Fifteen years after its founding, Berlin Art Week has become a seasonal fixture — a barometer for just how closely Berlin’s institutions, galleries, and off-spaces have grown intertwined. The most visible sign of this is the Berlin Art Week Garden, camping out at the Kulturforum for the anniversary: five days of workshops, talks, and film screenings, free and under the open sky. Next door, Perform! turns the Neue Nationalgalerie into a stage, while Ersan Mondtag and Nadim Samman swap their usual backdrop at the Berliner Ensemble for the Gemäldegalerie. Between Cranachs and Rembrandts, live performers drift through the halls like revenants, in a staging about decay and endurance.

In Mitte, Mondtag doubles down with his first solo gallery show at Dittrich & Schlechtriem. Contemporary painting at this year’s Art Week speaks in undertones that throw everyday life off balance. At Gallery Night (10.09.2026), from 18 to 22h, when around 50 Berlin galleries throw open their doors, Aubrey Levinthal hangs her interiors — women doing yoga, at the breakfast table, half-asleep — at Haverkampf Leistenschneider in Charlottenburg, alongside works by Tal R and Biala. Soy Capitán in Kreuzberg and Max Hetzler in Charlottenburg show Grace Weaver‘s angular, cubist young women scrolling, doing their makeup, driving. They’re emblems of a self-assured generation caught somewhere between burnout and boredom.

Meanwhile at Sprüth Magers in Mitte, the almost naively transfigured Italian LSD-landscapes of the Sicilian Salvo, who died in 2015, glow on the walls. A few streets over, Jeremy Shaw explores altered states of consciousness at Galerie Neu. In the Passage at Hermannplatz in Neukölln, Carsten Höller has a fly, intoxicated on mushrooms, stumble and take flight again. In Mitte, Cevdet Erek turns stadium architecture into a sound body at neugerriemschneider, Lucia Koch tests the limits of light and space at Carlier Gebauer, while Michael Sailstorfer pulls the rug out from under us entirely at Judin.

On Saturday (12.09.), Carrie Mae Weems speaks at C/O about her “Kitchen Table Series”, through which she turned the domestic lives of Black women into a political stage. From Weems’ kitchen table in Massachusetts, the Hamburger Bahnhof heads toward Japan with Ryuichi Sakamoto. The composer’s first major European retrospective comprises seven sound installations, including a piano destroyed by the tsunami that sonifies earthquake data in real time. Music originally composed for the Vatican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale rings out at the Reethaus on Rummelsburger Bucht. Curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers explain how it all came together on Sunday (13.09.).

In Kreuzberg, Rachel Seidu shows queer intimacy in Nigeria at Between Bridges, while Jeewi Lee is nominated for the Gasag Art Prize at the Berlinische Galerie with “Residual Memories”, a work about traces and loss. At Esther Schipper, David Claerbout brings time almost to a standstill, while in Kreuzberg, Theresa Reiwer opens her walk-through net utopia “Internet Explorer” at HAU3. Across 9,000 square meters, the festival Hallen 07 presents works by more than 50 artists in a decommissioned iron foundry in Reinickendorf — including Ryan Gander and Christian Jankowski.

Museum directors stand in line next to students, while collectors cycle from one opening to the next. For five days, the entire city slips into a state of exception. And that’s precisely where Berlin Art Week’s real achievement still lies, even after fifteen years. It sets people in motion who would otherwise never cross paths, and reminds us that art doesn’t only want to be looked at, but experienced together.

Text: Laura Storfner / Credits: Berliner Ensemble x Gemäldegalerie, Ersan Mondtag & Nadim Samman, Alternde Meister, Foto: Kathrin Hammer, ©Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; C/O Berlin, Carrie Mae Weems, Welcome Home, 1978-84. Courtesy the artist & Gladstone Gallery New York, Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco; Joan Jonas, Mirror Piece I & II (1969/2025), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin Art Week 2025, ©Linus Muellerschoen.