugue State, the composition is written for double bass, flute, voice, harpsichord, and electronics, performed against a towering pulpit-like wooden sculpture carved with fragments of medieval tapestry and Berlin street graffiti. “The series grew out of research into medieval resonating urns monks built into church walls,” Bultheel explains. “They altered the resonance of the space, almost like a natural equaliser. I wanted to build an instrument that wouldn’t produce music itself, but would resonate with others, creating atmosphere and ringing along.” But resonance here is both sonic and political. “The title references Emil Cioran’s reflections on the rise of fascism before World War II. It resonated with our current moment. The second chapter is about escapism and the desire to withdraw, to find relief from constant pressure.” Kraftwerk, with its aura of an industrial cathedral, becomes a part of the performance. “You don’t really hear reverb as it takes too long to travel back. Instead, you just feel very small, and the music feels massive. That creates a psychoacoustic effect I love.” Bultheel laughs about the marathon programme: “The curation is always strong, but this year I feel like I’ll want to go every night. Exhausting, but amazing.”
Based between Rotterdam and Berlin, surfaces are Ran Zhang’s subject matter. Her work, Dark Romance,explores the tension between image and knowledge, combining texture, colour, and shape into what she calls “2.5 dimensions” — something more than an image, but not yet an object. For 3rd Surface, Zhang will present a series of digitally manipulated micrographs of chicken skin, into which fragments of Berlin-Neukölln political graffiti are discreetly embedded. The result is a continuous, tactile surface that fuses biological vulnerability with suppressed political and emotional urgency. The micrograph acts not merely as observation but as a subtle agent of revelation and erasure. Visitors will encounter Zhang’s work within a public space of tables and chairs, where they can sit and converse within the exhibition. The artist is particularly intrigued to see how the festival’s sonic environment will intersect with her work: “It’s like layers in a sound piece,” she explains. “You focus, and the layers come to you. The visible and the invisible shuffle, amplify each other, and create a rhythm inside you.”
Atonal is a meeting point of experimental sound, performance art, and film, where current, urgent political discussion can take place. As von Oswald puts it, if Berlin Atonal “wasn’t ever-shifting, it would be boring. The work is really a cycle of questions: some very personal, others developed through dialogue with artists we trust. That’s the excitement: watching it all unfold together.”
Berlin Atonal takes place from 27 to 31 August 2025. Book your tickets here.
