The Helmut Newton Foundation has gutted its two-decade shrine on Jebensstraße and rebuilt it around a looping film — a bet that the twentieth century's most formidable still photographer now needs moving image to hold a room.
At KINDL, Simon Faithfull attempts to explain classification systems to a bird while Gabriella Hirst follows a lump of whale vomit through the porous boundary between animal waste and luxury commodity — two lecture performances that circle the comic futility of imposing human categories on a world that preceded them.
At Ballhaus Berlin, a venue whose walls remember a century of spectacle and suppression, The Velvet Creepers stage a queer circus that treats the Weimar lineage it claims not as costume but as continuity — passed through genocide, erasure, and the complicated freedoms of the post-reunification city.
A decade of graduate typefaces — 350 in all, from Den Haag to Buenos Aires — lands at the Kulturforum, turning the Kunstbibliothek into an unlikely monument to the quietest ambition in design: shaping the container through which all other messages travel.
At Bardo Projektraum in Friedrichshain, Marina Cyrino attaches balloons and DIY preparations to a concert flute until it sounds like a membrane tearing, while the monthly RADAЯ series quietly enters its second year of making room for sounds most programming structures won't accommodate.
Twenty-two editions in, achtung berlin remains the quiet annual census of what Berlin-Brandenburg filmmakers are actually making — and its 2026 programme, anchored by Borbála Nagy's tri-city portrait of female indecision, suggests the answer is more porous, more restless, and more specifically local than the Berlinale's global stage would ever let on.
A speculative pop-up boutique selling survival gear for mothers searching the Mexican desert for their children's bones arrives at Studio Я, turning the language of consumerism into an indictment of the global economy of disappearance.
A new queer rave series names itself after the body's most unseparated opening, daring its audience to find the room — though whether that room is in Berlin or Pittsburgh remains genuinely unresolved.
At FIND 2026, Katie Mitchell — a director who built her reputation cracking open literary texts with surgical live-camera precision — abandons language entirely for a piece about the sounds of a cow and a deer, daring the Schaubühne's most literate audience to sit with what theatre becomes when human speech is no longer the point.
At Berlin's Museum für Fotografie, 300 photographs from the Bauhaus-Archiv finally assemble the women who shaped the school's visual language — from Lucia Moholy's architecture shots misattributed for decades to the subversive commercial work of ringl+pit — into a case not for recovery, but for reckoning with how thoroughly they were written out.