Berlin Art Week 2026: a citywide celebration of contemporary art, sound and performance

Berlin Art Week returns from September 9th to 13th, 2026 for its 15th anniversary, with a citywide programme spanning around 120 museums, galleries, private collections, project spaces and Positions Berlin Art Fair. This year’s edition examines shared histories, migration, ecological and geopolitical concerns, and Berlin’s evolving relationship with Eastern Europe and beyond.

Berlin Art Week turns the city into an open exhibition

Across Berlin, Berlin Art Week Garten at the Neue Nationalgalerie and Gemäldegalerie at Kulturforum form the festival’s main meeting point. Alongside major institutions, independent and grassroots spaces take a prominent role, with the Featured section highlighting around 30 jury-selected projects.

Historical memory and present-day politics run through the programme. Gropius Bau explores migrant histories in Kreuzberg with Kreuzberg: Kunst und Migration seit 1960, while n.b.k. and Schinkel Pavillon collaborate on Projections onto the East. At Akademie der Künste, Metaxy: Between Destruction and Reconstruction examines the uncertain territory between devastation and rebuilding shaped by war and crisis.

The first German edition of the Bienal de São Paulo at Haus der Kulturen der Welt features artists including Forensic Architecture, Cevdet Erek, Leiko Ikemura, Emeka Ogboh and Wolfgang Tillmans in Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice.

Berlin art events move between performance, theatre and sound

Performance is a defining strand of this year’s Berlin art events. Neue Nationalgalerie hosts the fifth edition of Perform!, pairing Trisha Brown’s Walking on the Wall (1971) with a new work by Kiani del Valle. KW Institute for Contemporary Art features Farahnaz Hatam and Colin Hacklander’s Labour: Soft Thought, while Between Bridges presents caner teker’s b2b / nothing new, with performances by Space Afrika, Rayne, Emil Ertl and Martin Hansen.

The programme also crosses into theatre. Berliner Ensemble joins Gemäldegalerie for Ersan Mondtag and Nadim Samman’s Alternde Meister, while HAU Hebbel am Ufer hosts premieres by Sophia Süßmilch and Theresa Reiwer. At Gorki, a new wall on Platz der Märzrevolution becomes a public exhibition and performance site, marking Çağla Ilk’s arrival as artistic director.

Sound travels through museums, galleries and public spaces. Hamburger Bahnhof hosts Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound, hearing time, a major retrospective of the Japanese composer. At Reethaus, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers curate The Ear is the Eye of the Soul with Soundwalk Collective, featuring Brian Eno, FKA twigs, Patti Smith and Kali Malone.

The Berlin Art Fair and a new generation of galleries

Positions Berlin Art Fair anchors the commercial programme, opening at Berlin-Tempelhof Airport on September 10th. The fair brings German and international galleries into dialogue, pairing established names with emerging artists, while Gallery Night extends the programme through openings across the city.

Among the gallery highlights, Galerie Molitor presents Acacia Bloom, the first German solo exhibition by Georgian artist Nika Kutateladze. Opening on September 10th, the show draws on his five-year engagement with a depopulated mountain village threatened by an advancing landslide. His paintings turn portraits of its remaining inhabitants into fractured, spectral figures, while recurring jackals introduce an instinctive, unsettling vision of human nature.

A former architecture student, Kutateladze moved from sculpture and installation into painting, working in oil on board and repeatedly adding and stripping away layers. His faces appear to erode from within, making the painted surface itself part of the story.

Five days of exhibitions, encounters and discoveries

Over five days, Berlin Art Week links major museums with galleries, artist-run spaces, performance venues and temporary projects. Contemporary art, architecture, film, theatre, music and social history intersect throughout the programme, reflecting a city where established culture and experimental practice continually collide.

For its 15th anniversary, Berlin Art Week offers a constellation of perspectives connecting the city’s history with its uncertain future and Berlin’s local scene with artistic conversations extending far beyond Germany.