As Berlin Art Week returns, 10–14 September 2025, the city once again proves itself both marketplace and playground for contemporary art—edgy, alive, and restless. Here are Elephant’s pick of six shows not to be missed.
Poor but sexy. The cringe, albeit affectionate epithet coined by a former Berlin mayor in 2003, once perfectly captured a city in which cheap rents, empty buildings, and financial uncertainty fueled a wild, experimental underground where art, nightlife and alternative communities thrived in the cracks of every neighbourhood. In the intervening years, Berlin has experienced somewhat of a twist of fate: it’s still sexy, undoubtedly sexy, but rich and restless too. Investment is up, the economy hums but a 12% slash in the cultural budget announced at the start of this year has left things unsettled. Long-time residents and young creatives are worried the city might be sacrificing some of its offbeat, bohemian charm in lining its own pockets.
The programme for this year’s Berlin Art Week would, fortunately, suggest otherwise. With more than 100 museums, galleries, collections, and project spaces coming together over the next five days, organisers are responding to the cuts by experimenting with new models and outlets for creative enterprise. “The effects of the budget cuts are felt less in the content of the art itself, but rather in the conditions under which artists, institutions, and independent spaces are operating,” Berlin Art Week director Mona Stehle tells Elephant.
This is especially visible in the new structures and collaborations emerging this year: alliances are forming between mobile, often smaller initiatives, artist-led project spaces, and unconventional urban locations. The de-centralised programme spans site-specific installations, participatory and discursive formats, painting, installation, sound art, film, and performance—taking place not only in major institutions but also in former hangars, churches, industrial halls and studios. “One of our Featured projects, ‘Maximal’ at the Remise im Wrangelkiez brings together Berlin artists Cathrin Hoffmann and Sophia Süßmilch, who, through radical gestures in their studio, unite artists fighting displacement and striving for artistic visibility on the edge of disappearance,” says Stehle. “This may be in reference to the current shifting cultural and political realities of the city.”
While collectors will be anchored by the commercial buzz of Positions Art Fair, the offering is balanced with experimental, non-commercial formats demonstrating Berlin’s ability to be both a marketplace and a playground for contemporary art; edgy, alive, restless. The city is well loved for its performance art, so it’s worth checking out the programme for ‘Perform!’ festival at Neue Nationalgalerie, which features Yoko Ono’s Bells For Peace (14 September) as well as Mirror Piece I & II (1969/2025) by Joan Jonas, performed once a day on the gallery’s terrace.
Stehle’s advice for those visiting; ‘Plan ahead, embrace spontaneity and don’t worry about missing out!’
With more than 300 events hosted in just one week, the programme is simply too extensive to see it all, so we’ve selected six of our most hotly anticipated openings to give you a head start.
Petrit Halilaj, An Opera Out of Time at Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart
Petrit Halilaj is busy building beautiful things again—this time at Hamburger Bahnhof, where he transforms the museum into a stage of myth, memory, and collective dreaming. Marking his first major solo exhibition in a Berlin institution, Halilaj presents Syrigana, a five-act opera created with the Kosovo Philharmonic and first performed in his home village. Rooted in the landscape of Kosovo and its ancient boulder ‘Gjyteti,’ the work unfolds as an expansive installation animated by live performance. At its heart, the opera tells a playful yet profound story: a fox and a rooster fall in love beneath a pear tree that blossoms back to life. Joy floods the scene—flowers open, birds dance—only to be unsettled by the arrival of a snake. Here, familiar origin myths are joyfully unraveled. Adam and Eve appear not as humans but as chimeric creatures, who, once cast out of Eden, stumble upon an already flourishing humanity. Apples shift into pears, endings into beginnings, as voices in many languages and birdsong carry the tale. In this dreamlike environment of giant flora and fauna, Halilaj invites visitors into a world where love, imagination, and collective storytelling reshape how we might belong.
Global Fascisms at Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Many institutions participating in Berlin Art Week are tackling urgent social themes this year but this large-scale group exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) exploring the aesthetic, political, and emotional dynamics of fascism, feels particularly apposite. Global Fascisms brings together works by fifty international artists who respond to the rise of fascist ideologies through a variety of media, including painting, film, performance, discourse, publications, and digital formats. Among them is a work by Israeli conceptual artist Roee Rosen that sees almost romantic metaphors and euphemisms his country uses to disguise military operations in Gaza tattooed onto skin. Elsewhere South African artist Jane Alexander’s therianthropic sculptures stand as emblems of the inhumane nature of an apartheid society. There are works that draw on the role of technology and social media in creating echo chambers that augment radicalisation as well as perspectives from China, Israel and Austria that invoke interlinked themes of religion, nostalgia and propaganda. Together, they recognise fascism as a global challenge, contained not in the perimeters of the past but as a very immediate threat.
Issy Wood, Magic Bullet at The Schinkel Pavillon
London-based art world darling Issy Wood makes her German solo debut at this year’s Berlin Art Week. Between the floor to ceiling windows of the octagonal Schinkel Pavilion, twenty-five of Wood’s works created within the past seven years will map the artist’s evolving practice across painting, writing and music. In her astute observations of everyday objects and scavenging of digital imagery––sliding from the kitsch and ornamental to the beguiling and allegorical––Wood pieces together a jigsaw of contemporary existence. The show’s title, Magic Bullet, is drawn from a new publication accompanying the exhibition, which compiles diaristic texts first developed on Wood’s blog. Her fragmented still lives here appear to directly mirror the disclosure, concealment and intimacy also found in the written confessions she has kept since her teenage years.
Paula Santomé, The Beginning of Everything at Paint Shop
Origin myths are never neutral; they script the terms of power. In The Beginning of Everything, the newly opened Paint Shop hosts a new body of work by Paula Santomé, continuing her engagement with the mechanisms of control exerted over female bodies. Ignited by a visit to St. Mary’s Church in Berlin and her encounter with a depiction of Eve and the serpent, the project excavates the mythological and iconographic roots of patriarchy, asking how stories of guilt and disobedience came to be tools of domination. The exhibition brings together a large graphite drawing and a series of hand-embossed aluminum reliefs, bodies rippling against the metal plane. Santomé’s use of traditional methods becomes both material and metaphor, undermining inherited values while reframing them in contemporary contexts. More than just a formal exercise, her practice is a socio-political gesture, unsettling entrenched norms and opening dialogue between past and present.
Ruprecht von Kaufmann, HERBST at Haus am Lützowplatz (HaL)
For his first solo exhibition in his chosen home city in ten years, German painter Ruprecht von Kaufmann is also turning deliberately to the past to frame and illuminate the fractures of the present. Fixing Otto Dix (1891–1969) ––an artist celebrated for his brutal, anguished depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic–– as his primary reference, von Kaufmann interrogates the unsettling parallels between Germany then and now. With a doped impressionism and cool, almost sickly tonal palette, he captures a society dancing on the edge. Punks glare at passersbys with disdain; elegantly dressed hipsters walk indifferently past a homeless man. The show was conceived specifically for the exhibition spaces of HaL and consists—save for one exception—exclusively of works created since the end of 2024. One example is the work Altbau-Idylle (Old Building Idyll), which responds to a bay window in the late 19th-century building. The five panels of the work are tailored to its dimensions and placed in a semicircle in front of the windows. The illusionistically painted pictorial space also features a bay window, in which a drugged couple comatoses on a mattress.
Luiza Prado, Send Nudes (The Fall of Cyrene) at Neun Kelche
Berlin-based Brazilian artist Luiza Prado conjures a horny, thorny pixelated Tamigotchi paradise that borrows the verbal and visual vocabulary of the chronically online to speak to both collective and intimate urgencies. Her exhibition at Neun Kelche weaves together two stories: the disappearance of silphium—an ancient, heart-shaped plant used as a contraceptive and aphrodisiac, believed to have inspired the ♡ icon—and the end of a love affair. The extinction of a species and the dissolution of intimacy become inseparable, exposing the entanglements between private heartbreak and the broader histories of colonial extraction, environmental destruction, and the commodification of desire.
The bold, almost hallucinatory paintings and wall hangings, populated with burning-heart emojis and plastic beads, spiral around a bed in the project space, inviting visitors to “bed rot”—a collective surrender to escapism reframed as care—while bed linens stitch together sexts, nudes, and fragments of environmental news into a tactile cartography of survival.
Written by Millen Brown-Ewens
