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<\/a>Cand Breitz\u2019s performance ice<\/p>\nA few weeks ago, a posh Bavarian influencer \u2014 self-proclaimed tastemaker \u2014 explained the German social calendar to me with brutal clarity: \u201cnobody cares about Berlin Art Week.\u201d September, apparently, is already spoken for by Oktoberfest and Frieze London. Instead, VIPs come to Gallery Weekend Berlin, which always lands at the turning point between April and May.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Launched in 2005 by Berlin gallerists, including Max Hetzler<\/a>, Tim Neuger<\/a>, and Esther Schipper<\/a>, the Weekend idea was conceived as a decentralised alternative to large-scale art fairs and an opportunity for out-of-town collectors to enter gallery spaces and experience art in situ. The format proved highly effective and was subsequently adopted by various cities worldwide, from London and Milan to Paris, Nairobi, and New Delhi. Today, Gallery Weekend Berlin is organised by abc gwb UG, and represents a consortium of galleries.<\/p>\n In contrast, Berlin Art Week<\/a>, with its more institutional orientation, operates according to a less commercial logic. The implication is not merely one of convenience, but of hierarchy: a gallery-initiated long weekend outweighs a week framed around inclusivity and Berlin\u2019s identity as a production hub rather than a sales platform. It may not present itself as a competition, but in practice, it functions as one.<\/p>\n In recent years, the context has produced its own counter-format. A fringe version of the Gallery Weekend Berlin emerged in 2023: Sellerie Weekend, a self-dubbed \u201coff-programme\u201d during the festival for project spaces and other smaller exhibitors. Initiated by SPOILER and positioned as explicitly non-commercial, Sellerie offers cost-free participation. But because it is an antidote, it defines itself in relation to Gallery Weekend, which means it always happens concurrently.<\/p>\n The tension between commerce and culture was especially pronounced this year, as Gallery Weekend Berlin opened on May 1st. In Germany, this is International Workers\u2019 Day<\/a>. In Berlin, this is not just a bank holiday but a politically charged institution unto itself, shaped by labour movements, demonstrations, and a long history of dissent. It is a day structured around counter culture and street presence; not working is, in itself, a political gesture on this day (even if you do it from the comfort of a sofa).<\/p>\n The overlap between May 1st and Gallery Weekend Berlin, meanwhile, is not new; it has recurred regularly over the event\u2019s twenty-year history. Within Berlin\u2019s art-historical context, this structure is often seen as the establishment face of the scene, prioritising market stability over political engagement \u2014 effectively adopting a position of neutrality in moments of political visibility.<\/p>\n But neutrality on May 1st is a tricky chord to strike. The issue here is not the coincidence of the festival\u2019s timing, but rather the position it produces. Neutrality functions as structural pressure: underpaid art workers, interns, and artists reliant on networking are expected to work on a day associated with collective time off, while others in the cultural sector are forced to choose between professional obligation and participation in a historically significant day of protest. Attendance becomes both a logistical and political calculation. Commit to May 1st, and you miss Gallery (Sellerie) Weekend; choose Gallery (Sellerie) Weekend, and you effectively bypass May 1st. That imposed choice is, in itself, not neutral.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gallery Weekend Director Antonia Ruder<\/a> herself is known for a carefully maintained professional neutrality, though this position has come under scrutiny. Some critics argue that such neutrality is not apolitical but instead reflects an institutional alignment \u2014 one that privileges Berlin\u2019s role as a commercial hub over its legacy as a site of political and artistic dissent. Her stated goal of strengthening the city\u2019s position within the global art market is, for some, precisely what distances the event from its grassroots origins. Neutrality here is less an absence of politics than a form of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n The overlap can be read in two ways. Either Gallery Weekend competes with May 1st, siphoning attention away from it, or it feeds off it \u2014 benefiting from the density, movement, and charged atmosphere, like businesses clustering to increase visibility. Meanwhile, the day\u2019s chaos produces more than symbolic friction; it creates a practical bottleneck. Streets close, transport slows, distances stretch to painful lengths.\u00a0<\/p>\n So why must it fall on this weekend? One word: Venice<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Venice Biennale<\/a> opens this Wednesday, and the global art circuit moves accordingly. The timing is not incidental but strategic, aligning Berlin with the opening cycle of the Biennale and the broader choreography of the art calendar, allowing key figures just enough time to hop, skip, and skedaddle over to Italy for the next thing. If it was not already clear, the priorities of the art world become legible: the calendar does not adapt to politics \u2014 politics is expected to accommodate the calendar. The irony is that the Biennale itself is currently marked by political tension, namely the high-profile resignation of its entire jury, the notion of geopolitical alignment, and Iran pulling out completely. At a certain point, the neutrality act collapses because everything is political.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Many describe a broader climate of political caution within the art world: a contracting market has shifted priorities toward survival, while heightened political polarisation has encouraged self-censorship. Back in Berlin, what was once framed as the city\u2019s \u201canything-goes\u201d ethos has, in many ways, given way to a more measured and often censored atmosphere.<\/p>\n This atmosphere of caution is visible at KOW, where Candice Breitz\u2019s<\/a> solo exhibition HOT POTATO<\/a> stages it explicitly. Across a series of chalkboard panels, phrases are written repeatedly in white, recalling the disciplinary exercise of a pupil made to copy out lines: I WILL NOT SWIM AGAINST THE TIDE, I WILL NOT SHOOT MYSELF IN THE FOOT, I WILL NOT BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS ME, I WILL NOT RUFFLE FEATHERS, I WILL NOT POKE THE BEAR, and, finally, I WILL NOT MAKE ANY MORE POLITICAL ART.<\/p>\n Breitz is there, dressed in a bear costume and dancing about the space, provoking guests through the gallery glass. Resting on the floor is a single potato. In recent years, Breitz has been outspoken about the constraints placed on artistic expression in Germany, particularly in relation to pro-Palestinian positions. Like many others, she has faced institutional consequences, including the cancellation of a planned exhibition at the Saarlandmuseum in Saarbr\u00fccken in 2023.<\/p>\n Downstairs, a series of films extends this line of inquiry. In one, a group arranges watermelons in time-lapse to form phrases such as FREE PALESTINE and NEVER AGAIN. The works belong to Dear Esther, a body of films structured as letters to Esther Bejarano<\/a>, the Auschwitz survivor and lifelong anti-fascist activist. Breitz, who is German and South African and grew up under apartheid, draws these histories into a shared frame, linking questions of memory, censorship, and political speech.<\/p>\n Elsewhere in the city, similar concerns surface through different materials. At Carlier Gebauer, Palestinian conceptual artist Nida Sinnokrot\u2019s<\/a> exhibition Above Ground Below <\/a>presents a new iteration of Rubber Coated Rocks, which draws on the form of rubber-coated bullets as projectiles. Composed of stones, discarded footballs, and other found materials gathered at checkpoints in Palestine, each sculpture binds together elements marked by circulation, impact, and abandonment. The forms are emotive and powerful, resembling heads or clustered bodies: worn, weathered, and held in tension, registering both vulnerability and persistence. Assembled from what can be collected at hand, these aggregations take on a constellatory quality, oscillating between the bodily and the architectural.\u00a0<\/p>\n If Sinnokrot\u2019s work engages violence through material trace, other practices shift the focus toward forms of care and exchange. At daadgalerie, Som Supaparinya\u2019s<\/a> solo exhibition Melted Stars<\/a> brings together moving image and social gesture. Known for excavating lesser-known and repressed histories from her homeland, Supaparinya presents an early video work alongside a new installation examining the changing landscape of northern Thailand and neighbouring regions \u2014 areas shaped by war and the enforcement of colonial and political interests.<\/p>\n After the screening, Thai noodles were offered to visitors. In the context of a highly commercialised weekend, this generous act of hospitality registered as quietly radical: a form of giving without transaction. Accompanied by an artist talk, the event felt like a temporary reprieve from the surrounding intensity.\u00a0<\/p>\n The gesture extends into the work itself. The video Taste of Noodles traces the diversity of noodle cultures in Thailand and Vietnam, examining how each has adapted and reconfigured Chinese culinary traditions across different regions. The film is not just a study of food, but of movement, exchange, and transformation \u2014 how something imported becomes local, and how cultural forms carry layered histories of migration, adaptation, and power.\u00a0<\/p>\n Questions of access, like who moves freely and under what conditions, reappear elsewhere in the city, this time inscribed directly onto the body. At Galerie Neu<\/a>, Sophy Rickett\u2019s<\/a> photographic series Pissing Women (1995) captures women performing an act typically coded as male: urinating while standing in public space. What first appears as a minor transgression reveals a deeper asymmetry. The ease with which men occupy urban space contrasts with the constraints placed on women\u2019s bodies, turning a basic bodily function into a question of access, mobility, and permission.<\/p>\n Shot across sites of institutional and symbolic power in London, from Vauxhall Bridge to the MI5 building and Old Street, the images position the body in direct confrontation with the architecture of authority. The gesture is blunt, deliberate, and beautiful: a reclamation of public space, a disruption of gendered codes of behaviour, and a refusal of the norms that govern visibility and conduct. Presented within the exhibition Counter City, the series resonates with the present moment, as intensifying political pressures and the resurgence of far-right ideologies continue to reshape who is permitted to occupy space and how.<\/p>\n Questions of power and control extend beyond the body into the built environment itself. Across town on the upper level of Spr\u00fcth Magers, Robert Elfgen\u2019s<\/a> exhibition<\/a> utopisch turns toward industrial landscapes and nuclear infrastructure, rendered with a curious sense of utopian optimism. A sculpture of a discarded fuel canister \u2014 polished, reflective, and strangely pristine \u2014 stands out. In a moment defined by resource anxiety and energy precarity, the object reads less as waste than as something newly charged with a scary amount of value.<\/p>\n If Gallery (Sellerie) Weekend Berlin does one thing, it gestures at reconfiguring how this ever-changing city can be navigated. What does it mean to be here and to make it here? How is the city filling in the gaps in between curated spaces? Moving between venues becomes part of the experience itself, and you end up in places you wouldn\u2019t otherwise go.<\/p>\n It was in transit, between one space and the next, that a different kind of intervention happened. On Pohlstra\u00dfe, Berlin-based painter Peter Lindenberg<\/a> staged an impromptu painting performance directly on the sidewalk. With a tarp, a rolling canvas, and a trolley of supplies, he set up in the open \u2014 unsolicited and unapproved \u2014 and began to work.<\/p>\n In contrast to the controlled environments of the galleries, this gesture felt immediate, unmediated, and political. It was, in its own way, one of the more radical moments of the weekend: not because of scale or subject matter, but because it bypassed the structures that typically organise artistic production and visibility. In doing so, it came closest to embodying the premise of the weekend itself \u2014 art dispersed across the city, encountered unexpectedly, and embedded within everyday movement.<\/p>\n MORE: gallery-weekend-berlin.de<\/a><\/p>\n All photography \u00a9 Camille Moreno<\/p>\n CategoriesTags<\/a>Cand Breitz\u2019s performance ice<\/p>\n<\/p>\nInstallation view, Candice Breitz<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Peter Lindenberg painting on the street<\/p>\n