The Best of Berlin Art Week: Reflecting on the Festival’s 15th Anniversary

It has been nearly three weeks since Berlin was turned into a living celebration of the city’s art scene, engulfed by confrontations and partnerships between curators, artists, and institutions (old and new). Amidst these, the cautious beating heart of the city remained intent on remaking what it really means to be a contemporary art hub year after year. The artistic package on offer at the crystal anniversary of Berlin Art Week also happened to imitate some of the cautious beatings of the heart of Berlin itself. This cautiousness, however, was felt far more in the careful intentions behind the curatorial choices within the festival as opposed to a desire to not push the boundaries of what was possible at Berlin Art Week, with these careful intentions resonating particularly well with central questions of homeland and identity, which loomed over the week’s exhibitions. These questions of course, arrived amidst a sense of increased cautiousness, given that Germany is currently renegotiating its political landscape, but for visitors of the press arriving in the city such questions of home and belonging began not in a particular gallery but at the threshold of wherever they would lay their heads for the week.

Berlin Art Week Garten, Neue Nationalgalerie, 2026. Image credit: Angelo Dal Bo.

The sounds of the U-Bahn slowly gave way to those of a lively city street, before the Hotel Bristol's revolving door opened onto a plush, sumptuously lit interior, which kindly played host for the week's duration. Situated in West Berlin on the famed Kurfürstendamm, the hotel has been a fixture of the boulevard since the 1950s, when it opened as one of the first grand hotels of the post-war city. Today it retains much of that old-world glamour with polished marble and warm wood panelling lining the lobby, and the rooms themselves offering a generous comfort after lengthy days filled with exhibitions. For a festival so intent on unpicking the notions of homeland and belonging, it was lucky that our home in Berlin should come in such a luxurious form.

Yet comfort of this kind only sharpened some of the questions which the festival asked of its visitors. Beyond the hotel's doors, home was rarely presented as something so easily arrived at. More often it was something lost, or contested, and nowhere was this felt more keenly than at the first stop on our journey across Berlin Art Week.

As the last of the summer sun settled over a concrete courtyard dotted with comfortable chairs and large tables, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art welcomed visitors to the Kyiv Biennial, A Bird That Cannot Land (11 May 2026 to 13 September 2026), for one of the final times. The courtyard's easy hospitality offered a neat way into an exhibition that can no longer be seen, yet, much like the setting of KW itself, its sensory and emotional impact lingered well beyond its closing date.

Mona Hatoum, Misbah, 2006-07. Kyiv Biennial - A Bird That Cannot Land, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2026. Image credit: Marc Domage.

Nomadic by design, the Kyiv Biennial has never had a fixed home, and its chapter at KW made that restlessness its subject. Spread across the entire building, the exhibition brought together more than 40 artists from Berlin and beyond, drawing connections between post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Central and Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean, a territory the curators termed "Middle-East-Europe". Rather than treating these regions in isolation, the exhibition traced their shared histories of dispute, colonialism and empire, suggesting that each new conflict reopened the wounds of those before it. Of all the shows asking what homeland means this year, KW's took the question most literally, since many of its artists come from places whose borders have been redrawn within living memory, or from places that they have had to leave behind altogether. A piece which is particularly striking in its commentary on this is located in one darkened room beneath a vaulted brick ceiling. Here, Mona Hatoum's Misbah (2006–07) turns slowly on its chain, a pierced lantern that might hang in a family home, sending stars and the blurred silhouettes of armed soldiers circling across the walls, the floor, and the visitors standing among them. What first feels like the gentle glow of a child's nightlight soon becomes something more unsettling, as conflict drifts, quite literally, through the most domestic yet empty of physical settings.

If Hatoum's lantern turns the home into a place haunted by conflict, Lucia Tallová's Moving Clouds at the PalaisPopulaire (10 September 2026 to 31 December 2026) sifts through what homes leave behind once the people and politics that shaped them have gone. It is fitting that this first institutional solo exhibition in Germany for the Bratislava-born artist has found its own home under corporate patronage, as Deutsche Bank's "Artist of the Year" for 2026. Tallová gathers her materials from flea markets, antiquarian bookshops and archives: illustrated books, magazines and photographs that once sat on shelves and in drawers, many of them carrying traces of Eastern Europe's socialist past. Cut, folded and layered, these fragments grow from collage into sculpture and, eventually, into installations visitors can step inside, as though entering a room pieced together from other people's memories. Fragments of female bodies recur throughout, merging with monuments and the architecture of cultures that no longer exist. Tallová grew up in a country whose political order disappeared within her lifetime, and her work keeps asking what such systems leave behind in ordinary lives.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Macuto, 2025. Not all travellers walk roads, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), 2026. Image credit: Cansu Kuscu.

Two further exhibitions travelled much further afield in pursuit of these same questions of home and heart with both, coincidentally, housed in buildings that grew out of Berlin's post-war ties with America. At Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hugh Stubbins's swooping former Congress Hall at the edge of the Tiergarten, the 36th Bienal de São Paulo arrives in Germany for the first time with Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice (12 September 2026 to 6 December 2026). The title comes from a poem by the Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, and the exhibition takes its cue from her suggestion that some journeys happen away from the road altogether, through listening and silence. Its guiding image is the estuary, where different waters meet, and the curators draw a line between HKW, close to the Spree, and Oscar Niemeyer's Bienal Pavilion in São Paulo's Ibirapuera Park, two modernist buildings of the same era. Across more than thirty artists, the works confront colonial inheritances and the damage done by extraction, while turning towards care for animals, plants, land and water. Home here ultimately becomes made up of sets of relationships, something practised rather than owned, and the exhibition's open invitation to wander off track and even get lost made for a welcome counterpoint to the festival's more cautious mood.

Back in the west of the city, a short walk from the Kurfürstendamm, C/O Berlin's home in the Amerika Haus hosts The Heart of the Matter (12 September 2026 to 3 February 2027), a retrospective of the American artist Carrie Mae Weems. Where the São Paulo edition roams outwards, Weems begins by looking inwards, at her own family. The early series Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84) pairs photographs of relatives with her own autobiographical writing, reflecting a sense of home in the written word and the shared memories passed down through generations. It is the Kitchen Table Series (1990), though, that remains the heart of the show. Here, Weems narrows the frame further, with Weems at the same table in picture after picture, working through love, motherhood, partnership and self-determination beneath a single hanging lamp. Never one to unhook her audience, however, Weems once again widens her lens in Leave Now! (2022), a video dedicated to her grandfather Frank Weems, where he appears almost as a ghost through the techniques of nineteenth-century stage illusion, with his translucent presence belonging just as much to the past as to the gallery itself.

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man Reading Newspaper), Kitchen Table series, 1990.  C/O Berlin, The Heart of the Matter, 2026. Image credeit: Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

Carrie Mae Weems, Leave Now! Video installation, 2022. C/O Berlin, The Heart of the Matter, 2026. Image credeit: Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

For all the weight carried by names such as Hatoum and Weems, the week also made room for an artist whose star is still very much on the rise. At the KINDL, a former brewery in Neukölln whose industrial halls once hosted Hatoum herself, London-born Kira Freije presents Between Sunlight (13 September 2026 to 21 February 2027), arriving in Berlin fresh from a place on this year's Turner Prize shortlist. Freije's life-sized figures are built from the ground up. She casts her own hands and feet in aluminium, then welds strips of metal upwards from them, much like sketching an outline in steel, before adding faces, or fragments of faces, cast from people close to her. Gathered together, the figures celebrate, grieve, guide and rest, each absorbed in their own thoughts yet seemingly dependent on the others. Where so much of Berlin Art Week provided questions pertaining to homeland and belonging, Freije offered a refreshing and hopeful answer that wherever we might belong, we should belong together with those closest to us.

The final word of the week, however, belongs to an exhibition at Galerie Thomas Schulte, available to view until the 7 November 2026, which paired two artists who, more than half a century apart, treat identity and home as a restless and ever-changing identity. At the centre of Katharina Sieverding's Life-Death is her 1969 film of the same name, made in what was then West Berlin while Sieverding was a student of Joseph Beuys and the Düsseldorf academy was being shaken by protest. Shot on 16mm and later shown at documenta 5, it unfolds as a sequence of portraits in which Sieverding and her collaborators, in heavy make-up and androgynous costume, slip between the masculine and the feminine, remaining continuously unsettled. Beneath it drifts a soundtrack improvised in a single session by the musicians of Kraftwerk, then yet to find international fame, to an almost hypnotic effect. Nearly sixty years on, the film's sense that identity and home are performed and endlessly remade really ring true to Berlin’s cautiously beating heart.

Katharina Sieverding, still from 'Life-Death', 1969. Galerie Thomas Schulte, 2026. Image credit: Katharina Sieverding, Photo by: Klaus Mettig, © VG Bild-kunst.

Kerstin Brätsch, Die Sein: Para Psychics Expanded (Excerpt), 2026. Galerie Thomas Schulte, 2026. Image credit: Cansu Kuscu.

In the gallery's Corner Space, Kerstin Brätsch's Die Sein: Para Psychics Expanded (Excerpt) carries that beating restlessness of Berlin's heart into the physical matter of the gallery itself. A vinyl floor, adapted from one of her stone mosaics, which were themselves derived from her paintings, spreads between the gallery's two window spaces, while coloured films on the tall windows alter the sunlight as it falls across it. Cardboard panels bearing her imitation-marble surfaces hover along the walls, their agate-like patterns resolving into staring eyes before dissolving back into abstraction. Much like Berlin itself, everything that appears set in stone turns out to actually be mid-transformation.

This marks a fitting note on which to leave a crystal anniversary. Across the week, home was found in luxury hotels, a turning lantern, and a kitchen table, in flea-market fragments, in estuaries, and perhaps most of all in the company of others. At its close, Sieverding and Brätsch suggested that home and identity, just like Berlin, is never quite finished. Berlin's heart may have beaten cautiously this year, but it has not stopped changing, and fifteen years on, that may well be its greatest strength.