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.
Seven poets of exile read across four rooms inside Berlin's Documentation Centre for Displacement, and the audience is asked to do what the literature describes — move, choose a direction, and piece together meaning without a fixed seat.
At EVA Berlin 2026, buried among the usual talk of deep learning curation and blockchain metadata, the most radical item on the agenda is the quietest: the idea that a doctor might prescribe a museum visit the way they'd prescribe statins.
Andrei Plakhov, one of the few critics alive who has watched the Berlinale recalibrate across every major political era since the Cold War, sits down to read the 76th edition as a single, complex text — and the room he's reading from has changed as much as the festival itself.
Dance makes Berlin, dance empowers Berlin, but Berlin keeps forgetting to pay its dancers — the second edition of Dance macht Berlin at Akademie der Künste puts freelance artists, archivists and a sitting senator in the same room to talk about who really funds the city's contemporary choreography scene, and whether the budget will ever match the rhetoric.
Catherine Opie steps inside Mies van der Rohe's glass pavilion to talk about three decades of photographing who America allows to be seen — and who it doesn't — at a moment when those questions feel less like art history and more like a live wire.
A 33-year-old painter from Luxembourg gave a lecture in Pasadena in 2000, narrating his own logic over flickering projections — two years before a plane crash killed him. On 21 February, that recording screens publicly for the first time at Michel Majerus Estate in Berlin, followed by a live virtual response from Stephen Prina, the teacher who was in the room when it happened, speaking across a quarter-century of hindsight and a satellite link from Los Angeles.
Max Richter picks up the Berlinale Camera at Haus der Berliner Festspiele on 18 February, and the evening promises to sit in the tension between a billion streams and the single held note that made you forget you were watching a screen.
Monira Al Qadiri was eight when Kuwait's oil fields burned black enough to see from space — now she returns to that sky in a lecture performance at Berlinische Galerie, turning petroleum's seductive shimmer into a slow, precise reckoning with everything it built and broke.