This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2026 special issue of Freitag.
»Governments change and states hover,« Pfeifenmann thinks as he looks out of the train window on his journey from the shtetl of Disna, in what is now Belarus, to Berlin. That was in the early nineteen-twenties. A century later, on 6 September 2026, the election in Saxony-Anhalt could produce a government intent on unhinging the very state that sought to learn the lessons of the Weimar era and what followed. While the protagonist of Moyshe Kulbak’s cycle of poems travels from the East towards the promise of the West—to a Germany »where electricity runs in wires, and champagne in people’s veins«—views of the East in Germany today remain divided. How ideas of geographical, cultural and political places change over time also emerges in this year’s Berlin Art Week programme. Several art institutions are turning their gaze towards the »East«.
While many of these exhibitions lie within Berlin’s S-Bahn ring, station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf draws visitors out to the large housing estate beyond the »invisible city walls«, as Jochen Becker calls them. As part of a working group of the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), he develops discursive and artistic programmes at this satellite location of the art association, whose main base is in Berlin-Mitte. The exhibition ›The Architects, or How to Exhibit Failed Hopes‹ takes Peter Kahane’s feature film ›Die Architekten‹ (1989/1990) as its starting point. The film follows an architect in his late thirties who, together with a collective of like-minded colleagues, receives a commission to design the ideal centre for a large Berlin housing estate. Gradually, their hopes for a thriving communal life of restaurants, playgrounds, and cultural venues fall apart—undermined by intervention from above, but also by the growing disillusionment of a bohemian milieu of the post-war generation once driven by a spirit of new beginnings. Taking Kahane’s film as its point of departure, the nGbK in Hellersdorf returns, as Becker puts it, to the »birth pangs« of its own district at a time when the GDR was »bleeding dry«.
Speaking by phone in late July, Becker tells me that the team is gathering materials to create spaces in public locations around Hellersdorf where they can explore the conflicts depicted in the film. In one scene, the architects sit opposite a grey-haired man. »The depiction of stress cannot be the concern of committed socialist artists,« he snaps at them, rejecting designs for sculptures depicting exhausted workers and strained nuclear families. Sculptor Rolf Biebl, who now lives in Hellersdorf, played a minor role in the film, which also features his work. Shortly after reunification, he created just such an unheroic nuclear family outside the town hall, in defiance of the dictates of state-controlled art. One of the stations in the exhibition, which extends across several public sites, will respond to this work.
Hellersdorf is a district where many people still remember life in the GDR first-hand. Becker explains that, taking the film and its sense of »a failed hope« as their starting point, he and the other participants want to make conflicting experiences of life in the GDR visible against the historical backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The accompanying programme of discussions and events therefore brings together people socialised in East and West Germany, critics of the GDR and those who enjoyed living there, as well as newer Hellersdorf residents for whom the history of the two Germanys may initially feel remote. Becker calls this a »togetherness in contradiction«. In doing so, they also hope to counter romanticised narratives that, in his view, are instrumentalised by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Two poles of the art scene
The exhibition ›Projections Onto the East‹ likewise resists any single narrative. That becomes apparent in its choice of not one but two venues: visitors move between the Schinkel Pavillon, a GDR building constructed in 1969 near Museum Island, and the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) on Chausseestraße, founded in West Berlin that same year. In the group exhibition they have curated, artists Fabian Bechtle and Leon Kahane critically examine how different projections of the East have emerged. At its heart lies the relationship between attribution and reality—for instance, the notion that identity in the »East« is somehow more »original« and unmediated, and the question of how this idea relates to historical and contemporary conflicts. The exhibition text states its aim explicitly: to examine an »idealized ›East‹ as a cultural Other to a hegemonic ›West‹.«
Through a wide range of historical and contemporary artistic positions, Bechtle and Kahane want to examine how images of the »East« take shape in art—and how art, in turn, can transform them. Even before we meet, Kahane stresses the exhibition’s artistic focus when we speak by phone. The exhibition forms part of a larger project of the same name, which includes not only a programme of events but also a publication. In it, artists, scholars and writers engage with memory politics, antisemitism and the transformations that followed the end of the Eastern Bloc—also in light of current geopolitical tensions.
I meet Kahane at the SIM Café, in the heart of Berlin’s Kulturforum beside the Tiergarten. During Germany’s division, the Kulturforum developed into the main site of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, while Museum Island, with its historic museums, lay in East Berlin. The two venues across which Bechtle and Kahane have divided their exhibition likewise represent different poles of Berlin’s art scene. At the Schinkel Pavillon, contemporary art’s cool kids rub shoulders. At the n.b.k., the emphasis falls on its own series of discussions on positions in art theory. Kahane doesn’t see the two venues as rivals, however. Instead, he says, the point is to understand places through their relationship to one another.
At the n.b.k., an early short film by Hito Steyerl, ›Land des Lächelns‹ (1996), follows the artist as she visits a former border between West Berlin and the GDR with a handheld camera. Years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the two communities ceremonially re-enact their reunification. Above their heads hangs a string of sunny yellow letters: »Zehlendorf greets Kleinmachnow«. The re-enactment not only stages their coming together again as a ritual, but also reveals how the former border continued to make itself felt in the years after reunification.
Photographs by Helmar Lerski are on view at the Schinkel Pavillon. Half a century separates Lerski’s photographs from Steyerl’s work, yet both resist seemingly straightforward attributions of identity and history. Born in Strasbourg in Alsace in 1871 to Polish-Jewish emigrants, Lerski developed an unmistakable visual style during the Weimar Republic, characterised by dramatic close-ups and expressive contrasts of light. While the technical precision and wealth of detail in his photographs suggest a clear view of their subjects, the perspective and extreme proximity make both the people portrayed and their surroundings difficult to pin down. His photographic project ›Arabs and Jews‹, which he began in Palestine in the early nineteen-thirties, ultimately undermines the idea of identity as something clearly defined. Lerski’s photographs, along with two of his films to be screened at Delphi Lux on 7 October as part of the extended exhibition programme, envision social utopias and hopeful images of new beginnings. The question, then, is how his photographs and films resonate in the face of new traumas, social polarisation and contemporary conflicts over memory.
At the SIM Café, curator Kahane tells me that, in his view, an increasingly romanticised image of the »East« has taken hold in major international art exhibitions, characterised by anti-Western essentialism and self-victimisation. One of the discussions accompanying the exhibition turns a critical eye on Western projections onto the »East«. Titled ›Projections from the West? Art, Antifascism, Autonomy, and the Wohlfahrtsausschüsse‹, it includes Isabelle Graw, co-founder of the art magazine ›Texte zur Kunst‹, among its participants. In the early nineteen-nineties, she belonged to a group of cultural practitioners, writers and journalists campaigning for anti-racist politics. Against the backdrop of the racist violence of the early nineteen-nineties, the so-called Wohlfahrtsausschüsse, as these antifascist initiatives called themselves, organised a series of discussions and lectures in Rostock, Leipzig and Dresden under the title ›Etwas Besseres als die Nation‹ (Something Better than the Nation). In doing so, they also drew criticism from the East German left. The effort to examine one’s own role in the relationship between East and West—and the difficulty of doing so without reproducing the same oppositions—has a history of its own.
Pioneer of media art
The two exhibitions at the n.b.k. and the Schinkel Pavillon bring together contemporary works, new commissions and historical pieces by artists from Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova, Romania and Germany. Among them is Gabriele Stötzer, who understood her move out of the »artistic underground of the GDR« and into the public sphere as »protection from isolation and repression«, as the publication accompanying her current solo exhibition ›Dabei sein und nicht schweigen‹ (Showing up and Not Remaining Silent) at Berlin’s Gropius Bau puts it. At the Schinkel Pavillon, her works encounter Lerski’s photographs alongside other historical and contemporary experiences of an »East« whose supposedly clear-cut cultural codes Bechtle and Kahane call into question.
While ›Projections Onto the East‹ brings together several familiar voices from Berlin’s art scene, Kunstverein Ost (KVOST) brings Izabella Gustowska to Berlin, a pioneer of Polish media art whose work has so far received little attention in Germany—despite »an oeuvre so vast it could fill an exhibition at Gropius Bau«, as curator Monika Branicka puts it. Born in Poland in 1948, the »grand dame of new media«, as Branicka calls her, taught generations of Polish film and media artists as a professor at the Academy in Poznań, while her work has entered the collections of national museums across the country. »The woman is an institution in her own right,« Branicka exclaims indignantly.
›Home’s Shadows‹, opening at KVOST as part of Berlin Art Week’s ›Featured‹ section, offers something of a glimpse into Gustowska’s feminist-inflected oeuvre and its distinctive, dreamlike visual language. Here, Gustowska takes her family home in Poznań, which has belonged to the family since 1938, as the starting point for her exploration of personal and cultural memory. Her work revolves around the search for one’s own identity through encounters with others, moving between different media in the process. It is as though she wants both to acknowledge the boundaries of photography, film, spatial installation and performance and, through her fluid movement between them, repeatedly cross those boundaries. Perhaps this is also why Gustowska’s works invite us to move beyond entrenched ideas about others and about ourselves.
Visitors to KVOST will likewise find it difficult to escape the gaze of others that Gustowska has exposed herself to in her work for years. Eight pairs of eyes bore into the viewer. In its blurred black and white, the photographic work ›The Dinner Party‹ (2026) looks like a relic from the past. Its oval format recalls historic family photographs. The young girls sit close together, solemn-faced, around a round table holding several bowls. Propped against one of the vessels is a postcard depicting a flower, recalling the floral forms in Judy Chicago’s installation of the same name from 1979. The all-female gathering around the table can likewise be read as an echo of Chicago’s feminist reinterpretation of traditional Last Supper iconography. Chicago’s work pays tribute to significant women in history; Gustowska’s reference connects the girls from her childhood in Poland with those women. By placing the girls at the centre of a backlit lightbox, Gustowska gives them a presence that seems to outlast time and extend into the exhibition space. In Gustowska’s work with memory in particular, identity emerges not as a national or cultural essence, but as something continually formed through our relationships with others.
The artistic positions in the three exhibitions challenge clear-cut images and narratives of the past, memory and the present. Kulbak, too, sought a form for the contradictory reality of his own time that resisted easy categorisation. For his chronicle of Berlin in the nineteen-twenties, he chose a lyrical language in which the city’s initial promise gradually flakes away. As his alter ego Pfeifenmann observes the social and political events unfolding around him, he slowly wakes from his dream. By the end, little remains of Berlin as a place of longing: »we, the last of wolves that bay / in the ruins of the system«.