Founded by a group of the city’s gallerists 18 years ago, Gallery Weekend Berlin became a game-changing alternative to art fairs in the then-collector-less German capital. Ever since, the late-April timeslot has been a fixed date on collectors and curators’ calendars as galleries and institutions align their programming to host openings, launch new artist representations, and inaugurate new locations – not to mention the endless parties and dinners.

Indeed, there’s a certain tradition among Berlin galleries to reinvent, reclaim, and redraw the city’s art zones and open new spaces in ever-sprawling districts. This year, Galeria Plan B has relocated to a new venue in an imposing tower in former East Berlin with a show of new paintings by Adrian Ghenie (who also co-initiated the gallery in Cluj in 2005). And across town, in the heart of former West Berlin, the Istanbul- and Berlin-based Zilberman Gallery is opening its second Berlin outpost in what was once the storied Hotel Bogota, which shut its doors in 2013 after 110 years of operation. Here are seven additional shows not to be missed during this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin.

Samuel Hindolo, ‘Guest room’
Galerie Buchholz
April 28 – June 17

Titled ‘Guest room’, Samuel Hindolo’s debut show with Galerie Buchholz also marks the painter’s first solo exhibition in the German capital. A newly-minted resident of Brussels and Berlin, by way of New York City, Hindolo creates atmospheric figurative paintings. The show includes the new work 4:02 (2023), a moody diptych depicting figures in pilot gear communicating on historical military field telephones, while a mystical figure appears in a distant, purple-hued landscape. Hindolo’s enigmatic, sometimes cinematic, canvases have caught the attention of critics and collectors: his debut solo show at Brooklyn’s 15 Orient in 2020 was picked up by critic Hilton Als for The New Yorker, and high-profile art advisors, such as Gardy St. Fleur, have their eyes set on this young artist’s work.

Hiwa K, ‘Like a Good, Good, Good Boy’
KOW
April 28 – July 1

With this exhibition, the multidisciplinary Kurdish-Iraqi artist Hiwa K unveils Like A Good, Good, Good Boy (2023), a three-part video installation shot in his native city of Sulaymaniyah. In it, he weaves together personal stories and political realities to address ongoing crises by connecting three portentous locations across the city: the ruin of his childhood home, his old school, and the notorious prison where Saddam Hussein’s henchmen inflicted atrocities on an entire generation between 1979 and 1991. But the work also looks at the time that followed Hussein’s fall. Hiwa K and some of his former classmates gather on the school’s rooftop where they reveal, in a challenging conversation, the devastating effect that neoliberal free market ideologies have had on their Kurdish identities and the repression of Kurdish culture.

Hito Steyerl, ‘Contemporary Cave Art’
Esther Schipper
April 28 – May 25

Hito Steyerl’s first solo exhibition with Esther Schipper will also be her first major show in Germany since documenta 15: Held once every five years, the exhibition made news last summer when a painting was discovered to contain anti-Semitic imagery, causing a controversy large enough that Steyerl decided to remove her work, Animal Spirits (2022). Now, in Berlin, she will show an iteration of that same work adapted to the gallery space. 

Having established herself as a sharp and discerning thinker on the societal impacts of technology, digitization, and its lagging regulation, Animal Spirits captures the post-lockdowns zeitgeist through a film, a live computer-generated animation, and spatial installations. The all-encompassing darkened environment is an essayistic reverie through Keynesian economy to DAOs, fermentation, NFTs, and cheesemaking. Completing the presentation are stalactite-like glass orbs with LED growth lamps, soil, and plants – as well as sensors that measure visitors’ proximity to the orbs, which in turn activate the animation. 

‘In Defense of Symbolic Value’
Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße
April 27 – June 10

This group show, curated by Isabelle Graw, publisher of Texte zur Kunst and author of books about such elusive topics as the value accrual of an artwork or transactional friendships in the art world, responds to recent structural changes in the art market. Primarily, having observed the process of what she terms ‘resortization’, whereby galleries open outposts in the resorts where their wealthiest clients vacation, Graw laments the disappearance of a critical public sphere in which art attains its symbolic value. Works by uncontested carriers of value, symbolically and otherwise, such as Jutta Koether, Valentina Liernur, Kerry James Marshall, Albert Oehlen, Adam Pendleton, Avery Singer, and Rosemarie Trockel, drive home her point – soundtracked by an audio work by Cologne-based electronic musician Jens-Uwe Beyer.

Sophie Reinhold, ‘Träum Weiter’
Galerie Nordenhake
April 28 – July 1

Following gallery shows in Vienna, Zurich, and Paris, the Berlin-based rising star Sophie Reinhold’s first solo exhibition with Galerie Nordenhake, titled ‘Träum Weiter’ (‘dream on’), features a series of works that take their cue from the dichotomy between real life and its simulation. Reinhold prepares her canvases with powdered graphite, bitumen, and ground marble, which lends them sculptural heft and sanded-down slickness. In this show, she doubles down on the sense of density with a yet-untitled architectural installation purposely arranged to obfuscate visitors’ view of the paintings. Meanwhile, her painting’s bas relief-like iconography melds mythology and pop-cultural references, grabbing from the plethora of sources imprinted on our collective consciousness. The work Die Allegorie von Amor und Psyche (2022) shows a tender moment between the mythological lovers set against a background of red-and-white swirl, playfully evoking the beloved condiment combo of ketchup and mayo that goes on German fries. 

Cao Fei, ‘Duotopia’
Sprüth Magers
April 28 – August 19

For ‘Duotopia’, Sprüth Magers is dedicating its entire space to Cao Fei, a vanguard of time-based art that speculatively engages with technology and the future. The expansive show presents several works for the first time outside of her native China, including the videos Duotopia (2022), which captures the inaugural architectural structure that the artist created within the metaverse, and Meta-mentary (2022), in which people from all walks of life share their thoughts on the metaverse and its possibilities. The latter is installed next to vitrines with ephemera from Cao Fei’s first virtual-reality construction, RMB City (2007–11), and her first avatar, China Tracy, underlining her ongoing engagement with the crossover between the physical and virtual realms. Three new films on view also reveal an unexpected and more personal side of the artist, relating to her closest family and friends’ experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and capturing their uncertainty, grief, and thirst for human connection. 

Alexandra Bircken, ‘Musterung’
BQ
April 29 – July 1

For her seventh show with BQ since 2004, Alexandra Bircken exhibits a new series of textile works and sculptures made of deconstructed and reproposed ready-mades. A centerpiece of sorts, Nachts sind alle Katzen grau (2023), is a sculptural work formed out of a car’s cable harness and draped on the wall, interwoven with some strands of hair. Like a tapestry made of wires and fuse connectors, the piece evokes an automated nervous system, or a circulatory system without a heart. Elsewhere, Bircken’s textile wall work Rags & Bones 2 (2023) features repeating patterns of tanks, guns, and missiles woven in alarm-code red and black. With this work in mind, the serene blue, green, taupe, and black squares of Rags & Bones 1 (2023) suddenly appear like landscapes seen from a bomber flying above. War is all around us. 

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Hili Perlson is a writer and editor based in Berlin and Palermo. 

Published on April 26, 2023.

Caption for full-bleed image: Hiwa K, View From Above (video still), 2017. Courtesy of Hiwa K, Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani (Milan) and KOW (Berlin). A dark filter was applied over the image for readability.