This panel brings together four curators with a broad range of backgrounds to discuss the highly diverse ways and motivations with which fine art institutions approach live arts programming in a rapidly evolving arts ecosystem: Should live arts programs supplement long-term exhibitions, or strive to be main events in their own right? Is there a meaningful difference between Performance Art—once defined by its anti-institutional bent—and those performing arts (music, dance, theater) that may already have a home in dedicated institutions? And crucially: What are the budgets and, as performance theorist Shannon Jackson wrote in 2011, “material relations that support the de-materialized act” of live arts programming?

Through a practice spanning film, sculpture, installation, and painting, New York–based artist Stella Zhong contemplates dense concepts, such as nuclear semiotics and geometric topologies, as well as everyday materialities, like specific textures of food. Oscillating between the macro and micro, each of Zhong’s individual works come together to create total constellations, worlds in and unto themselves. In this conversation with curator Martin Germann, Zhong will discuss the expanse of her practice, offering insight into her first solo exhibition in Germany, on view on the occasion of Gallery Weekend 2026 at Trautwein Herleth.

An artist and Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama works at the intersection of artistic production and political activity. His drawings—produced during meetings and negotiations—translate attention into visual form. More recent sculptural works extend this process, reworking drawings into three-dimensional structures and proposing a multifaceted understanding of temporality. Against the backdrop of and parallel to Albania’s post-Communism transition, Rama developed a relationship with artist Anri Sala.

This conversation, moderated by political scientist and art critic Natalia Gierowska, examines Rama’s expanded practice through his long-standing dialogue with Sala. Join the artists as they discuss their shared interest in perception, the limits of language, the role of form in shaping collective experience, and, importantly, how artistic modes of thinking can remain operative within contemporary political practice.

With a practice that transverses sculpture, tapestry, graphic design, and large-scale installation, Pae White probes both material and motif. She explores the limits of a medium’s possibility and often upends its associations, repurposing everyday substances into sensory and revelatory new arrangements: Yarn becomes painting. Automotive lacquer is applied to organic forms. Jacquard weavings take on sculptural qualities. Paper is mistaken for bronze. For the artist, every artwork feels like a test, and nothing ever feels fully resolved. In this conversation, White joins Kimberly Bradley to discuss notions of beauty, craft, and processes of creation, particularly in relation to the artist’s newest body of work—on view in her solo exhibition “pushmi-pullyu” during Gallery Weekend Berlin at neugerriemschneider’s Christinenstrasse location.

How can photography unveil something that has always existed but remained unknown? This question, among many others, is explored in the work of Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, whose artistic practice embraces the slippery nature of photography. Through the combination of experimental analog techniques with digital means, Alexi-Meskhishvili creates controlled environments to give artistic direction but ultimately allows chance to take over in her processes of image-making. In this conversation, Alexi-Meskhishvili speaks with curator Carina Bukuts about challenging authorship, the darkroom as a stage and studio, and the concept of personal and collective memory in relation to the artist’s Georgian roots and the country’s Soviet history—themes also explored in her exhibition “Georgia,” on view at Galerie Molitor on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin.

Drawing on influences such as Arabesk culture, late modernity, and orientalist discourse, Göksu Kunak critically examines processes of self-Orientalization as well as strategies of camouflage, self-censorship, and speculative fiction through performance and installation. In the artist’s works, the powerful and hyperreal movements of bodybuilders, pole dancers, and climbers, among other motifs, are testaments to Kunak’s engagement with chronopolitics and hybrid textual forms to explore the performative languages of contemporary life. Watch Kunak and curator Léon Kruijswijk as they delve into the artist’s ongoing interest in simulacra and the notion of “crash”; the interplay between kinetic sculpture, spectacle, entertainment, and Turkish soap operas; their exhibition “REMAINS,” on view at Ebensperger; and a preview of a new production centered on sacrificial rituals.

What will the visual art world look like in ten or twenty years? In a time of accelerating change—fueled by ongoing geopolitical and economic crises, shifting discourses and audience expectations, strained cultural funding systems and the implementation of artificial intelligence to name but a few parameters—arts institutions and markets are looking to adapt to new realities. But how?

Drawing on András Szántó’s book The Future of the Art World: 38 Dialogues (2025), this talk explores an art world in flux, posing new challenges for its institutions as they chart a path to the future.