27/07/2026
Berlin Art Week 2026: The City as a Resonant Space
From 9 to 13 September 2026, Berlin Art Week celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. More than 120 museums, collections, galleries, project spaces and Positions Berlin Art Fair will transform the city into a polyphonic landscape of contemporary art. The programme already taking shape approaches memory, migration, the body, sound and social responsibility not as separate subjects, but as closely connected experiences.
At the Neue Nationalgalerie, Maurizio Cattelan presents NIGHT, his first major solo exhibition in Germany. Seminal historical works will meet new commissions conceived for the museum. Cattelan’s incisive humour, moral ambiguity and engagement with authority, identity and collective memory will enter into a direct dialogue with Mies van der Rohe’s transparent architecture.
A very different experiential space will emerge at Hamburger Bahnhof with Ryuichi Sakamoto. seeing sound, hearing time. The first major European retrospective devoted to the composer and artist brings together five large scale installations, transforming sound, time and spatial perception into an embodied encounter. It promises to be one of those rare moments in which music and visual art do not merely coexist, but genuinely merge.
At Gropius Bau, Kreuzberg: Art and Migration since 1960 turns attention towards a cultural history of Berlin that has long remained insufficiently acknowledged. More than 100 works spanning film, painting, photography, installation and performance examine how labour migration shaped the social and artistic life of Kreuzberg. At the same venue, Gabriele Stötzer’s major solo exhibition Showing Up and Not Remaining Silent presents around 150 works in which the body appears not as an object, but as a site of resistance, vulnerability and feminist self assertion.
A compelling detour leads to Torstraße, where janinebeangallery will be showing Andrea Damp’s GLIMMER throughout Berlin Art Week. Opening on 28 August, the exhibition places large scale paintings from 2015 to 2017 in dialogue with new works created in 2026, making almost a decade of artistic development visible. Damp’s layered painting holds figuration and abstraction, landscape and memory in a productive state of suspension. Precisely because these works resist immediate spectacle and reveal themselves gradually, GLIMMER promises to become one of the more enduring encounters of Berlin’s autumn art season. TIP!
The particular strength of Berlin Art Week 2026 may lie in these contrasts: monumental institutional interventions and concentrated gallery encounters, historical reassessment and sensory presence, political urgency and the quiet persistence of painting. Berlin offers no single answer. It offers something more interesting: multiple ways of seeing the present.
