Berlin Art Week is celebrating its fifteenth birthday this year. From September 9 to 13, 2026, the entire city will essentially transform into one giant gallery. Around 120 museums, private collections, project spaces, and galleries are taking part in the programme. Add to that the Positions Berlin Art Fair. Berlin Art Week Garten will serve as the festival’s central meeting point, jointly hosted by Neue Nationalgalerie and Gemäldegalerie at Kulturforum.
Over fifteen years, what started as a fairly modest event has grown into one of Europe’s most closely watched art festivals. This year also brought a surprisingly personal connection for us.
A Slovak Thread at the Heart of Berlin
At PalaisPopulaire, Slovak artist Lucia Tallová opens her exhibition Moving Clouds during the festival. Deutsche Bank named her its Artist of the Year 2026. Tallová was born in 1985 in Bratislava. She studied at the local Academy of Fine Arts and Design. She gained international recognition in 2022, when she took part in the Lyon Biennale. In her collages, she works with photographs from old books and magazines.
She combines these with found objects, such as furniture fragments or natural materials. Straddling painting, collage, and installation, she builds her own distinct visual language. Her work engages with themes like ecology, suppressed women’s stories, and the fragility of memory in an accelerated digital age. The exhibition opens on September 9, from 7pm to 10pm, as part of Open House, with free admission to the opening.
Berlin, Eastern Europe, and Decolonial Perspectives
Several of this year’s projects explore Berlin’s relationship to Eastern Europe. They also engage with shared, often painful histories. Gropius Bau turns to the history of migrant communities in Kreuzberg with the exhibition Kreuzberg: Kunst und Migration seit 1960. On view are works by, among others, Mehmet Aksoy and Pınar Öğrenci. Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and Schinkel Pavillon have jointly prepared the exhibition Projections onto the East. A new site-specific work by Guerrilla Girls will also appear on the façade of n.b.k.
The Bienal de São Paulo joins this thread too. The biennial was founded in 1951 and is coming to Germany for the first time. Haus der Kulturen der Welt hosts the Berlin edition, titled Not All Travellers Walk Roads, Of Humanity as Practice. Exhibiting artists include Forensic Architecture, Cevdet Erek, and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Performance and Sound as the Festival’s Defining Language
Performance becomes one of the defining elements of Berlin Art Week this year. Neue Nationalgalerie presents the fifth edition of Perform!. Alongside the historic Walking on the Wall by Trisha Brown from 1971, a new presentation by Kiani del Valle will also feature. The same institution simultaneously hosts the exhibition marking the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2026 award. It includes the work Night by Maurizio Cattelan.
Sound echoes through literally every corner of the city this year. Hamburger Bahnhof has prepared a major retrospective, Ryuichi Sakamoto, seeing sound, hearing time, dedicated to the pioneering Japanese composer. At Reethaus, curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers have prepared the sound experience The Ear is the Eye of the Soul together with Soundwalk Collective. Contributors include Brian Eno, FKA twigs, and Patti Smith.
The Art Market in Full Swing
During Gallery Night, organized in collaboration with Gallery Weekend Berlin, around fifty Berlin galleries will open their doors. On view will be, for example, Wu Tsang at Isabella Bortolozzi or Jeremy Shaw at Galerie Neu.
The festival’s largest fair remains Positions Berlin Art Fair. In the hangars of the former Tempelhof Airport, it brings together more than ninety international galleries from around twenty countries. This year, special attention falls on galleries from Turkey.
Súkromné zbierky otvárajú dvere
V rámci programu Open Houses sprístupní svoje zbierky aj niekoľko súkromných inštitúcií. Medzi nimi Boros Collection, Fluentum či Kienzle Art Foundation. Julia Stoschek Foundation zas týmto ročníkom uzatvára svoju berlínsku kapitolu, a to špeciálnym programom Closing Week.
Kompletný program festivalu nájdete na berlinartweek.de. Ak vás Berlín láka aj mimo septembra, oplatí sa sledovať aj profil Lucie Tallovej. Práve teraz totiž predstavuje slovenské umenie na jednej z najprestížnejších adries v centre mesta.
