Berlin Art Week 2026: What to See
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Berlin Art Week runs September 9 to 13, with hundreds of openings, talks, and performances packed into five days across the city. Here are the shows worth actually building a schedule around.
The Neue Nationalgalerie
"Night" marks Cattelan's first major solo exhibition in Germany, staged inside Mies van der Rohe's glass hall as the 2026 Preis der Nationalgalerie, curated by Lisa Botti with Klaus Biesenbach. The exhibition assembles key historical works, including Him and La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi, alongside pieces made specifically for the space. During Berlin Art Week the museum extends its hours until 10pm daily, from September 10 through 13, before settling into its regular run through March of next year.
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart
Three years after his death, Hamburger Bahnhof opens the composer's first major European Hamburger Bahnhof opens the composer's first major European retrospective, filling roughly 1,500 square meters of the Rieckhallen with seven sound and video installations spanning his work in music, film, and visual art. Several pieces were made with Shiro Takatani, his longtime collaborator. Sakamoto died in 2023, and the show is part of the museum's thirtieth-anniversary program, staying on view through next May.
Boros Collection
Access to the Boros Collection is ordinarily limited to a pre-booked guided tour, capped at twelve visitors at a time, inside a five-story wartime bunker whose concrete walls run three meters thick. For one afternoon during Berlin Art Week, on Saturday the twelfth, the doors open without a reservation, admitting anyone willing to queue. It is one of the only chances all year to see the collection without planning months in advance, and worth arriving early for.
C/O Berlin
C/O Berlin devotes its galleries to a four-decade survey of the American photographer's career, opening the same night as three other exhibitions across the building. Weems has spent that career training her camera on race, family, and the quiet mechanics of power in American life, work that reads as pointed now as it did when she began making it. The opening runs from eight in the evening until midnight, with the show remaining on view into the fall.
Neue Berliner Kunstverein
The anonymous feminist collective, active since 1985 and still appearing publicly in gorilla masks, opens its show at n.b.k. alongside two others in the building the same evening. Their posters, built from statistics about gender and race in museum collections and gallery rosters, have outlived several waves of art-world self-congratulation about having moved past the problem. Three decades on, the work still lands.
Bastian Gallery
Bastian gives over its rooms to the American postwar artist's material experiments, a chance to see Rauschenberg's combines up close rather than behind museum glass, in a city where his work rarely surfaces outside institutional retrospectives. The show favors depth over scale, giving each piece room most commercial hangs don't allow, and rewards visitors willing to look slowly rather than move through quickly.
Gallery Neugerriemschneider
Three generations share the walls at neugerriemschneider's Linienstraße space: the English painter, musician, and Stuckism co-founder Billy Childish, alongside his son Huddie Hamper and daughter Scout Hamper. Family shows are rare in a market built almost entirely around single-artist branding, which makes this one worth a look on its own terms, whatever pulls people through the door first.
KW Institute for Contemporary
KW Institute for Contemporary Art hosts an open house presentation from the Kyiv Biennial, which has continued running since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion and uses cities like Berlin as rotating host venues rather than a single fixed site. The opening runs from four until nine in the evening on September 9, the first night of the week, and offers a rare chance to see the biennial's programming outside Ukraine itself.
BBA Gallery
BBA Gallery presents a group show of ten international artists working across painting, photography, sculpture, video, and mixed media, built around the double meaning packed into its title, portraits and their imperfections. Artists include Jens Juul, Vishal Shah, Jaroslav Drazil, and Seung Yiu, each working through how identity gets constructed, performed, and occasionally betrayed by the image. The show runs from September 9 through October 24, with free admission Tuesday through Saturday, noon to six.
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Cover image: Berlin Art Week 2026, Hebel am Ufer, Sophia Süßmilch im HAU. Foto: Lee Everett Thieler
