Initiated by gallerist Anahita Sadighi, Soft Power, as part of the Featured section of Berlin Art Week, understands art as a collective practice that can create spaces for encounter, resonance and new forms of living together. In conversation, Sadighi reflects on her understanding of community, why working collectively has become a necessity, and what has moved her most deeply during the preparations for the festival.
›Soft Power‹ centres on collective practice and togetherness. Is that something you’re seeing more of in the art world right now—or something you feel is missing? What changes are you noticing?
I am convinced that curatorial and cultural power needs to shift register—away from hierarchical, dominant structures and towards forms that create connection and creative possibility rather than control. To be honest, it’s something I still feel is missing from the art world rather than something I’m seeing widely, at least at an institutional level.
At the same time, I can feel very clearly that change is already under way, just not in the places where existing structures are putting up the greatest resistance. For me, collective practice is therefore a necessity. Bringing people together is, at its core, a form of survival. With ›Soft Power‹, I want to create a new, playful and progressive framework, explicitly from a female perspective.
We’re also seeing authoritarian and nationalist forces gaining ground around the world, while the kind of soft power traditionally used by states as an instrument of cultural diplomacy is eroding. That’s precisely why the term is worth reclaiming—not as a tool of state power, but as a collective, creative practice. For me, Berlin remains powerful precisely because of its cultural landscape and creative depth. Art and music are two hearts beating in Berlin’s chest. Strengthening them and bringing them together is one way of opening up the city’s cultural life even further. I’m interested in reactivating that potential and taking it in a new direction, towards encounter, dialogue and exchange on a larger scale. These are exactly the questions the festival asks: questions of belonging, togetherness and collective presence.
For me, the festival itself is an expression of a curious mind and an open heart because it brings so many elements together in new and unexpected ways. We want to see what happens when art, design and sound meet in different ways, while keeping that sense of curiosity and playfulness. Personally, it’s a privilege to work with extraordinary thinkers and creatives from other disciplines and other worlds. It has broadened my sense of what curating and hosting can mean.
What sustains me is the sense that we’re living through a paradigm shift in which old, often Eurocentric and patriarchal structures are losing their hold over how we understand the world. Community, empathy and collaboration are no longer idealistic concepts, but strategies for survival. And it is women and younger generations, above all, who are driving this change with remarkable clarity.
What did you learn while preparing the festival? What moved you or particularly stayed with you?
With a project this ambitious, new challenges keep coming up, but so do new synergies and possibilities. For me, that’s the magic of projects like this. I often only really got to know the people I work with by working together, seeing how they respond to the unexpected and what solutions they find, often collectively.
What moved me most was how many people were willing to get behind a new, still untested cultural format—how many colleagues and collaborators wanted to contribute, take responsibility and bring their own expertise to it. Given the current cuts to Berlin’s cultural sector, being able to develop the ›Soft Power Festival‹, which began as a Berlin Art Week special project in 2025, into a fully-fledged festival this year is by no means something we can take for granted. I see it all the more as a collective achievement, carried by everyone who believed that this space needed to exist.
When you meet challenges with openness, they often lead to the most surprising and creative solutions. That’s something I’ve felt particularly strongly this year: seeing how an ambitious undertaking can ultimately grow into something generous and many-voiced.
And this period of preparation will always have a very special, deeply personal meaning for me: while working on the project, I found out I was pregnant. On the one hand, an enormous cultural project; on the other, a new life, a new chapter in my own life. I became very conscious of that parallel. It brought home to me once again just how much creative power women are capable of—how much we can carry, create and bring into the world at the same time.
What was particularly important to you when planning the festival?
Trust develops over years, not through a single exhibition. That’s especially true of the women artists I’ve worked with for a long time—through previous exhibitions, through music, through projects that have deepened over time. I was able to bring some of these long-standing relationships into this new, experimental format. At the same time, with a project of this scale, it was important to invite new artists too, women I came to know through María Inés Plaza Lazo or during my research for ›Soft Power‹. I think that’s precisely what made so many people open to taking part: ›Soft Power‹ isn’t a conventional exhibition format, but something we create together.
María Inés Plaza Lazo and I selected the artists in response to questions that run throughout the exhibition, such as: How does meaning change when it travels across distance? ›Soft Power‹ brings together around forty women artists working across contemporary art, performance and culinary practices. We see soft power as something that isn’t limited to states, but can also be exercised by individuals and communities across borders. The exhibition follows a choreography that María Inés and I developed together, unfolding across nine chapters—Arriving, Coming Together, Listening, Remembering, Imagining, Ritualising, Resonating, Celebrating, Becoming—with the artists in each chapter brought together around a shared question. The space follows the same logic: the works don’t sit alongside one another simply to illustrate a theme, but form a thread for visitors to follow.
Equally important to me was finding a balance between the exhibition, music and talks programmes, opening up an experiential horizon we haven’t encountered in this form before. Art and music needed to meet on equal terms, rather than one merely complementing the other. That connection extends into the space itself: architecture studio Gonzalez Haase AAS developed a shared spatial concept for the exhibition, talks and music programme that responds to the historic warehouse at Haus der Visionäre. Everything is connected.
»Community« has unfortunately become something of a marketing buzzword in recent years. What does genuine community and a real sense of togetherness mean to you? How do you nurture and sustain a community?
For me, community means responsibility above all. Perhaps love, in a deep and responsible sense, is the only formula for genuine change: cultivating love, learning it, multiplying it. I want to work and live with people who create light and offer alternatives, grounded in empathy, justice and connection. Ultimately, that’s our task as people working in culture: to question power, take responsibility and create spaces where solidarity and compassion can become social action.
That can’t be nurtured in a single moment; it takes repetition and time. You can see this in the very structure of ›Soft Power‹: the nine chapters don’t end with »Celebrating«, but with »Becoming«. For me, community isn’t a state you reach and then hold on to, but a process that has to be renewed again and again.
What are your hopes for the festival? What would you like visitors to experience and take away with them?
I hope visitors take away something of the power that comes when art, music, people and thoughtful, mutually respectful dialogue come together in a safe space—hence the name of the festival. It’s about the creative act itself. We want to place love at the centre, not as a feeling, but as a practice that creates a healing space that stays with you.
Perhaps more than anything, I hope visitors leave with the suspicion that the quietest forces can sometimes be the most effective. For me, that’s the real task of curating: not to generate agreement, but to leave behind a question that continues to work on you long after you’ve left the space.
We live in a time marked by fear, fragmentation and exhaustion, partly as a result of global shifts in power. Political, economic and media forces often work more subtly today, but no less powerfully than overt forms of violence or control. What matters isn’t how quietly a force works, but whether it connects or manipulates. That makes it all the more important to counter manipulation with something else: dialogue, education and compassion. In this sense, ›Soft Power‹ is a plea for connection rather than division, for listening rather than loudness, for transformation rather than stagnation—an invitation to rethink the quiet forces of culture.