This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2026 special issue of Freitag.
At the heart of São Paulo, Brazil, Ibirapuera Park stretches out like a green lung, modelled on an English landscape garden. Within it stands Oscar Niemeyer’s industrial pavilion, built in 1951 and home to the São Paulo Biennial since 1957. At the centre of Berlin lies the Tiergarten, another English landscape garden, and within it the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), built as a congress hall in 1957 and used as an exhibition venue since 1989.
On one of those hot summer days in early August, I meet Alya Sebti in a cool conference room inside HKW’s boldly curving building. Sebti, who co-curated last year’s São Paulo Biennial with HKW director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and a team of curators, tells me that the two buildings have one thing in common: neither was designed as an exhibition space. »It’s freeing to think in a space that is not designed as an exhibition space,« she says, »but it comes with a lot of challenges. Bonaventure and the rest of the curatorial team at HKW have thought about ways of showing work that isn’t in the classical canon.« This means breaking free from the modernist convention of the white cube, where works are meant to stand in isolation. At HKW, where straight walls are in short supply, there is little choice anyway. »The building informed the curation,« Sebti says, »as well as what happens around it: the park, the river.«
Courtains like the course of a river
Sebti sees many echoes between São Paulo and this site in Berlin. »I am speaking about geography and topography: the pavilion for the São Paulo Biennial shares the modernist architecture, the curves, the presence, and dominance of modernist architecture. We had to play—or dance—with that.« The surroundings suggest further parallels. »The scenography for both venues is inspired by a river; the Spree here, the Córrego Sapateiro there—a river which is now invisibly, covered by a layer of the city.« Curtains will wind through the exhibition like the course of a river, with visitors free from any prescribed linear route. Niemeyer’s pavilion in São Paulo is considerably larger than HKW: there was room for works by more than one hundred and twenty artists; in Berlin, there will be thirty.
Since 2011, the Brazilian biennial has sent parts of each exhibition onwards as itinerâncias, or travelling editions. This time, they will reach fifteen locations, with the exhibition having already stopped in several Brazilian cities. Berlin, however, is a special case—not only because the curatorial team is mostly based here, but also because many of the works have been created specifically for the city. Rather than simply bringing the Biennial to Berlin, the team is creating a new version of it. Precious Okoyomon’s installation, with its sprawling trees, would have been impossible to transport, for instance, even though it is emblematic for this Biennial: its themes include humanity’s relationship with nature, but also the exploitation of resources and the violence behind it. Many of the artists share a desire to connect with nature. One of them is Berlin-based Emeka Ogboh, whose installation ›Mourning Earth Lament‹ from São Paulo will be adapted for HKW. Sound always plays a part in Ogboh’s work: in an enclosed space among tree trunks, women sing an a cappella lament for the earth. The strong smell of burnt soil forms part of the installation too—a physical sensation that follows you back outside. This work needs time, Sebti assures me.
The curator repeatedly speaks of a dance with the given: the encounter between art and spaces never designed to exhibit it. But beneath lies another question—how to approach modernism. The Berlin institution has been grappling with it for decades. A crudely reductive critique of the canon, exhibition practices and twentieth-century art history might simply dismiss modernism in the broadest sense: too many male geniuses populate the Eurocentric narrative of art history. At HKW, by contrast, modernism has long been understood in the plural, with particular attention to its hidden tributaries.
One of these tributaries runs through the exhibition in the paintings of Mohamed Melehi, a member of the Casablanca School, which sought new approaches to making art. The Casablanca School is not entirely new to HKW: Farid Belkahia, who headed the art school in Casablanca from the early nineteen-sixties, featured in chief curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s inaugural exhibition, ›O Quilombismo‹, in 2023. The aim, Sebti says, is to bring such practices into conversation across borders—for instance, the Moroccan painters with Brazilian artist Maria Auxiliadora. Auxiliadora, who also featured in ›O Quilombismo‹, was often associated with so-called »naive art«. That classification, Sebti argues, also needs to be questioned: shouldn’t the artist, who died in 1974, instead have a place in the canon of a multifaceted modernism?
There are numerous connections to ›O Quilombismo‹. That exhibition set topics that would guide HKW’s future programme: from then on, communal life and its entanglement with artistic practice have taken centre stage, driven by an almost utopian political ambition. The title leads back to Brazil and the quilombos, the name once given to settlements founded by people who had escaped slavery. In HKW’s definition, quilombismo describes forms of solidarity and communal life. Tanka Fonta—born in Cameroon and based in Berlin—also took part in that exhibition and returns for this one. His large-scale frieze can already be seen in the HKW foyer. Across it, letter-like signs gradually dissolve, like a comment on the building’s dynamic architecture. Fonta is not only a painter but also a poet and musicologist; perhaps that explains why the symbols recall systems of musical notation. An even larger banner will be suspended from the building’s façade—on that August day, its individual sections are already spread out across the exhibition hall, as he works on them.
The exhibition title, ›Not All Travellers Walk Roads‹, is a line from ›Da calma e do silêncio‹ by Maria da Conceição Evaristo de Brito, a poem about calm and silence. The text suggests meditation and perhaps immersion, qualities the exhibition’s meandering architecture aims to evoke, with no labels to distract from the artworks. »In the foyer, there will be the sense of togetherness in an installation by Laila Hida,« Sebti says. A film by the Casablanca-born artist forms its centre, surrounded by rugs and cushions as well as a tent. »In São Paulo, people would lay down or dream there, and we want visitors here to be able to forget the frenzied pace of time.« Visitors will encounter a sound work by Cevdet Erek on entering, its rhythm responding to the architecture of HKW. The next line of Evaristo’s poem reads: »There are submerged worlds / that only the silence / of poetry penetrates.«
In their concept for the Biennial, the curators ask what it might mean to think of humanity as a verb: as a practice at a time that demands action. Critics of the exhibition in São Paulo took issue with its political caution. When Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung stated that the exhibition was not about migration, democracy or its failure, Chris McCormack wrote in ›e-flux Criticism‹ that this position bordered on the reactionary. The Berlin instalment includes artists with a fairly explicit political agenda, among them photographer Wolfgang Tillmans with a new film and Forensic Architecture with a video installation. In it, the collective examines the looting of cultural artefacts by colonial powers in West Africa and its long-term consequences.
The São Paulo Biennial ranks among the world’s oldest large-scale exhibitions. Biennials are often understood as surveys of contemporary culture, from the Venice Biennale to the itinerant Manifesta. Yet in recent years, a certain fatigue has also spread throughout the art world: there are too many large-scale exhibitions, the argument goes; they are too ambitious and fail to fulfil their political promises. Perhaps, then, an exhibition that travels onwards in fragments and mutations, adapting itself to many different places in order to reach a broad audience, offers exactly the right approach. »The daily commitment to humanity, a daily practice, something non-static or individualistic, not a noun but a verb is not only specific to the Biennial,« Sebti adds. »It is very present in the DNA of HKW.«