This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2025 special issue of Freitag.
Ulrike Ottinger, Harun Farocki, Pier Paolo Pasolini—for decades the Neue Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) has traced a line through film history with exhibitions devoted to auteurs whose work shaped both cinema and art. Long on director Marius Babias’s wish list, an exhibition with Margarethe von Trotta has at last come to fruition. A phone call, a suitcase and a taxi ride across Berlin have turned that idea into reality: for this year’s Berlin Art Week, n.b.k. opens a comprehensive retrospective of the filmmaker.
With a career spanning five decades, Margarethe von Trotta—born in Berlin in 1942 and stateless until the nineteen-sixties—has become arguably Germany’s most internationally recognised auteur. Her films mine German history and its heroines—Hildegard of Bingen, Rosa Luxemburg, the Ensslin sisters, Hannah Arendt—to probe the porous boundaries between private life and public politics. From a feminist perspective she sustains a critical dialogue with society, history and the present, affirming, again and again, the possibility of a life lived in independent thought.
Von Trotta’s work, firmly rooted in the tradition of New German Cinema, has garnered awards and been shown internationally, particularly in France, Italy and the US. Curated by Marius Babias and Michaela Richter, the n.b.k. exhibition is the most extensive presentation of her work in Germany to date. Centring on her cinema productions, it sets excerpts from ten films alongside previously unpublished photographs, screenplay drafts and diary entries, together with posters, publications and press material that illuminate her narrative strategies. Among them are early milestones such as ›The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum‹ (1975)—co-directed with her then husband Volker Schlöndorff but uncredited on release—and ›The Second Awakening of Christa Klages‹ (1978), which marked her emancipation as a director and her decision to centre strong female characters. The show also traces her engagement with influential female thinkers and her long-standing collaborations with actresses including Angela Winkler, Jutta Lampe, Katja Riemann and Barbara Sukowa. It foregrounds von Trotta’s own trajectory of self-empowerment—beginning as a theatre actress before appearing in films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder—and, through an exhibition design by Ola Zielińska, creates space for her work to be revisited anew. It underscores how her practice has opened paths for subsequent generations of (female) artists.
Running in parallel, a film season at Babylon Kino (Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 30) screens selected works by Margarethe von Trotta, including the award-winning ›Marianne and Juliane‹ [org. ›Die bleierne Zeit‹] (1981) and ›Rosenstraße‹ (2003). In both she probes Germany’s histories of Nazi rule and RAF terrorism. Across these films she reflects again and again on how people respond to and articulate the power structures of their time.
Films about the city of Rome
Von Trotta’s retrospective is complemented in the n.b.k. Showroom by the premiere of the first essay film by Katerina Poladjan and Henning Fritsch: ›Ancora un dialogo di Roma‹, referencing Marguerite Duras’s 1982 film ›Il dialogo di Roma‹. Duras’s ›Roman Dialogue‹ unfolds as a camera journey through the city, accompanied by an off-screen exchange between a man and a woman: a couple. Urban landscapes, waterways and landmarks such as the Palazzo Farnese are mirrored by their voices. Commissioned in early nineteen-eighties Italy alongside other women directors such as Susan Sontag, Duras used her film to critique both the image of ancient imperialism and the city’s entrenched cult of masculinity.
Writer Katerina Poladjan (born 1971 in Moscow) and director/author Henning Fritsch (born 1972 in Kassel) reframe Duras’s template with their own narrative. Drawing on their joint residency at the Villa Massimo in Rome, they retrace Poladjan’s childhood paths through the Italian capital she once called home. Filmed on a mobile phone, the work captures images from the suburb of Ostia and layers them with an associative voice reflecting on personal experiences linked to »own« and »foreign« places, creating an intimate dialogue between word and image.
This theme of locating the self, so central to von Trotta’s work, finds a contemporary expression in Poladjan and Fritsch’s film, which addresses migration and otherness with quiet precision. Poladjan’s feminist voice also runs through her recent novels—›Zukunftsmusik‹ (2022), tracing four generations of women in a Soviet kommunalka in 1985 (soon to be adapted at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater in 2026), and the newly published ›Goldstrand‹, winner of the 2025 Großer Preis des Deutschen Literaturfonds.
Language in public space
For several years, n.b.k. has extended its exhibition practice into public space. The façade—redesigned annually by a different artist—now features ›they filled me up with words‹ by Nora Turato: six panels above the Kunstverein’s windows carrying text images by the Zagreb-born performance artist (1991). Drawn from her own handwriting and rooted in her ›pool‹ series, these works originate in collections of found texts and language fragments that Turato compiles annually into »reports«—textual reservoirs that underpin her wider practice, especially her performances. In ›pool 7‹ she turned for the first time to her own words and a performance reflecting on her »language consumption« and its relation to the body. Turato, who appeared at Berlin Art Week 2023 with an exhibition at Sprüth Magers, highlights the social dynamics embedded in language and questions how it shapes and conditions the body. Her façade work, curated by Lidiya Anastasova, will be accompanied by performances on selected dates.
The n.b.k. Billboard at the junction of Friedrichstraße and Torstraße—also curated by Lidiya Anastasova—hosts a new contribution by Patti Smith and Stephan Crasneanscki. The musician and poet Smith (born 1964 in Chicago) and the sound artist Crasneanscki (born 1969 in Grenoble) sustain an ongoing dialogue in their joint project ›CORRESPONDENCES‹, with Crasneanscki’s field recordings forming the ground for Smith’s poems. On the Billboard they present an audiovisual work from this series, referencing both the Jean-Luc Godard film archive and the anarchist thinker Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin. Patti Smith’s poems ›Cry of the Lost‹ and ›Prince of Anarchy‹ are available as audio recordings via QR code. Her voice confronts the collage spread across the Billboard, inscribing itself into Berlin’s urban fabric.
With this finely balanced programme, n.b.k. stages a quiet coup, allowing the question of how we speak to one another to resonate across media and generations.
›Margarethe von Trotta‹, n.b.k.,
11 SEP—9 NOV 2025
›Katerina Poladjan, Henning Fritsch: Ancora un dialogo di Roma‹, n.b.k. Showroom, 11 SEP—9 NOV 2025
›Nora Turato: they filled me up with words‹, n.b.k. Fassade, 11 SEP 2025 —31 AUG 2026
›Stephan Crasneanscki, Patti Smith: Cry of the Lost | Prince of Anarchy‹,
n.b.k. Billboard, 11 SEP 2025 —22 FEB 2026