Gallery Tour
Mitte Süd
Kreuzberg

Muskauer Strasse, near the old Kreuzberg market hall, has yet to establish itself as a gallery district, and maybe that’s exactly why it makes the perfect place to begin. Showing for the first time in the Perspectives sector of Gallery Weekend this year is Shahin Zarinbal gallery. “Whole Property” is the title of the solo show by multidisciplinary artist Mark Barker. The British-born artist (b. 1983), now based in Berlin, works across painting, drawing, photography and sculpture in his first exhibition with the gallery: fenced enclosures, houses and toilets. What seems straightforward unfolds into a layered investigation of control, boundaries and bodily needs, delivered with a quietly assured aesthetic intelligence.

A wander through the neighborhood ends with a right turn into Regina-Jonas-Strasse, just before the Landwehr Canal. Behind the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Galerie Trautwein Herleth occupies a space where appearances, again, deceive. In Stella Zhong’s first solo show with the gallery, the artist uses installations and sculptures to probe understanding and perception, enriching her smooth, unsettling volumes with humor and tactility. Close looking leads not only to a sense of the diffusely uncanny, but to something closer to longing.

A courtyard away, at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, that desire intensifies. Painter Brook Hsu unfolds her painterly, graphic and photographic engagement with the Barcelona Pavilion, designed nearly a century ago by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, before the eyes of the audience. The paradox of that temporary architecture, one of modernism’s most iconic buildings, conceived for the 1929 World Exhibition and dismantled shortly after until its reconstruction in the 1980s, is central to her practice. In Hsu’s characteristic green, architectural fragments and figures placed within them appear alongside black-and-white photographs of the pavilion’s figurative sculptures.

It takes a short walk through the Kreuzberg sun before entering the deep, dark walls of the high bunker that has housed EBENSPERGER’s spaces for a year now. In this charged historical setting, Göksu Kunak turns time into the defining medium of the performance exhibition “REMAINS“, which will shift continuously throughout its opening hours. Who is permitted to leave traces, to exist, to remain, and who is simply condemned to disappear? Kunak also interrogates the role of performance as a medium in itself, and through a density of references creates a show that is genuinely unusual. Don’t miss it.

Not far from the Jewish Museum and the Gropius Bau, in the part of Kreuzberg that already feels almost like Mitte, a remarkable cluster of galleries has taken root over the past few years. Nordenhake on Lindenstraße presents sensuous, ethereal paintings, monochrome landscape abstractions by John Zurier, born in the USA in 1956. This is already their tenth solo show together. After pausing in front of those luminous tableaux, you emerge just clear-eyed enough to continue to the next Perspectives participant on the ground floor of the same building: Persons Projects.

In sharp contrast to the painting just seen, the photography-focused space moves in a completely different direction. Historical pieces from Karl Benjamin’s Hard-Edge painting meet Grey Crawford’s photographic engagement with geometry, structure and abstraction in a dialogue that feels both natural and revelatory. Crawford, born 1951, was clearly shaped by the work of his elder by 26 years, as these series demonstrate, establishing him as an early pioneer of color manipulation in the darkroom.

Next door at Soy Capitán, Camilla Steinum questions how we see, make sense of and give meaning to the world. In You Can Move, illusion, sound and touch come together and invite visitors to bring their own bodies into the experience. The suspended spheres from Listening Holes react subtly to their surroundings, softening the boundaries between proximity and distance. Works with numbers and lottery tickets bring in chance as a cultural principle, a system of rules and probabilities shaped by expectation and hope.

Two blocks west, in the heart of the old newspaper district, Galerie Barbara Thumm occupies a former printing house. On show is an interdisciplinary exhibition by artist and poet Farkhondeh Shahroudi. Born in Iran in 1962, the Hannah Höch Prize winner has lived in German exile since the 1990s and is widely regarded as one of the most important voices of the diaspora. Her multilayered works weave text and textile elements into sculptural objects. In a second space, Thumm presents new Mash-Up works by Munich-based Gülbin Ünlü, who completed her studies at the Munich Academy only in 2018. The wall-based works are genuinely impressive, combining every conceivable ambivalence into pieces that are at once sharp and tender, robust and fragile, painterly and printed. It comes as no surprise that Ünlü’s distinctive work has entered the collections of some of Europe’s most prestigious institutions, among them the Pinakothek der Moderne, the Haus der Kunst and the Berlinische Galerie.

carlier | gebauer also have their gallery in the same sprawling complex. There we encounter
“Constellations and Cosmologies”, the title says it all, by Palestinian sculptor Nida Sinnokrot. In the work series Rubber-Coated Rocks, shown here in a new iteration, Sinnokrot has since 2001 been combining found and collected materials gathered around military checkpoints in Palestine. Questions of circulation, impact and abandonment meet vulnerable yet resilient physicalities. A second installation, Water Witness, expands these enquiries into infrastructural dimensions, anchoring concrete questions within a broader cosmological frame. Once you’ve spent enough time with the quietly creaturely sculptures, we head further west to find ourselves at Max Goelitz, also appearing for the first time in the Perspectives sector.

A work from master of light James Turrell’s Glass series is being shown in Berlin for the very first time. Turrell uses light as a medium in itself, as a spatial and material phenomenon. Losing yourself in “Sensing Fields“ is a welcome respite from the density of this year’s weekend.

Heading north up Charlottenstraße, Buchmann offers lush painting by Bernd Koberling. Erdstelle, Moosheidegestein, Eine unendliche Betrachtung: the works of this painter, born 1938, who came of age as one of the Junge Wilde and became one of the most formative voices in postwar German art. His ongoing engagement with nature is legible from the titles alone. Alongside large-format canvases spanning the 1990s to the present, there’s an extensive series of watercolors to take in. “The more intimate the image, the cruder the means,” the artist says. Best to go and find out for yourself.

A little further north, the most beautiful corner windows in Berlin await at Thomas Schulte’s Charlottenstraße outpost. The exhibition “Like a rubber rung on a ladder“ presents two large solo installations by Walid Raad, whose fragmentary, composite wall-based elements connect interior and exterior space visually. True to form for the US-Lebanese artist, history and memory are central, with underlying questions of conflict, violence, individual and collective experience never far from the surface, all carried by a strong aesthetic sensibility.

Turning east onto Leipziger Straße, you find yourself unexpectedly on one of the city’s most exciting art strips. Tucked slightly above street level, among project spaces and institutions, are the rooms of Klemm’s. More than two decades of image and film production by Juan Pablo Echeverri, who died in 2022, can be discovered across both gallery levels. The richly layered universe of parody and social critique on display here offers a glimpse into a legacy of precision, range and formal consistency.

Just a few meters on, Sweetwater invites you to spend time with the work of Hanna Stiegler. Her grainy images of the bed she shares with her child, captured through a baby monitor screen, offer a refreshingly female counterpoint. The noisy, rough visual aesthetic is formally compelling.

And further east: Daniel Buren, born in France in 1938, and Galerie Konrad Fischer share more than fifty years of collaboration. A fresh group of works by the analytical painter is now on show in the gallery’s rooms on Neue Grünstraße, with his characteristic 8.7 cm stripes, naturally. Working always in situ, Buren draws the surrounding architecture into the work once again. In the large, circular mirror pieces, each over two meters, both architecture and viewer find themselves reflected. The result is the repetition of infinity, enough to think about all the way home.