This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2026 special issue of Freitag.
While Berlin Art Week celebrates its fifteenth anniversary in 2026, ›Featured‹ remains a relatively recent addition to the festival. Since 2023, the section has brought together interdisciplinary projects and special formats from Berlin’s independent scene, complementing exhibitions at galleries, museums, and private collections as well as the Positions art fair. For temporary initiatives and project spaces, ›Featured‹ promises greater visibility and a wider audience; for cross-disciplinary events, it also provides a link to the visual arts. At a time of dwindling cultural funding, economic pressure, and fierce competition for attention, that prospect has proved increasingly attractive: ninety projects applied in the first year, of which a jury selected twelve; this year, more than two hundred and fifty submissions were received for thirty ›Featured‹ slots. The programme includes many familiar names from Berlin’s project-space scene, including ACUD Galerie, Between Bridges, CCA Berlin, Passage, Kunstverein Ost (KVOST), Pickle Bar, Spoiler, Trauma, Tropez, and Scherben.
At its exhibition space on Leipziger Straße, which has been running since 2021, Scherben presents the group show ›Black, Green, Pink‹. The exhibition takes as its starting point abstract painting’s historical ambition to bring the reality of the image into the viewer’s space, asking what potential new pictorial worlds might hold under the technological and structural conditions of today’s art world. It brings together works by R. H. Quaytman, whose conceptual paintings have been exhibited internationally since the 2000s, and Frances Scholz, a fellow US-American artist of Quaytman’s generation who teaches at the Braunschweig University of Art. Also included are works by Nandi Loaf, who, following her current solo exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, will by now have appeared on the radar of more than just art-world professionals. Following a solo presentation by John Boskovich in 2024 and the group exhibition ›Lesbian Legacies‹, the project space’s founders, artists Lorenz Liebig and Tarek Kentouche, have once again put together an intergenerational exhibition of institutional calibre. Scherben has by now become an established fixture on Berlin’s art scene, with a programme that may draw on established names but often brings them together in constellations and discursive contexts sometimes absent from the better-resourced institutions where these artists otherwise exhibit.
On Friday, ›Featured Night‹ draws visitors beyond the usual art-world addresses with extended opening hours. At the Hotel Adlon Kempinski, Berlin-based artist Sunny Pudert has organised an evening of readings, performances and everything in between. The five-star hotel’s Royal Suite provides the setting for Cammisa Buerhaus, Zack Darsee, Kevin Kemter and Magdalena Mitterhofer to reflect in text on the ways urban experience inscribes itself on bodies, stories, and images. Few will have forgotten the image of Michael Jackson holding his son out of the window of this very suite in 2002. Less firmly lodged in collective memory is the fact that the Hotel Adlon served as a military hospital during the Second World War before burning down shortly after Germany’s surrender. The building that stands there today bears no trace of this history. ›Ordinary Tales of City Madness‹ may be a humorous, euphemistic nod to the fact that, for most visitors, spending a Friday evening at the Adlon will hardly count as an everyday occurrence. Beyond the chance to do just that, it will be interesting to see how the writers and performers relate the site’s eventful history to subjective experiences of the city.
Disciplines beyond the visual arts also feature prominently in this year’s ›Featured‹ selection. Film is represented by the first Kreuzberg Art Film Festival, a screening at Kino International of ›Eternity‹, Susanne Regina Meures’ film about and featuring Florentina Holzinger, and a culinary evening organised by SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA. Radio enters the mix with an open house for independent community radio stations as part of the Berlin Radio Play Festival, while theatre is represented by an Ersan Mondtag performance at the Gemäldegalerie in collaboration with the Berliner Ensemble. Çağla Ilk, the new artistic director of the Maxim Gorki Theater, begins her first season with an installation by Sarkis inside the theatre and an additional exhibition space on Platz der Märzrevolution. This year, then, ›Featured‹ brings together a cross-disciplinary programme with numerous institutional collaborations—raising the question of what role remains for the independent scene within it.
Anyone feeling worn out by the packed events calendar might want to make a note of ›Horizontal‹, an exhibition accompanied by a festival devoted to lying down on 12 and 13 September. At the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité, artists, activists and researchers explore the potential of lying down as a political practice, a trace of history, and a physical experience.