Guided Tour

Pessimism of the Model, Optimism of the Street

We gather at Bar Internationale for lunch and an introduction (1pm), before setting out on a 10-hour-arc that reaches from Berlin’s Mitte district through Charlottenburg to Kreuzberg, and comes full circle in Schöneberg. To engage so intensely with this Gallery Night is to deconstruct a model: the repetitiveness of openings, profit staged as inevitability. To walk it together is to encounter the street’s interruptions, where gestures challenge conformity and claim their own rhythm.

We begin in Mitte, where the model feels most codified, and where it immediately meets its mirror. Andrea Fraser at Nagel Draxler turns the institution into the subject. Matti Braun at BQ threads quiet materials into expansive, cross-cultural worlds. Daniel Hölzl at Dittrich & Schlechtriem exposes the armature of the display itself. At neugerriemschneider Thilo Heinzmann, Michel Majerus and Ho Tzu Nyen move from gesture to archive to cinematic myth. Ulrike Theusner and Allistair Walter at Eigen+Art push figuration to the limits of intensity. Louis Fratino at Neu stages intimacy as insistence. Andrea Zittel at Sprüth Magers moulds life into a workable place, sketching the system’s promise and its exclusions.

Next, we cross into Wedding, a district marked by both displacement and reinvention: Mischa Leinkauf at Alexander Levy intervenes in the city’s flows, along with André Masson at Levy Galerie, where psychic terrains redraw national maps. Arhun Aksakal at Ebenspergersplices narrative and rupture.

In Charlottenburg, scale and canon carry weight but remain contested. New in town, long in the biz: We visit the show for Galerie Max Mayer's very first Berlin opening with Ei Arakawa, who turns performance into a volatile grammar of relation. A group show at Société multiplies the present. Katharina Grosse and Grace Weaver at Max Hetzler saturate surface and stance. Robert Colescott and Christelle Oyiri at Buchholz pit satire against memory-work. Julia Irlinger and Dan Walsh at Thomas Schulte stretch abstraction into spatial grammar. Thomas Zipp and Carrie Mae Weems at Barbara Thumm bind psychiatry, race, and history in a charged dialogue. Tanja Wagnerconvenes a group show centring care as method and resistance as form.

In Kreuzberg, the street’s optimism remains audible: a group show at Heidi as fleeting chorus; Jesse Darling at Molitor with precarious infrastructures; Adam Pendleton at Pace voicing subtle poetics; and Monsieur Zohore at KOW turning humor into leverage. We make a break at ChertLüdde for shows outside of the official Berlin Art Week programme with Tyra Tingleff and Sandra Paulson. We land in the works of  Pieter Schoolwerth at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidlerwhere figuration fractures the system and its residues, and Carolyn Lazard at Trautwein Herleth where she reframes what may be considered shared resources.

Through these passages, three urgencies recur: Displacement through speculation; the invisibility of labour; the struggle over ownership—of space, memory, and the future.

Dates

Thu, 11 SEP, 1—11pm