ABOUT US
Berlin Art Week is a festival week and major collaboration between important institutions in the Berlin art world. Once a year, we present a diverse programme with over 100 partners ranging from museums to exhibition houses, fairs, private collections, project spaces, and numerous Berlin galleries. Our partners open their doors together and invite the public to discover something new and to immerse themselves in ongoing developments in the world of contemporary art. Art experts and art lovers from Berlin, Germany, and around the world are invited to exhibitions, performances, screenings, and an extensive festival week programme.
Berlin Art Week is a project of Kulturprojekte Berlin. It is made possible with the support of the Senate Department for Culture and Community, the Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises and the European Regional Development Fund (EFRE). It is realized with funding from Berliner Volksbank eG.
Save the date:
10—14 SEP 2025
9—13 SEP 2026
(subject to modifications)
A Week Filled With Art, Community, and Cooking
Berlin Art Week 2024 takes place under the motto of communal exchange. During the festival’s 13th edition, over 100 partners present what Berlin’s contemporary art scene has to offer. Individual artistic positions are exhibited, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pamela Rosenkranz and Yoko Ono at n.b.k., Sigmar Polke at Schinkel Pavillon, as well as a joint venture of Gisèle Vienne’s work at Haus am Waldsee, Georg Kolbe Museum, and Sophiensæle. Numerous award ceremonies honour outstanding artists and, in addition to solo shows, fascinating thematic group exhibitions are on view. An exceptional number of live performances are also taking place exclusively during Berlin Art Week.
This year, the festival centre ›BAW Garten‹ is hosted by Gropius Bau, where director Jenny Schlenzka opens her inaugural exhibition programme with Rirkrit Tiravanija. In addition to an exhibition programme which transforms Gropius Bau into a place of discourse and exchange, Berlin Art Week offers a diverse selection of events at ›BAW Garten‹, organised together with its partners from all over the city. Visitors dance in the open air, eat and discuss during Cooking Demonstrations, and end their evenings to the sounds of Berlin DJs. A temporary artistic installation by Something Fantastic brings the topic of urban development to the heart of the festival centre.
For the first time this year, visitors can visit the private spaces of Berlin-based collectors as part of ›Discovering Collections!‹. Further, twelve special projects and eight project initiatives, which form part of the section ›BAW Featured‹, take art lovers to special and undiscovered places across town. Visitors can watch performances at an abandoned department store, help to reactivate the Spree Canal at an auction, and transform into artists themselves in various workshops.
Of trees, digital art and lots of performances
As a special highlight, this year’s festival centre ›BAW Garten‹ will be a at the Neue Nationalgalerie. During the entire festival week, visitors are invited to discover an extensive programme of performances, talks, interventions, workshops and music—free of charge and in the open air. A temporary artistic installation of trees along the exhibition building in collaboration with atelier le balto puts the topic of sustainability at the heart of the festival centre. Under thematic focal points such as representation and institutional critique, AI and digitalisation in art production or artistic reflections on war, the more than 1,000 artists in the Berlin Art Week programme deal with social, political and economic movements of our present. From young individual positions such as Sally von Rosen or Anan Fries to established artists such as Mary Ellen Mark and Ai Weiwei to collaborative projects such as ›If the Berlin Wind Blows My Flag‹ by daadgalerie, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and Galerie im Körnerpark or ›The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time‹ by Schinkel Pavillon and Brücke-Museum, the various partners represent the entire spectrum of contemporary art in their programmes. Special performance programmes such as those at Neue Nationalgalerie or Haus am Waldsee, a five-day Digital Art Lab at Haus am Lützowplatz, the HAU4 digital stage at Hebbel am Ufer or a film programme on the roof of The Feuerle Collection will surprise visitors with very special events specifically for Berlin Art Week.
A week full of art—at the centre of contemporary art production
With its 11th edition, Berlin Art Week 2022 is shining a special light on its artists and the places of art production. This year’s festival centre ›BAW Garten‹ directs this special focus to the grounds of the Uferhallen in Wedding: In the midst of numerous artist studios, Berlin Art Week invites all local residents, art lovers, and those who are simply curious about art to come together, discover, and to participate in workshops, performances, and open studios. An extensive outreach programme with numerous tours across the city provides further access to the entire festival programme. Throughout the festival week, more than 1,000 artists will present young and established individual positions in museums and exhibition spaces, project rooms and art associations, from Rachel Rossin and Lu Yang to Jenna Sutela and Anna Uddenberg, performance art by Simone Forti and Leila Hekmat, group exhibitions by Tactical Tech or a three-part retrospective on Mona Hatoum. The Positions Berlin art fair at the former Tempelhof Airport, the VBKI Preis Berliner Gallerien as well as an association of more than 50 Berlin galleries across the city are setting important accents in making the Berlin art market and current artistic production in the city visible.
10th Edition of Berlin Art Week
In 2021, Berlin Art Week took place for the tenth time. To mark this jubilee year, together with over fifty partners—museums, exhibition institutions, fairs, private collections, project spaces and numerous galleries, we presented a rich programme full of exhibitions, prize award ceremonies, special programmes, and events. Special events included exhibitions by artists and performers such as Alexandra Bircken, Alicja Kwade, Katharina Sieverding, Thea Djordjadze, Shilpa Gupta, Emeka Ogboh, Bendik Giske, Judith Hopf, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Barbara Kruger, Nicholas Bussmann, Mire Lee, Su Yu Hsin, Legia Lewis, caner teker, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Elske Rosenfeld, Tony Cragg, Maxwell Alexandre, Conny Maier, Zhang Xu Zhan, and Bili Bidjocka. This year for the first time, the expanded programme of education and outreach ›Explore Berlin Art Week‹ enabled additional points of access to art, locally in neighbourhoods and all over town, inviting the public to exchange and explore. At ›BAW Garten‹, the new temporary site of outreach on the grounds of Kindl—Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, which was designed together with the artist Sol Calero, various conversations, performances, events, and workshops were held. An extensive programme of tours featured gallery tours, bike ours, and neighbourhood tours. In the digital realm, the ›Journal‹ and ›Playlist‹ accompanied the week, engaging with artists, gallerists, and curators, and explored the subject of Berlin as a city of art.
A city-wide intervention, open studios, art at Berghain and the digital space
Berlin Art Week 2020 was held despite measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic—citywide, decentralised, outdoors and also digitally. New additions included the ›Playlist‹ platform, a supplement to the festival’s digital programme started in 2020. Berlin Art Week partners joined forces to bring Hans Haacke’s ›Wir (alle) sind das Volk‹, a project first shown at documenta 14 (2017), to outdoor surfaces near and the facades of museums and exhibition venues around the city. Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, the Boros Collection brought the work of more than 100 Berlin artists to ›Studio Berlin‹, an exhibition in the legendary Berghain nightclub. Werkhof L57 in Berlin’s Moabit district—home to the studios of Katrin Sander, Anri Sala, and Katharina Grosse—featured at Berlin Art Week for the first time, as did the Ivo Wessel Collection. High points included exhibitions by Marc Bauer, Lerato Shadi, Harald Hauswald, Slavs and Tatars, Cao Fei, John Miller, Christian Jankowski, and Vivian Suter. Fairs coinciding with Berlin Art Week 2020 included Positions Berlin Art Fair and paper positions berlin—its offshoot devoted to drawing and works on paper—but also second edition of Messe in St. Agnes, an art fair held in the former nave of St. Agnes Church, now König Galerie.
Art beyond walls and artist-run spaces
Berlin Art Week 2019 celebrated the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A number of participating exhibition venues explored artistic and social developments in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1989. Artists including Mona Hatoum, Anri Sala, and Jose Dávila probed the consequences of living together in divided societies at Gropius Bau; Bettina Pousttchi explored ›City and Space‹ at Berlinische Galerie. Expanding the diverse programme were exhibitions by artists Metahaven, Tobias Dostal, Iman Issa, Anna Virnich, Thomas Scheibitz, Wu Tsang, Bjørn Melhus, Christopher Kulendrang Thomas, and Annika Kuhlmann. Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, ›Statista‹ in the vacant Haus der Statistik developed artistic prototypes for an urban society built in the spirit of the Commons—a project of the city’s less well-known, artist-run spaces and collectives. Haus der Statistik also hosted the Berlin Art Week 2019 opening, which featured a number of performances on the grounds.
Photo art and urban interventions
Highlights of Berlin Art Week 2018 included solo presentations by Agnieszka Polska, Julian Charrière, Karin Sander, Laurence Abu Hamdan, Thomas Scheibitz, and Lee Bul. Berlin Art Week 2018 cooperated with the European Month of Photography Berlin to present Opening Days, a programme of photo-focused exhibitions throughout the city. Featured photographers included Cindy Sherman, Nicholas Nixon, and Alina Simmelbauer. Berliner Festspiele debuted its ›The New Infinity‹ programme on Mariannenplatz. The continuing annual series, which explores planetariums as galleries of the future, commissions audiovisual presentations by contemporary artists and projects them on a mobile planetarium dome. Art Berlin and Positions Berlin Art Fair drew nearly 200 galleries to the airport hangars of what was once Tempelhof Airport.
Emerging artists, performances, and a new gallery prize
Performances, happenings, interventions: for three days, the ›Festival of Future Nows‹ cooperated with the Nationalgalerie and the Institut für Raumexperimente at Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart—Berlin to present works by 100 international artists. Other highlights included solo exhibitions by Monica Bonvicini, Willem de Rooij, Danny Lyon, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, Geoffrey Farmer, Daria Martin, Miet Warlop, and many more, along with a Harun Farocki retrospective at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k), and a dance performance by Boris Charmatz on the airfield of the former Tempelhof Airport. The newly-founded Art Berlin art fair debuted at the Gleisdreieckpark station. This year also saw the launch of the Landesverband Berliner Galerien (lvbg) gallery award, a prize for Berlin’s up-and-coming galleries. The winner is announced every year at Berlin Art Week.
From overcoming borders to art films
Crowd pullers of the festival’s fifth edition included a kick-off, 13-hour art and avant-garde film programme at Kino International, an event organised by the haubrok foundation in conjunction with Berlin galleries. Further high points included exhibitions by Gordon Parks at C/O Berlin, an extensive special programme of the berlin biennial, and Anne Imhof’s imposing »opera« at Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart—Berlin, for which an entire hall of the historic rail station was immersed in fog for the duration of Berlin Art Week 2016. Exhibitions and performances by Jérôme Bel, Alexandra Pirici, Jacob Appelbaum, Edmund Kuppel, Gordon Parks, Yvonne Roeb, Halil Altındere, Ian Cheng, Andreas Greiner, and others thrilled audiences. The Julia Stoschek Collection opened its Berlin branch with a group exhibition with works by artists including Jon Rafman, Wu Tsang, Hannah Black, and Hito Steyerl.
How do we want to live together in the future?
A consortium of four major exhibition venues—Berlinische Galerie, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, DB Kunsthalle, and Neue Nationalgalerie—explored questions about the city and society from various artistic perspectives with ›City/Image‹ as its topical umbrella. The Nationalgalerie commissioned artists Agnieszka Polska, Assaf Gruber, Alexandra Pirici, and others to reinvent Allan Kaprow’s Fluids series of happenings as part of the project. Other buzzed-about high points included solo exhibitions by Alicja Kwade, Paul McCarthy, René Block, and Cindy Sherman. As a partner of Berlin Art Week 2015, the international format ›Talking Galleries‹ initiated podium talks by such art market experts as Chris Dercon, Chus Martínez, and Angela Choon.
Construction and deconstruction of reality
The opening of Berlin Art Week 2014 featured numerous concerts, performances, and the exhibition ›Vertigo of Reality‹ in and around the AdK on Hanseatenweg. Artists such as Marina Abramovic, Ólafur Eliasson, Harun Farocki, Hamish Fulton, Bjørn Melhus, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Tino Sehgal contributed to numerous presentations. Preview Berlin Art Fair is becoming Positions Berlin Art Fair. Other programme highlights included a Gallery Night on Friday with a number of Berlin galleries from abc art berlin contemporary and the social sculpture ›Kitchen Monument‹ in front of Berlinische Galerie, a coproduction of the artists’ cooperatives raumlabor and Plastique Fantastique. Berlin Art Week 2014 addressed current debates on art production and the art market in the form of an international conference (ARTfi).
Central open-air festival and contemporary painting
Berlin Art Week 2013 opened with a large street party on Auguststraße in Berlin’s Mitte district. In its second year, joining programme partners from 2012 were ten other art institutions and project spaces selected by a jury consisting of Kasper König, Monica Bonvicini, and Claudia Wahjudi, and these became part of the programme in 2013, as well as the big art fairs and many galleries from Berlin and around the world. The Senate Department for Culture and Europe awarded its first prize honouring artist-run project spaces and initiatives as part of the Berlin Art Week in 2012, a tradition that continues annually to this day. A number of exhibitions in the cross-institutional cooperation ›Painting Forever!‹ explored contemporary painting; featured artists included Franz Ackermann, Martin Eder, Michael Kunze, Anselm Reyle, Antje Majewski, Katrin Plavčak, and Giovanna Sarti.
A city all about art—the first Berlin Art Week
The first edition of Berlin Art Week 2012 was a gamble, an experiment. Eleven initiating partners including the art fairs abc art berlin contemporary and Preview Berlin, as well as Akademie der Künste, Berlinische Galerie, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Nationalgalerie—Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart—Berlin and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein teamed up to celebrate a week of contemporary art the year after Art Forum was canceled. Exhibitions featured artists including Alfredo Jaar, Paul McCarthy, Douglas Gordon, Jörg Sasse, Agathe Fleury, Michael Sailstorfer, Yasam Sasmazer, Guy Ben-Ner, and Cy Twombly. Berlin Art Week pooled Berlin’s rich art programme; new services and an all-venues ticket created the first-ever, joint platform for the city’s most important art players.