As the city quieted down after a tumultuous Berlin Art Week, a victorious shriek tore through the Berlin night outside the Späti. The week had us running from Florentina Holzinger's ETERNITY at Kino International to Ersan Mondtag at the Neue Nationalgalerie, and back to Watergate (RIP), now Silencio, for Cattelan's party. Die Linke had finally won Berlin, and at least three project spaces opened a bottle they'd been saving for their next funding approval. For anyone whose social circle runs from Wedding to Neukölln via a Kreuzberg studio, Die Linke has been winning every election for years. It just took the rest of the city a while to catch up with our Instagram stories. Now for the real question: will the cultural budget come back along with our dreams, or do we keep making art out of cardboard and spite? Until we find out, here are this week's openings, where the wine is still free and the politics have always been left.

Thu, 24 Sep 18:30 at Haus am Lützowplatz
"ON AI": Lecture by Ornella Fieres (in German)
A language model looks at a 19th-century photograph of a mountain landscape and says it "seems" to capture the majesty of nature. That word "seems" is the question of the evening. The AI has the image in front of it but can only guess at what it shows, based on probabilities from its training data. Fieres' video work of the same name comes out of a chain of AI translations. One model describes analogue family and nature photographs, and a second turns those descriptions into moving images. In her talk she asks how something purely artificial perceives something natural. She also draws a line from Romantic landscape painting and its cult of the sublime to contemporary work that brings AI and nature together.
Ornella Fieres is a Berlin-based media artist and scholar. Her work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, among others. She is doing a PhD on AI at HfG Offenbach and teaches digital theory at UdK Berlin.
Haus am Lützowplatz
Lützowplatz 9
10785 Berlin

Fri, 25 Sep 19:30 at Axel Obiger – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Cut Outs & Conversations – Conversation No. 4 with Dr. Birgit Kulmer
The fourth conversation is with Dr. Birgit Kulmer, director of Galerie Parrotta Contemporary in Cologne and Bonn. Cut Outs & Conversations puts the work of Hans-Peter Stark and Susa Templin in dialogue through a shared practice of cutting, layering and superimposing images. [add the rest of the listing text]
Axel Obiger – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Brunnenstr. 29
10119 Berlin

Sat, 26 Sep 19:30 at Axel Obiger – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Finissage and Reading: Cut Outs & Conversations
To close the show, poet Tobias Falberg reads from his work. The evening also launches the publication Wir singen das Wort Kerosin, a selection of image-text poems made with Hans-Peter Stark since 2010. [check listing for more details]
Axel Obiger – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Brunnenstr. 29
10119 Berlin

COMING UP

Thu, 1 Oct 18:00 at Sexauer Gallery
Kerim Seiler: Der Titel kommt zuletzt (Titles come last) – Oktoberfest
Toast the season in the middle of Kerim Seiler's show. The exhibition brings together three major works. Tschutschu is a room-filling installation on the floor. The neon piece Spaceknot (News) hangs from the ceiling like an intricate drawing in space. On the wall is a grid of around a hundred framed ink drawings.
More special events: Piano Recital on 14 Oct, 7pm and a performance by Kerim Seiler on 31 Oct, 2–6pm.
Sexauer Gallery 
Streustr. 90
13086 Berlin

Fri, 2 Oct 19:00–22:00 at Axel Obiger – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Opening: SUPERSOFTSKILLS
with Liz Dawson, Christoph Esser, Jan Holthoff, Matthias Moravek, Enrico Niemann, Colin Penno, Maja Rohwetter, Joel Roters
If soft skills describe how an artist works, SUPERSOFTSKILLS makes that "how" visible. That includes the decisions, detours and points of resistance in the material. The show gathers skills that resist conventional assessment yet turn out to be decisive. Among them are holding observation to the point of instability, rerouting existing systems, treating detours as method and leaving contradictions unresolved. Across eight practices, forms emerge from processes that resist quick interpretation.
On view 3 Oct – 31 Oct 2026
Axel Obiger – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Brunnenstr. 29
10119 Berlin

ON VIEW

Charlotte Bastian & Gonzalo Reyes Araos: The Unstable Horizon @SCOTTY
The horizon has long been our fixed point of orientation, the line that lets us place ourselves in space and tell the sky from the earth. In an age of screens, acceleration and a radically changing environment, that line has come loose. The Unstable Horizon brings together two artists who look at what happens to perception once that anchor is gone. [add a line on each artist's work]
until 3 Oct 2026
SCOTTY
Oranienstr. 46
10969 Berlin

Kerim Seiler: Der Titel kommt zuletzt (Titles come last) @Sexauer Gallery
An installation, a neon drawing in space and around a hundred framed ink drawings. Special events: Oktoberfest on 1 Oct, 6pm; Piano Recital on 14 Oct, 7pm; Performance on 31 Oct, 2–6pm.
until 31 Oct 2026
Sexauer Gallery 
Streustr. 90
13086 Berlin

© Ersan Mondtag, courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, Berlin, Photo: CHOREO

Ersan Mondtag works at the intersection of visual art, theater, opera, and film. His practice fuses sculpture, installation and performance art, and space in a unified visual language. At its center stands the body as a vessel of recollection. Life events become imprinted upon materials as well as on gestures, postures, and architectural spaces. Navigating between personal history and collective memory, Mondtag’s works examine how social relations take solid form in bodies, objects, and landscapes.

Concurrently with Dispair, Mondtag presents Alternde Meister, a performance developed in collaboration with Nadim Samman and produced in partnership with the Berliner Ensemble. As the Berlin Art Week’s opening event, the work marks the start of the program and unfolds over the course of several stagings in the rooms of the Gemäldegalerie. Conceived as a Berlin vanitas, Alternde Meister initiates a dialogue between aging bodies and paintings from past centuries. Bridging the divide between museum and theater, a living tableau of beauty, transience, and memory emerges in which past and present briefly share the same moment in time.

Ersan Mondtag gained international recognition with his contribution in the German pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia 2024. In Monument of an Unknown Man, he created an immersive space of recollection in which installation art, film, and performance scrutinized the history of labor migration through the prism of his own family’s story. The work also marked the inception of his current creative engagement with material, memory, and the body as a historical archive.

Mondtag is currently directing Ariadne auf Naxos at the Salzburg Festival. In 2027, Mondtag will open the Bayreuth Festival with a new production of Parsifal.

On view until 31 Oct 2026
Dittrich & Schlechtriem
Linienstraße 40
10178 Berlin

Follow the White Rabbit @Galerie Georg Nothelfer
with Heike Buchfelder, MK Kaehne, Gisbert Pöppler, KRH Sonderborg, Walter Stöhrer
The exhibition Follow the White Rabbit playfully brings together historical works of postwar abstraction with contemporary collectible design and installation-based works. At its core is the dialogue between the gestural painting of the Informel movement and objects that transcend functional boundaries.

until 31 Oct 2026
Galerie Georg Nothelfer
Corneliusstr. 3 10787 Berlin

Leon Kahane: Criticism and Self-Criticism in Free Time @Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

until 31 Oct 2026
Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
Linienstrasse 45
10119 Berlin

Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice: 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Berlin Edition @HKW
The 36th Bienal de São Paulo comes to Berlin in a special edition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The curatorial team includes Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Alya Sebti. Participating artists include Aline Baiana, Emeka Ogboh and Wolfgang Tillmans.
until 6 Dec 2026
HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin

On Landscape: Between Escapism and Disenchantment @Haus am Lützowplatz
with Alkan Avcıoğlu, Jessica Auer, Julius von Bismarck, Sven Drühl, Ornella Fieres, Philipp Fürhofer, Noémie Goudal, Beate Gütschow, Simone Haack, Michelle Jezierski, Friedrich Kunath, Hiroyuki Masuyama, Mike Strauch, Troika and others
This group show looks at landscape today, caught between a longing for escape and a sober reckoning with a damaged world. Ornella Fieres, one of the artists in the show, gives her "ON AI" lecture here on Thursday.
until 3 Jan 2027
Haus am Lützowplatz
Lützowplatz 9
10785 Berlin