Kirill Serebrennikov's new ten-day Berlin festival scatters opera, theatre, film, and workshops across churches, opera houses, and a multiplex at Alexanderplatz — a nomadic proposition from a director who staged work via written instructions from Russian house arrest and now dares permanence to justify itself.
Pop-Kultur enters its second decade in Berlin still occupying the strange position it carved out in 2015 — part festival, part social process, funding fifteen commissioned works nobody else would greenlight while its institutional backers count networking outcomes.
At Radialsystem this July, Heroines of Sound turns twelve years of surfacing women in electronic music toward a sharper question, tracing the Japanese diaspora's under-celebrated presence in Berlin's experimental scene through new commissions and a lineup curated by long-time resident Midori Hirano.
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.