Ten highlights from Berlin Art Week 2026
A vast & layered city like Berlin can be hard to
navigate for the cultural visitor, with institutions, non-profits, and
commercial galleries scattered widely. Thankfully, each year the city organises
Berlin Art Week with over 100 organisations opening for exhibitions, events,
and parties. We went along to find out what’s happening in the German capital’s
art scene.
One year ago, we visited Berlin to explore the city’s vast
Art Week festival (see 00296). In fact, it was so good we had to return for the
2026 edition. Over five September days, more than 100 galleries, project spaces,
and private collections put on exhibitions, talks, events, and celebrations. From
huge institutions to tiny gallery spaces – and even
a building site – welcomed Berliners and international visitors to relish in
the cultural breadth of the city.
This year marks 15 years of the annual event, and it’s as big as ever. In fact, there was far too much for recessed.space to explore, but we had a pretty good go at squeezing in as much as we could. It was a lot to pack in, but was helped with the generous hospitality of Hotel Bristol near the Zoologischer Garten S-Bahn station, not only a spacious and welcoming hotel, but one with the country’s first heated indoor pool, constructed at the request of celebrated conductor Herbert von Karajan.
It proved a relaxing and perfectly located base from which recessed.space could navigate the breadth of Berlin Art Week 2026, here distilled to ten highlights.
This year marks 15 years of the annual event, and it’s as big as ever. In fact, there was far too much for recessed.space to explore, but we had a pretty good go at squeezing in as much as we could. It was a lot to pack in, but was helped with the generous hospitality of Hotel Bristol near the Zoologischer Garten S-Bahn station, not only a spacious and welcoming hotel, but one with the country’s first heated indoor pool, constructed at the request of celebrated conductor Herbert von Karajan.
It proved a relaxing and perfectly located base from which recessed.space could navigate the breadth of Berlin Art Week 2026, here distilled to ten highlights.
Lina Lapelytė at Hamburger Bahnhof
The headline event of Berlin’s enormous Hamburger Bahnhof was the first major European retrospective of composer and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto, polished and poetic study of works by and in collaboration with the prolific Japanese creative who died in 2023. However, we were excited that Lina Lapelytė’s We Make Years Out of Hours was still installed and enjoyed in the Historic Hall, a landscape of over 400,000 simple wooden cubes animated by public play and occasional song.
The Lithuanian artist, well-known as one of the team behind operatic performance Sun & Sea (see 00036), here creates one of the most joyous artworks ever made, with adults and children alike spread across the analogue-Minecraftesque field building architectural towers, stacking piles, and creating freely. Every so often, singers spread across the room erupted into song incorporating lyrics by authors and poets that speak to community, love, loss, and collaboration.
The headline event of Berlin’s enormous Hamburger Bahnhof was the first major European retrospective of composer and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto, polished and poetic study of works by and in collaboration with the prolific Japanese creative who died in 2023. However, we were excited that Lina Lapelytė’s We Make Years Out of Hours was still installed and enjoyed in the Historic Hall, a landscape of over 400,000 simple wooden cubes animated by public play and occasional song.
The Lithuanian artist, well-known as one of the team behind operatic performance Sun & Sea (see 00036), here creates one of the most joyous artworks ever made, with adults and children alike spread across the analogue-Minecraftesque field building architectural towers, stacking piles, and creating freely. Every so often, singers spread across the room erupted into song incorporating lyrics by authors and poets that speak to community, love, loss, and collaboration.
Alicja and Bożena Wahl at CCA Berlin
In 2025, the wonderful architectural setting of CCA Berlin within the Egon Eiermann-designed offices attached to the bombed Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was a revelation not just because of the unique spaces, but how the curation so suited the light and material quality of the place. This year, a presentation of twin sisters Alicja and Bożena Wahl is similarly in perfect harmony with the setting.
The sisters may not be well-known outside of their native Poland, where from the 1960s and for 60 years they worked across visual art, running a gallery, stage design, photography, video, book cover art, and illustration, but this concise and well-paced exhibition explores their work and legacy extremely well. Alicja and Bożena both recently passed (in 2020 and 2025 respectively) and this survey shows their solo and collaborative works spanning their practice through the Communist era to the modern day.
Frequently exploring notions of pairing and entanglement, their drawings enmesh fantastical, grotesque, surrealism with human realism. Considering themselves as a “unit”, the two nonetheless created works separately, and this tension between individuality and connectivity is evident throughout both the artist’s works. An outcome of great research from Curator Susanne Mierzwiak and their Assistant Pauline Herrmann, this exhibition deserves to travel beyond the CCA – though it sits so well in their modernist rooms.
In 2025, the wonderful architectural setting of CCA Berlin within the Egon Eiermann-designed offices attached to the bombed Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was a revelation not just because of the unique spaces, but how the curation so suited the light and material quality of the place. This year, a presentation of twin sisters Alicja and Bożena Wahl is similarly in perfect harmony with the setting.
The sisters may not be well-known outside of their native Poland, where from the 1960s and for 60 years they worked across visual art, running a gallery, stage design, photography, video, book cover art, and illustration, but this concise and well-paced exhibition explores their work and legacy extremely well. Alicja and Bożena both recently passed (in 2020 and 2025 respectively) and this survey shows their solo and collaborative works spanning their practice through the Communist era to the modern day.
Frequently exploring notions of pairing and entanglement, their drawings enmesh fantastical, grotesque, surrealism with human realism. Considering themselves as a “unit”, the two nonetheless created works separately, and this tension between individuality and connectivity is evident throughout both the artist’s works. An outcome of great research from Curator Susanne Mierzwiak and their Assistant Pauline Herrmann, this exhibition deserves to travel beyond the CCA – though it sits so well in their modernist rooms.
Stelios
Kallinikou & Susanne Kriemann at C/O Berlin
Charitable foundation, C/O Berlin, has celebrated the medium of photography for 26 years. Just over a decade ago they moved to a building designed by architect Bruno Grimmek for the mid-50s Intbau International Building Exhibition, formerly used by the US government as a soft power cultural hub. Since then, it has become Berlin’s home for photography and also base for the annual After Nature Prize, running since 2024 and created with the Crespo Foundation to explore ideas of nature within an unsettled world.
This years winners are both afforded generous space to present their works. Cypriot Stelios Kallinikou’s images are concerned with how ecological diversity is intertwined with military infrastructure within the Akrotiri Peninsula, a region that remained British territory even after 1960 independence, and where the RAF still have a base. His work carries uncanny humour and a deep understanding of place that works beyond the image and into a political, territorial, and cultural inquiry.
Local artist Susanne Kriemann is interested in the atomic age, an interest that began with the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Through her practice of non-camera photography, Kriemann uses soil from former uranium mining sites across Europe to create abstract images recording invisible forces through autoradiography. Various bodies of work come together to consider how the industrial past continues to impact landscapes at the micro scale, making it visible beyond the abstract.
Charitable foundation, C/O Berlin, has celebrated the medium of photography for 26 years. Just over a decade ago they moved to a building designed by architect Bruno Grimmek for the mid-50s Intbau International Building Exhibition, formerly used by the US government as a soft power cultural hub. Since then, it has become Berlin’s home for photography and also base for the annual After Nature Prize, running since 2024 and created with the Crespo Foundation to explore ideas of nature within an unsettled world.
This years winners are both afforded generous space to present their works. Cypriot Stelios Kallinikou’s images are concerned with how ecological diversity is intertwined with military infrastructure within the Akrotiri Peninsula, a region that remained British territory even after 1960 independence, and where the RAF still have a base. His work carries uncanny humour and a deep understanding of place that works beyond the image and into a political, territorial, and cultural inquiry.
Local artist Susanne Kriemann is interested in the atomic age, an interest that began with the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Through her practice of non-camera photography, Kriemann uses soil from former uranium mining sites across Europe to create abstract images recording invisible forces through autoradiography. Various bodies of work come together to consider how the industrial past continues to impact landscapes at the micro scale, making it visible beyond the abstract.
More information at: www.kindl-berlin.com/exhibitions/kira-freije
& www.kindl-berlin.com/exhibitions/neozoon
Kira Freije & NEOZOON at KINDL
KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art has for ten years been bringing international artists into 1600 square metres of exhibition space encompassing the impressive 1920s Kesselhaus, a former brewery designed by Hans Claus and Richard Schepke and reconstructed post-war by Gerhard Fritsche. Its six giant copper vats within what was once known as the “Palace of Berlin Beer Culture” remain in situ, but elsewhere around the building are gallery spaces bursting with impressive exhibitions.
British artist Kira Freije, shortlisted for the current Turner Prize and who we featured from Ewerk Luckenwalde in 2023 (see 00098) brings her haunting cyborg-like characters to KINDL. Each starts off as a cast of the artist’s own feet, before developing into skeletal sculptures as industrial ghosts well-suited to the space.
In the nearby VideoSpace, female collective NEOZOON present together, a film that zooms into the archetypal American white fence, denoting parcelled up individuality, to see through insects and humour what such partition means in a male-centric reading of history, progress, and property.
KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art has for ten years been bringing international artists into 1600 square metres of exhibition space encompassing the impressive 1920s Kesselhaus, a former brewery designed by Hans Claus and Richard Schepke and reconstructed post-war by Gerhard Fritsche. Its six giant copper vats within what was once known as the “Palace of Berlin Beer Culture” remain in situ, but elsewhere around the building are gallery spaces bursting with impressive exhibitions.
British artist Kira Freije, shortlisted for the current Turner Prize and who we featured from Ewerk Luckenwalde in 2023 (see 00098) brings her haunting cyborg-like characters to KINDL. Each starts off as a cast of the artist’s own feet, before developing into skeletal sculptures as industrial ghosts well-suited to the space.
In the nearby VideoSpace, female collective NEOZOON present together, a film that zooms into the archetypal American white fence, denoting parcelled up individuality, to see through insects and humour what such partition means in a male-centric reading of history, progress, and property.
Thu-Van Tran & Mischa Kuball at KINDL
Paris-based Vietnamese artist Thu-Van Tran has concocted a wonderful mixed-media exhibition at KINDL. Wrapping itself through a suite of interconnected spaces, the ceramics, paintings, and drawings (and lemons) work together into a heady mix. It is all about ecological and traumatic consequences of colonialism. Works reference open pit mines in Australia and fire-scared landscapes, while graphite drawings are titled Trail Dust, the code name for the US military toxic spraying operations during the Vietnam War.
In KINDL’s enormous boiler house, German artist Mischa Kuball’s site-specific installation reflects and plays with surrounding architecture. A room once packed with machinery and noise is now empty, an absence heightened by Kuball’s rotating mirrors both closing and revealing perceptions of openness. Light flooding through tall windows bounces around, ceiling becomes floor, and space is interrupted.
Paris-based Vietnamese artist Thu-Van Tran has concocted a wonderful mixed-media exhibition at KINDL. Wrapping itself through a suite of interconnected spaces, the ceramics, paintings, and drawings (and lemons) work together into a heady mix. It is all about ecological and traumatic consequences of colonialism. Works reference open pit mines in Australia and fire-scared landscapes, while graphite drawings are titled Trail Dust, the code name for the US military toxic spraying operations during the Vietnam War.
In KINDL’s enormous boiler house, German artist Mischa Kuball’s site-specific installation reflects and plays with surrounding architecture. A room once packed with machinery and noise is now empty, an absence heightened by Kuball’s rotating mirrors both closing and revealing perceptions of openness. Light flooding through tall windows bounces around, ceiling becomes floor, and space is interrupted.
More information at: /www.kindl-berlin.com/exhibitions/thu-van-tran & www.kindl-berlin.com/exhibitions/mischa-kuball
Maurizio Cattelan at Neue Nationalgalerie
While Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1968 Neue Nationalgalerie is an impressive structure, it is not the easiest of galleries to curate within – hence Berlin Modern (see below) is currently under construction to offer a more functional exhibition space. Its large, open ground level offers an immense space to fill, but few walls to offer compartmentation of hanging space. Historically, it has worked best as a sculpture gallery, which is the approach taken by this Maurizio Cattelan presentation.
Many German artists are furious that Cattelan has received the important Pries der Nationalgalerie, an award set up to support an emerging artist under 40 with a career-changing moment. At a time Berlin is becoming increasingly unaffordable for creatives to live in, many consider the decision to gift the award and exhibition to an already famous Italian celebrity artist tone deaf to the current art landscape.
The exhibition has its moments, though instead of a vast survey show it is somewhat treated as a singular artwork in itself, with child-Hitler sculpture HIM taking centre stage in a wider scenography that invites German visitors to question the relationship of history with institutions and church. Contextually, HIM works, as does the newly made scale replica of the Brandenburg Gate, through which visitors pass to enter the main show.
However, with very few works on display, not to mention the one-liner nature of Cattelan’s sculptures not requiring much lingering and contemplation on craft or depth of meaning, the €16 ticket price seems steep – though perhaps it’s worth it just to see the interior of van der Rohe’s supergrid ceiling taken over by thousands of pigeons.
While Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1968 Neue Nationalgalerie is an impressive structure, it is not the easiest of galleries to curate within – hence Berlin Modern (see below) is currently under construction to offer a more functional exhibition space. Its large, open ground level offers an immense space to fill, but few walls to offer compartmentation of hanging space. Historically, it has worked best as a sculpture gallery, which is the approach taken by this Maurizio Cattelan presentation.
Many German artists are furious that Cattelan has received the important Pries der Nationalgalerie, an award set up to support an emerging artist under 40 with a career-changing moment. At a time Berlin is becoming increasingly unaffordable for creatives to live in, many consider the decision to gift the award and exhibition to an already famous Italian celebrity artist tone deaf to the current art landscape.
The exhibition has its moments, though instead of a vast survey show it is somewhat treated as a singular artwork in itself, with child-Hitler sculpture HIM taking centre stage in a wider scenography that invites German visitors to question the relationship of history with institutions and church. Contextually, HIM works, as does the newly made scale replica of the Brandenburg Gate, through which visitors pass to enter the main show.
However, with very few works on display, not to mention the one-liner nature of Cattelan’s sculptures not requiring much lingering and contemplation on craft or depth of meaning, the €16 ticket price seems steep – though perhaps it’s worth it just to see the interior of van der Rohe’s supergrid ceiling taken over by thousands of pigeons.
Gordon Matta-Clark at Berlin Modern
To expand on the cultural offer of the Nieu Nationalgalerie, the vast new contemporary art gallery Berlin Modern is currently under construction in a neighbouring plot. After a keenly fought 2015 architectural competition Awarded to Herzog & de Meuron, the opening date was originally set for 2021. In Germany, such largescale construction projects never run smoothly, and the project was not started on site until 2024. It is now expected that construction may complete in 2030, with the budget rising from an initial €130m to a now estimated €600m+. All this has resulted in Berlin Modern becoming both a hugely exciting project for the city, but also one with political pressures, critical response, and a public keen to see progress take place.
Over Berlin Art Week, Berliners were able to get inside the concrete shell as it currently stands to see both the architecture slowly emerge, but also a well-considered display of Gordon Matta-Clark films of other architectures collapsing and dividing. A 4-day pop-up, the curatorial context of showing these works within the construction site worked well, a steady stream of visitors not only studying the seminal work of the anarchitect, but also the progress of Berlin Modern itself.
The selection of five films were all from his richest period of the 1970s, with both 1975’s Conical Intersect and Splitting taking centre stage. Splitting, in which the artist carefully divided a New Jersey suburban home in half, and Conical Intersection, where two soon-to-be-demolished 17th century buildings in central Paris has a cone-shaped hole cut through walls, ceilings, and floors, both speak to the fragility and temporality of construction and, indeed, deconstruction. To see them flicker in projection within the hollows of H&dM’s megaproject made for a fascinating meeting.
To expand on the cultural offer of the Nieu Nationalgalerie, the vast new contemporary art gallery Berlin Modern is currently under construction in a neighbouring plot. After a keenly fought 2015 architectural competition Awarded to Herzog & de Meuron, the opening date was originally set for 2021. In Germany, such largescale construction projects never run smoothly, and the project was not started on site until 2024. It is now expected that construction may complete in 2030, with the budget rising from an initial €130m to a now estimated €600m+. All this has resulted in Berlin Modern becoming both a hugely exciting project for the city, but also one with political pressures, critical response, and a public keen to see progress take place.
Over Berlin Art Week, Berliners were able to get inside the concrete shell as it currently stands to see both the architecture slowly emerge, but also a well-considered display of Gordon Matta-Clark films of other architectures collapsing and dividing. A 4-day pop-up, the curatorial context of showing these works within the construction site worked well, a steady stream of visitors not only studying the seminal work of the anarchitect, but also the progress of Berlin Modern itself.
The selection of five films were all from his richest period of the 1970s, with both 1975’s Conical Intersect and Splitting taking centre stage. Splitting, in which the artist carefully divided a New Jersey suburban home in half, and Conical Intersection, where two soon-to-be-demolished 17th century buildings in central Paris has a cone-shaped hole cut through walls, ceilings, and floors, both speak to the fragility and temporality of construction and, indeed, deconstruction. To see them flicker in projection within the hollows of H&dM’s megaproject made for a fascinating meeting.
More information at: www.passage.art
Carsten Höller at Passage
From the enormous to the minute. We also visited Passage in last year’s Berlin Art Week, and loved what is perhaps the city’s smallest but most visited gallery space. Located within a vitrine on the yellow-tiled platform of Hermannplatz U-Bahn station, Passage offers a free moment of unexpected culture for many of the tens of thousands of users each day.
Carsten Höller may be known for his (rather boring) slides, but his wider practice explores science, experience, and perception in fascinating ways. Here, he presents Fly on Amanita, a ridiculously hi-definition video of a green bottle fly becoming intoxicated on a jelly drop infused with amanita muscaria, a sweet fungus that alters consciousness and instinct. Here, the fly consumes the drug before becoming high, disorientated, and then recovers, before cleaning itself and returning to the drug.
It is a loop of joy, collapse, and repair, and also a meaningful scientific study of an animal which recurs in Höller’s work. It is thought that other than humans, only dolphins pursue experience for its own sake, for the hope of altering understanding and consciousness. This artwork introduces an idea that the humble fly may share this desire.
From the enormous to the minute. We also visited Passage in last year’s Berlin Art Week, and loved what is perhaps the city’s smallest but most visited gallery space. Located within a vitrine on the yellow-tiled platform of Hermannplatz U-Bahn station, Passage offers a free moment of unexpected culture for many of the tens of thousands of users each day.
Carsten Höller may be known for his (rather boring) slides, but his wider practice explores science, experience, and perception in fascinating ways. Here, he presents Fly on Amanita, a ridiculously hi-definition video of a green bottle fly becoming intoxicated on a jelly drop infused with amanita muscaria, a sweet fungus that alters consciousness and instinct. Here, the fly consumes the drug before becoming high, disorientated, and then recovers, before cleaning itself and returning to the drug.
It is a loop of joy, collapse, and repair, and also a meaningful scientific study of an animal which recurs in Höller’s work. It is thought that other than humans, only dolphins pursue experience for its own sake, for the hope of altering understanding and consciousness. This artwork introduces an idea that the humble fly may share this desire.
Lucia Tallová at PalaisPopulaire
A few weeks ago, recessed.space went to Samos, a small Greek island to discover art about fragments of architecture, society, and history (see 00329). When we were there we met the Slovak artist Lucia Tallová, so it was a welcome surprise to see her work on a far greater scale as a central part of Berlin Art Week. Having won the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year 2026 award, Tallová mounted a major exhibition at the PalaisPopulaire not only showing the provocatively playful, warped and wefted collage as we saw in Greece, but a room-filling, architecture bending explosion beyond.
With a practice rooted in disrupting the male-centric, photo-reproduced canon of architecture to introduce a new way of imagining the classics, the published, and the lived, Lucia Tallová has created a deeply considered immsersive survey of her work.
This is not a simply pin-up and show exhibition, but one that takes the functional grid architecture of the space and plays against it. New columns erupt to disrupt the plan, but collapse. A new timber framework both conceals and reveals, creating an unreliable infrastructure. Large format photographs collapse into chaos, truths become fiction, and fictions become hopes. This is a disruptive and angry reading of canon, publishing, and place, but it’s carried out with joy, optimism, and intent for a feminist future that crumples columns.
A few weeks ago, recessed.space went to Samos, a small Greek island to discover art about fragments of architecture, society, and history (see 00329). When we were there we met the Slovak artist Lucia Tallová, so it was a welcome surprise to see her work on a far greater scale as a central part of Berlin Art Week. Having won the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year 2026 award, Tallová mounted a major exhibition at the PalaisPopulaire not only showing the provocatively playful, warped and wefted collage as we saw in Greece, but a room-filling, architecture bending explosion beyond.
With a practice rooted in disrupting the male-centric, photo-reproduced canon of architecture to introduce a new way of imagining the classics, the published, and the lived, Lucia Tallová has created a deeply considered immsersive survey of her work.
This is not a simply pin-up and show exhibition, but one that takes the functional grid architecture of the space and plays against it. New columns erupt to disrupt the plan, but collapse. A new timber framework both conceals and reveals, creating an unreliable infrastructure. Large format photographs collapse into chaos, truths become fiction, and fictions become hopes. This is a disruptive and angry reading of canon, publishing, and place, but it’s carried out with joy, optimism, and intent for a feminist future that crumples columns.
Arash Nassiri at Fluentum
A nonprofit, privately run institution far outside the city-centre enclave of art institutions, Fluentum is remarkable in its engagement with both contemporary art and its own historical architectural context. The organisation is focused on “bringing the past into the present through fictionalising or reinterpreting it”, and this intent is rooted in the very building it is housed within. Constructed between 1936 and 1938 by architect Fritz Fuß, it was a critical to Nazi strategic warfare as an HQ for the Luftwaffe before, post-war, becoming the US military HQ from where the ’48-49 Berlin Airlift was organised.
A Bug’s Life by Arash Nassiri, co-commissioned with London’s Chisenhale Gallery, is a fable-esque exploration of architecture as carrier of memory. Considering mansions designed by Hamid Omrani and constructed in the US after the 1979 Iranian revolution, the diasporic architecture – disparagingly referred to as “Persian Palaces” – are carriers of geopolitics, taste, and displacement.
A film follows an insect puppet navigating the spatial and political history of such a Persian Palace, while upstairs scale architectural sculptures appear as if artefacts from Omrani’s designs. This project deals with memory and architecture, but so too is Fluentum meaningfully concerned with the discourse. With such loaded history, Fluentum set to meaningfully interrogate their home through In Medias Res, an excellent series of publications between 2021 and 2023, considering the heritage, meaning, and social archaeology, not just as exorcism but as a meaningful and progressive understanding of architectural past for the future.
A nonprofit, privately run institution far outside the city-centre enclave of art institutions, Fluentum is remarkable in its engagement with both contemporary art and its own historical architectural context. The organisation is focused on “bringing the past into the present through fictionalising or reinterpreting it”, and this intent is rooted in the very building it is housed within. Constructed between 1936 and 1938 by architect Fritz Fuß, it was a critical to Nazi strategic warfare as an HQ for the Luftwaffe before, post-war, becoming the US military HQ from where the ’48-49 Berlin Airlift was organised.
A Bug’s Life by Arash Nassiri, co-commissioned with London’s Chisenhale Gallery, is a fable-esque exploration of architecture as carrier of memory. Considering mansions designed by Hamid Omrani and constructed in the US after the 1979 Iranian revolution, the diasporic architecture – disparagingly referred to as “Persian Palaces” – are carriers of geopolitics, taste, and displacement.
A film follows an insect puppet navigating the spatial and political history of such a Persian Palace, while upstairs scale architectural sculptures appear as if artefacts from Omrani’s designs. This project deals with memory and architecture, but so too is Fluentum meaningfully concerned with the discourse. With such loaded history, Fluentum set to meaningfully interrogate their home through In Medias Res, an excellent series of publications between 2021 and 2023, considering the heritage, meaning, and social archaeology, not just as exorcism but as a meaningful and progressive understanding of architectural past for the future.
Helmar Lerski at Schinkel Pavilion
As part of a wider group show, Projections Onto the East, Helmar Lerski’s photographs are a revelation in their seven-sided presentation in the incredible context of the eclectic, octagonal GDR building. Helmar Lerski was foundational to modern photography. Born in Strasbourg in 1871, he didn’t properly start to use a camera until 1910, but took to the craft so quickly that was soon working not only on still projects but was becoming involved in the growing film industry.
By 1927 he had become so established in films that he worked as cameraman, lighting technician, and special effects expert on Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis. Some of that eye is present in this selection of various bodies of works made between 1928 and 1943. A committed communist, half of the photographs are taken from Menschliche Hände (Human Hands) focusing on the hands of workers – whether that work be manual labour or humanities craft. As a study of the individual worker to focus on the skill and craft across all workers it offers an approach to equality and humanism through the lens.
The same ideals of shared humanity and universal connection is present in the second side, Menschliche Hände and Juden und Araber, a body of work made in Palestine in the 1930s. Perhaps more important now than 90 years ago, his close-up portraits of differentiated “Arabs” and “Jews” sought to highlight the abstract and arbitrary nature of division when highlighting a shared humanity and existence.
As part of a wider group show, Projections Onto the East, Helmar Lerski’s photographs are a revelation in their seven-sided presentation in the incredible context of the eclectic, octagonal GDR building. Helmar Lerski was foundational to modern photography. Born in Strasbourg in 1871, he didn’t properly start to use a camera until 1910, but took to the craft so quickly that was soon working not only on still projects but was becoming involved in the growing film industry.
By 1927 he had become so established in films that he worked as cameraman, lighting technician, and special effects expert on Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis. Some of that eye is present in this selection of various bodies of works made between 1928 and 1943. A committed communist, half of the photographs are taken from Menschliche Hände (Human Hands) focusing on the hands of workers – whether that work be manual labour or humanities craft. As a study of the individual worker to focus on the skill and craft across all workers it offers an approach to equality and humanism through the lens.
The same ideals of shared humanity and universal connection is present in the second side, Menschliche Hände and Juden und Araber, a body of work made in Palestine in the 1930s. Perhaps more important now than 90 years ago, his close-up portraits of differentiated “Arabs” and “Jews” sought to highlight the abstract and arbitrary nature of division when highlighting a shared humanity and existence.
