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.
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 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.
A quarter of a million African soldiers helped liberate Europe from Nazi occupation, and then Europe spent eighty years writing them out of the story — Haus der Kulturen der Welt now stages a sprawling, multigenerational exhibition inside a Cold War monument to the very freedom those soldiers were denied.
Shilpa Gupta spells TRUTH in concrete across the floor of Hamburger Bahnhof and places it in conversation with the ghost of Beuys — turning a temple of postwar European genius into a field theory of who gets to speak and who gets silenced.
Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie opens the first major Brancusi retrospective in Germany in over fifty years, bringing more than 150 works and a partial reconstruction of his legendary Impasse Ronsin studio outside Paris for the first time since the artist's death.
At Rossi & Rossi in Berlin, Slavs and Tatars collapse a Chinese character for "barbarian," an Arabic pronoun, and an English interrogative into a single exhaled syllable — three scripts, one sound, and an argument that identity has always been a matter of which alphabet gets to parse the answer.
A single syllable refracted through Chinese, Arabic, and English scripts becomes Slavs and Tatars' trapdoor into identity politics at their new Berlin show — where who you are depends entirely on which alphabet you think in.
At Gropius Bau, 120 photographs by Peter Hujar meet Liz Deschenes' lens-less photograms and oxidising silver surfaces in a show that treats photography not as memorial but as an ongoing chemical event — afterimages still developing on the wall, in a building that carries its own damage in plain sight.
Berlin's longest-running photography festival returns with a motto — "what stands between us" — that lands less as curatorial framing than as an uncomfortable diagnosis of its own medium's complicity in the divisions it claims to examine.