Featured Events in Berlin in 2024 (June Updated)

The Berlinische Galerie has devoted over 1000 square metres to presenting its collection. Waiting to be discovered among the roughly 250 works on show are paintings, prints, photographs, architecture and archive materials rarely or never displayed before. Walking around this exhibition is like time travel and takes visitors through Berlin in 17 chapters: the Kaiser's era, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship, the new beginnings after 1945, Cold War in the divided city, and the counter-cultures and unconventional lifestyles that evolved in East and West under the shadow of the Wall. In East Berlin, an alternative art community developed from the late 1970s. In West Berlin from the late 1970s, aggressive art by the “Neue Wilden” placed the divided city back in the international limelight.

Already 2,000 years ago, the emperors of China had portraits of loyal officials and generals made in order to display them in their palaces. This presentation features depictions of meritorious officers that the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736–1795) had commissioned for their display in the hall of fame Ziguangge to demonstrate his power and legitimacy. In the 20th century they became spoils of war not one but two times. Located adjacent to the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Ziguangge is a two-storey pavilion. During the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736 – 1795), the building was a venue for military rituals and banquets and housed paintings with battle scenes of the imperial military campaigns and portraits of meritorious officers.

The exhibition examines the transformative potential of public art and explores the methods and motivations behind such works, as well as their social impact.

Basketry is a cultural technique that is thousands of years old, practised worldwide, regionally distinctive and still a handicraft in the truest sense of the word. Humans alone have mastered the complex weaving method, with no machine capable of replacing their artisanship. The exhibition focuses on this fascinating skill and reveals the interconnections between historically evolved knowledge and modern innovations. The exhibition’s four sections – People, Protection, Material and Patterns – offer visitors the chance to discover numerous woven everyday objects from across Europe stemming from the Museum Europäischer Kulture (MEK, Museum of European Cultures) collection. A walk-in sculptural installation by artist Olaf Holzapfel and other international contemporary art and design works using various weaving techniques offer additional perspectives on the artisanal tradition.

The exhibition is aimed at gamers of all ages, but also at visitors who have little experience with computer games. The fact that computer games have developed into a leading medium is no longer a daring thesis. The social and aesthetic significance of the interactive and multimedia medium can no longer be overlooked. The computer game has freed itself from its origins as a laboratory experiment and toy and has become "the" medium of digital society, somewhere between pop culture, entertainment and art. With the opening of the exhibition »The World of Games« in the fall of 1997, the ZKM was one of the first art institutions worldwide to give video game culture a permanent public platform in an art context. Since then, the ZKM has repeatedly reshaped the presentation of games in a series of different exhibitions.

The Fourth Plinth is renowned across the globe for bringing world-class contemporary art to London's most prominent historical public square and Antelope is the 14th commission since the programme of artworks began in 1998. Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Samson Kambalu's bronze resin sculpture restages a photograph of Baptist preacher and pan-Africanist John Chilembwe and European missionary John Chorley, taken in 1914 in Nyasayland (now Malawi) at the opening of Chilembwe's new Baptist church. Chilembwe is wearing a hat, defying the colonial rule that forbade Africans from wearing hats in front of white people, and is almost twice the size of Chorley. By increasing his scale, the artist is elevating Chilembwe and his story, revealing the hidden narratives of underrepresented peoples in the history of the British Empire in Africa, and beyond. John Chilembwe was a Baptist pastor and educator who led an uprising in 1915 against British colonial rule in Nyasaland triggered by the mistreatment of refugees from Mozambique and the conscription to fight German troops during WWI. He was killed and his church destroyed by the colonial police. Though his rebellion was ultimately unsuccessful, Malawi, which gained independence in 1964, celebrates John Chilembwe Day on January 15th and the uprising is viewed as the beginning of the Malawi independence struggle. The artist, Samson Kambalu, was born in 1975 in Malawi, and now lives and works in Oxford where he is Associate Professor of Fine Art and a lifelong fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford University. His sculpture, which was made in Deptford, was selected by the Fourth Plinth Commission Group, chaired by Ekow Eshun, following an exhibition at the National Gallery where nearly 17,500 people commented on the selection. For over two decades, The Fourth Plinth has showcased the work of great artists who have not shied away from tackling the important issues of the day. Yinka Shonibare CBE considered the legacy of British colonialism in Nelson's Ship in a Bottle. Katharina Fritsch commented on gender equality and the masculine posturing in the square with her work Hahn/Cock. Michael Rakowitz's recreation of the Lamassu, a winged bull and protective deity that was destroyed in Nineveh (near modern day Mosul) in 2015 shone a light on the devastating impact of war on cultural heritage, and Heather Phillipson's THE END presented a giant swirl of whipped cream, a cherry, a fly and a drone that transmits a live feed of Trafalgar Square, suggesting both exuberance and unease and responding to Trafalgar Square as a site of celebration and protest. Antelope will be on the Fourth Plinth until September 2024 and is a highlight of the inaugural Sculpture Week London, a new initiative that will celebrate public art throughout London in a collaboration between Frieze, Sculpture in the City and the Mayor of London's Fourth Plinth Programme. The Fourth Plinth is funded by the Mayor of London, Arts Council England and Bloomberg Philanthropies. It features on Bloomberg Connects, the free app that allows users to access over 100 museums, galleries, and cultural spaces around the world anytime, anywhere. Through the Fourth Plinth guide, users can access a range of exclusive content, including a video of Kambalu discussing the Fourth Plinth installation and his practice more broadly, information on past commissions and a welcome from Justine Simons OBE, London's Deputy Mayor for Culture and Creative Industries. Samson Kambalu said: “I am thrilled to have been invited to create a work for London's most iconic public space, and to see John Chilembwe's story elevated. Antelope on the Fourth Plinth was ever going to be a litmus test for how much I belong to British society as an African and a cosmopolitan. Chilembwe selected himself for the Fourth Plinth, as though he waited for this moment. He died in an uprising but ends up victorious.”

More than 15 installations, sculptures and interventions have been set up in and around the Hamburger Bahnhof since it opened as a museum of contemporary art in 1996. These include Dan Flavin's striking blue and green light installation on the façade of the main building as well as works by Tom Fecht, Urs Fischer, John Knight and Gregor Schneider. Some of the works are more visible than others. The Endless Exhibition enables visitors to explore the artworks and to reflect on their relevance for the collection today – through public tours, a dedicated publication and website. Each year the Endless Exhibition will be expanded by a newly commissioned work of art that is to be permanently acquired for the collection of the Nationalgalerie. Berlin-based artist Judith Hopf, whose installation and sculptural work deals with social definitions and power relations, will kick off this important expansion of the collection.

The Hamburger Bahnhof presents a multi-layered panorama of Berlin's art scene and the city itself, spanning from the threshold of the opening of the Berlin Wall through to the present. With the new presentation of the collection in the west wing, the Hamburger Bahnhof invites the public to reflect on the role of art and cultural institutions in fostering inclusion, engagement and social transformation. Some 80 artworks, including paintings, works on paper, sculptures, photographs and videos, explore the sociopolitical and economic factors that have shaped the city and the artistic practices to have emerged from within it. Sibylle Bergemann, Rainer Fetting, Isa Genzken, Mona Hatoum, Emeka Ogboh, Anri Sala, Selma Selman, Isaac Chong Wai and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt are among the 60 artists included in the display. For the first time, the Nationalgalerie's contemporary art holdings will enter into a long-term exchange with the art collection of the German Federal Government and the collection of the ifa – Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations. The exhibition will be further enriched by a selection of significant new acqui-sitions. Familiar major works will be shown alongside others that have rarely, if ever, been shown before.

The exhibition, Unbound: Performance as Rupture,addresses how over generations artists have used their bodies and the performative action recorded by the camera to intervene in and refuse dominant ideological orders and the colonial gaze perpetuated by the camera. Setting collection works in dialogue with loans, Unbound brings together seminal videos, films, and photographs from the 1970s to today that through performance afford various forms of rupture, fracture, and pause, which resonate on aesthetic as well as social and political levels. In addition to performance documentation and performance-for-the-camera, the exhibited artworks offer investigations into contemporary image and performance economies that examine how bodies move across or evade physical and digital spaces. With works by Panteha Abareshi, Eleanor Antin, Salim Bayri, Nao Bustamante, Matt Calderwood, Peter Campus, Patty Chang, Julien Creuzet, Vaginal Davis, Ufuoma Essi, VALIE EXPORT, Shuruq Harb, Sanja Iveković, Stanya Kahn, Tarek Lakhrissi, Klara Lidén, Senga Nengudi, Lydia Ourahmane, Christelle Oyiri, P. Staff, Sondra Perry, Howardena Pindell, Pope.L, mandla & Graham Clayton-Chance, Katharina Sieverding, Akeem Smith, Gwenn Thomas.

In her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations, the British artist Emma Talbot (* 1969 in Stourbridge, lives in London and Italy) explores existential questions. For the 20-metre-high Kesselhaus at the KINDL, she is developing a site-specific installation consisting of paintings on silk, sculptural ensembles, and hanging objects, in which archaic voices are brought back to life: Furies, sirens, oracles, witches, and spirits warn of the environmental and political disasters of our present. They tell a story of toxicity and healing and point to alternatives that make a positive future conceivable.