Berlin Art Week and Design Festival 2026

We’ve all been waiting for an injection of design in Berlin and with Art Week and Currents coming together for the first time this year, there is some interesting movement. Berlin Art Week runs 9 to 13 September, its fifteenth edition all over Berlin, Currents opens its first edition on 10 to 12 September — a design festival assembled out of showrooms, studios and workshops across the city, started by the design journalists Jasmin Jouhar and Laura Ewert.

We're in New York getting the next Creative Showcase ready for 23 September, so we're following this one from over here.

Members of our community curated a guide to Berlin Art Week and Currents and the events and exhibitions they are hosting.

Sorted by where things are.

Four things within a short walk of each other, mostly along Potsdamer Straße.

It's Cattelan's first big solo show in Germany. He's the one who put the marble middle finger in front of the Milan stock exchange.

Four of the older works are coming. "Him", a Hitler shrunk to the size of a schoolboy, kneeling in prayer. "Novecento", a taxidermied horse strung up from the ceiling in a harness. "La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi", a doll-sized Cattelan in Joseph Beuys's felt suit, hanging off a coat rack by his collar. And "Untitled" from 2003, Oskar out of Günter Grass's "The Tin Drum", the boy who decides to stop growing, with his drum.

There are new pieces made for the building, one of them for the glass hall.

Garden of Neue Nationalgalerie, © Photo by Alessandro Amato

"I'm probably biased because I'm a huge Mies van der Rohe fan, but the Neue Nationalgalerie is a place I would always recommend, regardless of what is on. During Berlin Art Week, I'm especially looking forward to Maurizio Cattelan's new exhibition and PERFORM!, which brings performance art into one of my favourite buildings in Berlin." — Damon Kaul, @anothachoppa

"There's an afterparty for the Cattelan exhibition, where the Neue Nationalgalerie is working with a very interesting partner from Paris. That one shouldn't be missed either." — Tarek Shater, @archdigestsyou

Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Straße 50 Opening Wed 9, entry 21:00 · on view Thu 10 – 7 Mar 2027 · €16 / €8 PERFORM! runs from Thu 10

"This might be one of the things I'm most curious about. Gordon Matta-Clark's work will be shown inside berlin modern while the museum is still under construction. I love the idea of experiencing art in a museum before it even becomes a finished museum, and returning years later knowing you already experienced the building at this stage of its life." — Damon Kaul, @anothachoppa

Five works from the 1970s in one of the exhibition halls of the Herzog & de Meuron building while it's still a site. Matta-Clark cut into buildings marked for demolition. "Conical Intersect" was made in Paris in 1975, with the Centre Pompidou going up in the background.

Access is via Scharounplatz, opposite the Philharmonie. And yes, it's a construction site.

berlin modern, Scharounplatz / Ecke Potsdamer Straße Thu 10, 12–18h · Fri 11–Sun 13, 10–18h · €8

Our friend Julian Bächle is behind this one. He also runs "Everyday Exquisite" at bächlemeid, most recently over Gallery Weekend in May.

Currents opens here on the Wednesday. A talk first, How to Build a Club, with ROBERTNEUN and Studio 1111, then DJ Schowi, Damiano von Erckert, Rhina Love, Natalia Escobar, Nils Müller, and Dennis Buck from Ruttkowski;68.

Cattelan's opening is the same night at 21:00, a few minutes up Potsdamer Straße.

Studio 1111, Potsdamer Straße 96 Wed 9, from 20:30 · free entry until 22:00, RSVP for reduced after

Studio 1111, Image via Currents

"The one I'm most looking forward to is the Offsite Arts exhibition at the Italian Embassy, showing a Caravaggio painting that was lost for a long time. It's also the first time the embassy's rooms can be visited." — Tarek Shater, @archdigestsyou

The painting is "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy", around 1606, in Germany for its first public showing. Offsite Arts pairs it with a new commission by Berlinde De Bruyckere, the opening edition of a series putting rediscovered historical work next to living artists in buildings that aren't galleries. Tjioe Meyer-Hecken and Felipe Schwager put it together.

Free, but you book a time slot at offsitearts.com.

Embassy of Italy · 11 Sep – 2 Oct · admission free, timed booking

Opening at the Italian Embassy © Photos by Clemens Porikys

Mondtag made the German Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

"Dispair" is his first solo show with the gallery, all of it made for these rooms. Large sculptures in carbonized wood, reliefs in wood and silicone.

Go for the building too. Dittrich & Schlechtriem moved into Linienstraße 40 in January, an anthracite-black concrete monolith on the corner of Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, by Roger Bundschuh with Philipp Baumhauer and the artist Cosima von Bonin.

The opening is Thursday, 18–22h, part of Gallery Night. The show is on view from Wednesday and stays up to 31 October.

Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Linienstraße 40, 10119 Opening: Thu 10, 18–22h, Gallery Night On view Wed 9 – 31 Oct

Christian Boros founded an advertising agency and opened up his “basement” which happened to be a bunker with five floors, 3,000 square metres and eighty rooms, where he and Karen Boros now show their art collection. Every piece is installed by the artist into the room it was given.

Boros Collection #4 is: Anne Imhof, Alicja Kwade, Cyprien Gaillard, Klára Hosnedlová, Bunny Rogers, Anna Uddenberg, Julian Charrière and others.

Reinhardtstraße 20 Sat 12, 13–18h · €15 / €10 reduced, on site only, no registration

Christian and Karen Boros Penthouse in Berlin, © Photos by Lucas Oliver Mill

"Another Mies building, so another very personal recommendation. Matt Browning's A Screen of Trees enters into dialogue with the Mies van der Rohe Haus, bringing contemporary art into an architectural work that is already worth the trip on its own." — Damon Kaul, @anothachoppa

The house is the Lemke House on the Obersee, the last thing Mies built in Germany before he left in 1938. It spent the GDR years as a laundry and canteen for the Ministry, with the garden concreted over as a car park.

The show opens on the 13th, the last day of Art Week. The opening event is the Saturday evening.

Mies van der Rohe Haus, Oberseestraße 60, Lichtenberg Opening: Sat 12, 16–21h · on view 13 Sep – 10 Jan 2027

"And one for when your feet need a break. ETERNITY, featuring Florentina Holzinger and Peaches, sounds like a great way to experience Berlin Art Week from a cinema seat. Add the architecture of Kino International itself and I'm in." — Damon Kaul, @anothachoppa

Florentina Holzinger has the Austrian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale until 22 November. SEAWORLD VENICE, with Nora-Swantje Almes, a flooded pavilion working as underwater theme park, sewage plant and sacred space at once, performers swimming and hanging and ringing bells inside the tanks.

ETERNITY is the first film to put her work on a cinema screen. Susanne Regina Meures directs, and the cast takes in Holzinger and Peaches. A group of friends drives out for one last summer while the world comes apart, and the past catches up with them.

Premiere on Sunday morning, Sept 13, with a discussion afterwards with Holzinger, Meures and the cast.

Kino International, Karl-Marx-Allee · Sun 13, 11:00 · OmU

© Photo by Daniel Horn

Behind Holder Objects is Trinidad Davanzo and Camilo Palma, both members of ours — a Berlin gallery and platform for contemporary Latin American design, working as a direct line between the region and Europe.

For Currents they've taken over Dopo Domani on Kantstraße with "Pasado / Mañana", a show about how memory and inheritance surface in objects being made right now. Dopo Domani has been doing interiors on that street for more than thirty years.

There's a design talk on the Thursday, 12 to 14h. RSVP via [email protected], more info here.

Dopo Domani, Kantstraße 148 Thu 10 + Fri 11, 8–16h · Sat 12, 8–14h Talk: Thu 10, 16–18h

© HOLDER, Trinidad Davanzo and Camilo Palma

Reinickendorf is a long way out. But -

"If you want to see a lot without crossing Berlin all day, I'd head to the Wilhelm Hallen. HALLEN 07 brings more than 50 artists together in one location, while The Foundry by Bocci also connects the site to Currents with The Overview Effect. I love that art, design and industrial architecture come together here." — Damon Kaul, @anothachoppa

Galleries, museum collections and private collections share the halls, ChertLüdde, Esther Schipper, Mehdi Chouakri, Nagel Draxler, the Berlinische Galerie, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and others. Christian Jankowski is guest artist with neon works from "Castles in the Air". Chamber ensembles from the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin play the closing Sunday.

Wilhelm Hallen, Reinickendorf · 5–13 Sep, 11–20h, closed Tue 8

Our friends at Deoron land in Berlin for the first time, after Milan and Copenhagen. More than fifty designers, furniture next to fragrance, ceramics next to sound. The programme runs talks, listening sessions and performances from morning into the night, and it keeps changing across the five days.

Deoron is where Yont Studio put the Brutalist DJ Booth in Milan. Serdar Ayvaz & Coşan Karadenizm, the duo behind studio Yont, shared the process behind their work at our last Creative Showcase in Berlin in June.

It's on Provinzstraße, twenty minutes from the Wilhelm Hallen.

Monopol, Provinzstraße 40–44 Wed 9–Fri 11, 12–19h · Sat 12 + Sun 13, 9–19h