Have you really never heard of Miranda July? Maren Eggert doesn’t ring a bell? If that’s the case, you must urgently get a ticket to Der erste fiese Typ (The First Bad Man) at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. Based on the novel by American author and artist Miranda July, the play features none other than Maren Eggert (in my opinion, one of the most exciting actresses in the German film and theatre landscape). The evening, at the Deutsches Theater, unfolds as an absurdly funny and wonderfully offbeat monologue about relationships. Maren Eggert plays Cheryl, a woman in her early forties who believes she has perfectly organized her life through self-invented rules, maximum self-control, and a very active imagination. That is, until she ends up trapped by her own system. Director Sarah Kurze stages the material as a monologue, opening up Cheryl’s inner world, somewhere between comedy and melancholy. Behind the protagonist’s seemingly well-ordered surface lies emotional emptiness and a deep uncertainty about how closeness between people actually comes into being. How do we begin to let others in? Her own logic and order are everything to her. No unnecessary routes through the house, meals eaten straight from the pan, and books read directly in front of the shelf. Yet her perfectly organized life is thrown thoroughly off balance when the much younger, unapologetically unconventional Clee moves in — an encounter that challenges Cheryl’s entire way of life. Between self-defense videos, daydreams, and emotional chaos, Cheryl has to ask herself whether she may have completely misread the world – and herself. For 105 minutes, Maren Eggert moves between earnestness and laconic irony. It is gloriously quirky, at times absurd to watch, and deeply intelligent. A true acting tour de force that carries the entire evening. Chapeau! The result is a clever and funny, surprisingly tender night at the theatre about self-protection, self-determination, projections, and the moment when fantasy collides with reality.

Text: Milena Kalojanov / Photos: Jasmin Schuller

Deutsches Theater, Schumannstr.13a, 10117 Berlin–Mitte; map
Der erste fiese Typ (The First Bad Man). Find tickets for April 2026 online.

@deutschestheater

Who owns public spaces? If you ask KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the answer is unequivocal: the artist Klara Lidén. As the title of one of her earliest 2005 self-portraits declares, she holds the “Keys to the City”. In the photograph, Lidén conspiratorially opens her trench coat in a playful black-market pose. Lining the inside are bolt cutters, pliers, and wrenches — the tools with which she uses to unlock cities to this day. Equipped as such, she launched her campaign of conquest from the streets of Stockholm, New York, and Berlin into galleries and museums around the world. The urban space remains both Lidén’s stage and her material depot. Her sculptures, performances, photographs, and video works emerge directly on sidewalks, in trains, underpasses, and parks. In doing so, she disrupts the anonymity and cosmopolitan codes of conduct in big cities. By exploring urban centers out to their margins and beyond the barriers, she reveals that even in places promising the greatest freedoms, boundaries and power hierarchies persist. Thanks to KW, the city she has called home for the past twenty years is finally dedicating its first institutional solo exhibition to her. Spanning three floors, the retrospective brings together subversive works from the past two decades. Often disorienting, yet always humorous, Lidén embarks on a reclamation of urban space. Drawing on her background in architecture, she refers to this practice as “Unbuilding” — a strategy that can take many forms: at times she performs, as in “Paralyzed” from the early 2000s, a pole-dance routine for commuters on the S-Bahn. At others, she dismantles trash bins and advertising boards from pedestrian zones and reassembles them as readymades in the white cube.

Lidén’s practice borrows from the improvised street aesthetics of punk and graffiti, while casually drawing on intellectual heavyweights such as Guy Debord, Marcel Duchamp, and the Affichistes. At a time when anonymous investors are buying up inner cities and allowing them to decay into ghost blocks, she tirelessly fights for what makes metropolises truly unique and livable at their core: their open spaces. Working with found materials from public space, too, is the Congolese artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi. The trained electrician spent last autumn as an artist-in-residence at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Using discarded items from the KW’s storage and materials sourced from Berlin recycling centers, he transformed scrap into playful sculptures that have shed any trace of their original functionality. His imaginative constructions can be read as metaphors for inequality in his homeland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Translating an entire urban landscape — with all its hierarchies — into sound was the achievement of Else Marie Pade. KW dedicates a sensitive audio exhibition to the Danish composer, techno pioneer, and resistance fighter: ten of her most significant musical arrangements, alongside works on paper, introduce the Musique concrète pioneer, who passed away in 2016, to a wider public for the first time. Her “Symphonie magnétophonique” evokes 24 hours in Copenhagen through an intricate sonic tableau. If Klara Lidén is the keeper of the city’s keys, then Else Marie Pade was the guardian of its urban sound. Both shared a clear message: ultimately, urban space belongs not to the powerful, but to the people.

Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: David von Becker, Frank Sperling

KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststr.69, 10117 Berlin-Mitte; map
Klara Lidén: Kunstwerke until 10.05.2026
Jean Katambayi Mukendi: Ratio until 10.05.2026
Else Marie Pade: Partitur until 10.05.2026

@kwinstituteofcontemporaryart