With the advent of standout autumnal weather patterns in Berlin, the city’s urban climate acquires a new dimension: there is an unnoticed sibilant noise coming from the crowded cafes situated in Mitte, in the shadow of the Fernsehturm, as well as from the numerous artistic studios nestled in the old industrial sprawl. Berliner Kunstwoche is an annual event that brings the entire art world to Berlin in its full splendor. Foremost, the editor highlights that in 2024, there will be a selection of exhibitions that will be very critical and very diverse, where the audience will be able to “move” from reflective historical contexts to daring and very timely practices. The gazes that will follow each of these major ten shows to see in Berlin this year will suffice to inform one about the organization and practice of the city’s art.
Appearing for the first time in 2012, Berlin Art Week has established itself as the leading contemporary art festival in Germany that happens annually. It aimed to increase interaction between public institutions and private galleries in Berlin to promote the city’s new and unconventional art.
Berlin is known to have been an important centre of arts, having experienced the highest art activity during the years around the fall of the Berlin Wall, when artists from all over the globe joined the art scene in the inexpensive city and its bohemian spirit. Taking advantage of this magnificent artistic backdrop, Berlin Art Week assembles museums, art fairs, markets, galleries, and project spaces to provide a complete picture of novelty abroad and well-known artists.
This implies the aspect of the event that is partnerships with key stakeholders, especially such as the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlinische Galerie, and others. However, Berlin Art Week also includes business and commercial events like Art Berlin, which took over Art Forum in 2018, and experimental events in the name of ABC.
The event has now grown in the inclusion of not just shows but performance, installations, talks, and panel discussions in its programming, which shows the city’s appetite for cross-disciplinary relationships. It consolidates Berlin’s character as a canvas of artistic expression and innovation, bringing attention to artworks that are serious with regards to political issues and social concerns.
By 2024, the successful development of Berlin Art Week is undeniable and sheds new light on the city as an emerging capital of new art and ideas. This tradition seamlessly connects the city’s radical heritage, contained within its avant-garde daring, to the ambitious and audacious future. According to the event’s schedule this year, it runs from September 11 to 15, 2024, with over 100 partners, including galleries, museums, projects, spaces, and so on. Here are 10 exhibitions that top our bucket list:
1. Mark Bradford – “Keep Walking” at Hamburger Bahnhof
Mark Bradford’s work has long been a dialogue between abstraction and social activism. His artistic process, which often incorporates scavenged materials like billboards and merchant signs, reflects his connection to the urban environment and his keen sensitivity to social struggles, particularly around race, gender, and economic inequality. In Keep Walking, Bradford brings his massive, textured compositions to the reopened Rieckhallen, exploring themes of community, disenfranchisement, and survival. The title itself serves as a metaphor for resilience amidst systemic oppression—a continuation of Bradford’s ongoing exploration of the struggles that define the urban experience
2. Tschabalala Self – “Family Matters” at Gropius Bau
What cannot be said about Tschabalala Self, the finest textile worker, painter, and maker so well-known for her pieces aimed at appropriating and uplifting Black culture, in which especially the Black woman is in focus? The figurative narrative mosaics come alive with the inclusion of fabric interfacing designs, paint, and figures so as to attack and create the bastion of self-defence against stereotypes. Surrounded at the Gropius Bau tackles the idea of the domestic space as both safe and troubled, where issues of race and community can be examined in banal everyday situations. Her artworks included in this exhibition provoke the questions of how the family structure is both the problem structure and an outcome of the family social and political environment.
3. Hito Steyerl – “This is Not a Drill” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art
“By To The River’s End: Context Overload” is considered a reconstruction in progress in the rhythm of archives. This is distinguished from other art-market-centred production models because it exposes real power relations that adopt the same features as those inscribed through ideological understandings of technology. There have been lengthy studies on Moser H.’s cover authorship. This is Not a Drill continues her examination of AI and digital technologies in terms of reverberating the systems‘ constructs—where have all the neutral narratives gone? This is a compliment to Steyerl in every sense of the term, because understanding and struggling against ‘Unphotographable Evil’ is the main task of every civilisation.
4. Cao Fei – “Future Factory” at Schinkel Pavillon
It is this clash and friction of our contemporary life in its digitalised complexity that she has captured in her artwork. Fei, who is at the forefront of contemporary Chinese artists, explores the effects of globalization and technology on work, culture, and people’s sense of self. Her video works and virtual reality spaces are often dystopian, but they also have humor and surrealism. Future Factory is no exception, allowing the Schinkel Pavillon to be transformed into a utopian space where physical and digital realities intersect. The exhibition raises questions about the evolution of work and the processes of its automation, as well as the influence of AI on human relations, which provokes fascination, fear, and anxiety about the future prospects of technology evolution.
5. Adrian Piper – “The Space of Memory” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Adrian Piper’s conceptual works have opened people’s eyes to deep-seated issues of race, identity, and memory politics in our individual and societal histories. As an artist and a philosopher, Piper’s works stimulate the creation of internal processes for the viewers concerning prejudice and the institutions supporting exclusion and forgetfulness. At the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, The Space of Memory is bracing to be largely evaluative, making use of videos, texts and space to examine the democratisation of collective memory. Art by Piper also acknowledges that personal accounts and the occurrences in history are not to be taken at face value, especially on that of postcolonialism.
6. Anne Imhof – “Youth in Revolt” at Neue Nationalgalerie
Anne Imhof’s performances correspond as much to psychological dramas as to spectacles, often contesting or in fact displacing the boundaries of performance art and installation. This immersive form reached its golden age with the 2017 staging of Faust, for which Anne Imhof received the Golden Lion. The aesthetics of her work are tension, alienation and control. In Youth in Revolt at the Neue Nationalgalerie, she appears poised to carry on with her triangulation of power relations and structures, subcultures, focused on youth and rebellion. Imhof’s work is encased in the structural void of the gallery’s glass and steel, opening and shutting. It provides a zone of control, surveillance, and emotional tension where bodies negotiate space in an act of resistance and compliance at the same time.
7. Wolfgang Tillmans – “Matter of Time” at Sprüth Magers
Wolfgang Tillmans is a photographer who has always remained liminal, working in portraiture, abstraction, and social documenting. He stands out in the way that he manages to encapsulate the transient, the personal and the temporal. Matter of Time looks back at death, time and the fragility of being, all of which are themes that have defined Tillman’s explorations from the very start. In this show, photography is combined with sound and illustrating motion to create a meditative space where the transience of existence is the focus. He recounts the monumental as well as the trivial events, where each and every portrayal addresses the concept of humanity through Matter of Time as a philosophy about life and death interrelation.
8. Isa Genzken – “The Social Fabric” at Berlinische Galerie
Isa Genzken’s works, be it sculptures or architectural projects, are over the top and provocative. Her creations attack society’s fetish for goods in an all-consuming urban context in a way that borders on insanity but is laser smart in its structure. The Social Fabric at Berlinische Galerie addresses the relationship between architecture and social matters by using materials such as concrete, glass, and other common objects to explore how public and intimate spaces are made and lived in. Her works’ coherence of beauty and destruction makes this exhibition so wordy about the world we live in.
9. Gajin Fujita – “Blessings and Curses of This World” at Buchmann Galerie
Gajin Fujita’s artwork fuses the Japanese traditional ukiyo-e woodblock print style with contemporary Los Angeles street art, thus establishing a diverse cross-cultural synthesis. He draws on his own multicultural background and argues about issues such as cultural identification, ethnicity, and tradition in a transnational world. Blessings and Curses of This World does this in elaborate paintings that have gold leaf, graffiti and other elements in bright colours, looking at the pros and cons of being ulticultural, more so of domestic origins. His artifacts portray cross-cultural phenomena in a positive light while addressing the sensitive issues associated with preserving one’s culture in a fast-paced world.
10. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley – “THE SOUL STATION” at LAS Art Foundation
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a British artist working in a domain that involves the archiving of Black trans experiences, particularly through and in relation to digital media as well as interactive video gaming. Her work implicates the audience in questioning the ethics of representation and the view of oppressed identities in art and culture. In THE SOUL STATION, interactive gaming elements are complemented with something organic interacting with space and installations, thus making it possible for people to not only look but also be involved in the making of ethical and political choices. Brathwaite-Shirley’s works also raise important questions about who gets to record histories and for what purposes, as well as how such areas as cyberspace are capable of dealing with resistance and commemoration.
Such artists encourage us to experience and explore at once highly topical issues, social, political, and cultural, making the Berlin Art Week 2024 a pivotal event for all who care about art’s future. Each exhibition promises not only aesthetic beauty but also the tackling of relevant topics concerning the modern world, such as the introduction and development of AI and the inconsiderate and selective history writing. This line-up adds to the already existing narrative of Berlin’s status as a centre for radical artistic practice and international discourses.
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