Toshihiko Mitsuya
This month you can enjoy the fourth edition of the Berlin Art Week, held from September 15-20, 2015. There will be so much to see as national and international artists from all over the world will be presenting their works and performances. You’ll be able to visit art fairs, more than 20 regular exhibitions, project spaces and be part of various award ceremonies, gallery openings, performances, screenings, artist talks, guided tours and concerts. To give you a bit of guidance with this schedule full of events we selected our favorite and most promissing exhibitions that you shouldn’t miss!
1. ABC Art Berlin Contemporary
The art fair abc is one of the biggest institutions of the Berlin Art Week and it will have its 8th edition at Station Berlin art Gleisdreieck. What sets it appart from normal art fairs is, that is is curated as a big group exhibition. Around 100 national and international galleries will be presenting art from different countries showcasing very known artists but also the new ones. The architects from June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff are responsible for an interesting new architectural concept of the premises – defining the structure of the rooms and halls only by their corners. We are very excited!
photo: Marco Funke/Lisson Gallery | Christian Jankowski
p style=”text-align: right;”>photo: Grimmuseum | Merete Vyff Slyngborg
2. Positions
The art fair Positions, the follow-up of the Preview, moves from Kaufhaus Jandorf to a new venue in the Arena this year with much more space to show art. Positions will be presenting 76 exhibitors from 16 countries and you can see a variety of works from galleries, artists and art academies. It’s mainly focused on emerging talents. If it’s still warm outside you can visit the Badeschiff afterwards and jump directly into the pool right after your tour.
photo: Arena Berlin
photo: Edgard Berendsen
The Berliner Liste art fair is another institution that has been around for quite a long time, but they refocussed from establed to new artists in recent years. Join the fair at Kraftwerk Berlin on Köpenicker Straße and get the chance to look at the art of emerging talents from all over the world. There will be paintings, sculptures, graphics and drawings, installations, video art and performances.
photos: Berliner Liste
“Stadt/ Bild” is a collaboration between Berlinische Galerie, Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Nationalgalerie. Each of this institutions will be presenting exhibitons that are thematically related. The museum as such, its institutional structure and the work processes within will be examined as well as the social aesthetic and cultural aspects.
photo: Dialogic City
Visit the private collection of art collector Christian Boros at the former “Banana Bunker” in Mitte. The current exhibition features Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson and Wolfgang Tillmans. To be part of the guided tour normally you have to make a reservation but during the Berlin Art Week you can just drop by.
photos: Sammlung Boros
Visit the Me Collectors Room and have a look at the retrospective exhibition “Cindy Sherman: Works from the Olbricht Collection” with around 65 photographs by the artist (born 1954). Sehrman became famous in the 1970s with her black and white series Untitled Film Stills, in which she embodied clichéd female figures of the 1940s and 1950s in fictional film scenes.
photo: Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
This beautiful venue will be showing an exhibition by the artist Paul McCarthy, showing his own naked body. The premises of the Schinkel Pavillon will be redesigned in a morbid way and in the middle of the room you`ll be able to have a look at a counterpart of the artist.
photo: Fredrik Nilsen
8. C|O Berlin
There are three different exhibition at the C|O at Amerika Haus which are definitely worth a visit: “Rudi Meisel . Landsleute 1977 – 1987: Two Germanys” which focuses on Germany at the end of the 1970s, “Lives of the Unholy – Talents 34 . Krzysztof Pijarski / Annika K. Kuhlmann” and “Eyes Wide Open! 100 Years of Leica Photography”.
photo: Christer Strömholm. Nana, Place Blanche, Paris, 1961 © Christer Strömholm/Strömholm Estate, 2014
This enchanting old space in Zehlendorf exhibits the works of Alicja Kwade who takes up astrophysical and philosophical questions and reveals various structures of reality in space and time, matter and thought.
photo: Roman März
10. Projektionen
Parallel to the Berlin Art Week starting on the 11th September you can visit the exhibition “Projections” by the art association Art van Demon Berlin which will present various artists at the former silent movie theater Delphi in Weißensee. The venue is absolutely worth a visit as the location is not often open to the public. In the past the Delphi offered space for stars like Marlene Dietrich. From September 11-18, 2015, a young group of 20 international artists will show their paintings, graphics, video arts, installations and performances combining the past of the theater and the presence.
Foto: Art van Demon / Soline Krug
The exhibition “Time Capsules. By the side of the road” presents entirely new photographs by Wim Wenders. There will be images which influenced him the most – from Germany (nowadays he lives in Berlin) and America, the most important countries in his career.
photo: Courtesy Wim Wenders, Foto: Peter Lindbergh, 2015
photo: Contemplation, Denver, Colorado 1982
12. Aluminium Garden at Studio Picknick
Another very interesting exhibition: The Aluminium Garden at Studio Picknick, curated by Celina Basra. The Japanese artist Toshihiko Mitsuya and the architects of June 14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff present their installation of 180 structural studies of plants – hand-made out of aluminum foil.
Toshihiko Mitsuya
13. Arcadia Unbound at Funkhaus Nalepa Straße
Organized and curated independantly by four Berlin artists the group show Arcadia Unbound at the stunning Funkhaus Nalepastr. is going to be one of the highlights of Berlin Art Week just like the Ngoro Ngoro exhibition of a similar style at the Gallery Weekend earlier this year. More impressions in our exhibition preview.
Wolfgang Flad
14. Eveline van de Griend at Platoon Kunsthalle
The “Reincarnation of Jheronimus Bosch? – The Myths of J. Van Aken” – that’s the long and mysterious title of the new solo show of paintings by artist Eveline van de Griend that is opening at Platoon Kunsthalle on September 19th, 2015. It will be on display until September 24th.
Detail from “I will follow” by Eveline van de Griend
We’re sure there is much more to see – do you have any recommendations? We’re happy to read them in the comments below.