Triin Metsla is an Estonian art historian, curator, lecturer, and PhD researcher whose work spans from contemporary art to art history, especially the questions surrounding the politics of cultural narratives and canons. Now based in Berlin and working here as a researcher, she brings a thoughtful perspective to one of the world’s most dynamic art capitals.
In this guide, she invites you to wander through Berlin’s ever-evolving art scene and discover the essential shows, spaces, and stories shaping the city this season. So grab a hot cuppa and start plotting your next trip.
Berlin is one of those rare cities where art is made up by strong contrasts: former wartime bunker hosts contemporary art installations, a neoclassical guardhouse holds one of the most important anti-war sculptures ever made, and a cluster of contemporary galleries can showcase the freshest works from young artists. Berlin is perhaps something like a shapeshifter, new every day and always having room for everyone: for the minimalist, the techno romantic, the painterly nostalgist, the conceptual purist, the curious newcomer. Walking from Boros Collection to the Schinkel Pavillon, from the KW to Neue Wache and down to the galleries around Kurfürstenstraße, I’m reminded each time why this place refuses to be summarized – because Berlin is never a single scene.
We first start our walk from Boros Collection. This building is a landmark on its own. The Boros Bunker remains one of Berlin’s most extraordinary exhibition settings: a five-storey, 3,000-m² reinforced concrete air-raid shelter built in 1942 under Albert Speer’s wartime architectural administration. Originally designed to hold thousands during bombings, its rooms were intentionally labyrinthine, with thick walls, low ceilings and a rigid grid of chambers now home to contemporary art. The current presentation is a cross-section of mostly European and Latin American art that positions between material experiment and psychological matter: Anne Imhof’s choreographed, post-club atmospheres; Anna Uddenberg’s uncanny, hyper-sexualised bodies; Alicja Kwade’s cosmological sculptures; Cyprien Gaillard’s archaeological poetics of ruins and ecological collapse.
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To continue with the extraordinary venues, the Schinkel Pavillion has to be mentioned. The pavilion, an important GDR-era building was finalized in 1969 by the architect Richard Paulick combining contradictory elements from Classicism and Modernism. Today, the Schinkel Pavilion with its unusual architecture and strong exhibition program, remains one of my favourite art venues in Berlin. The current show Magic Bullet by Issy Wood is staged like a concert that never quite happens. Upstairs, in the glassy, octagonal pavilion, instruments are set up as if a band could walk in at any moment: guitars waiting on their stands, a drum kit idle, a keyboard half-lit – a reference to Wood’s parallel life as a musician. The exhibition showcases more than twenty-five works by portraying unusual objects with Old Master intensity, using zoomed vision. Selection is haunted by every day desires and anxieties, and ultimately proposing painting as a slow, obsessive way of screenshotting the endless images that shape gender, class, and longing.
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Next stop is KW Institute for Contemporary Art. At KW, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s exhibition centers on their “Starmirror” model – a tool trained on a community-consented dataset that allows artists to generate sound. Rather than treating AI as a novelty, Herndon and Dryhurst frame it as an infrastructural question: Who is represented? Who consents? Who profits? At its center is a songbook generated by a model trained on Ordo Virtutum (1151) – a play in which a soul must choose between good and evil. The play is by Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), the German Benedictine abbess and polymath.
The second show at KW is String Constructions by Kazuko Miyamoto which reads as a quiet but radical re-writing of Minimalism from the inside. The show is her first institutional solo in Germany and gathers the string works she developed in New York from the early 1970s onward – floor-to-ceiling webs of cotton thread and nails that slice up rooms into tilted planes of light and shadow. Although she is often labeled a Minimal or Post-Minimal artist, the exhibition shows that she never simply followed the usual, white-male art canon. Her string works bring in stories of movement, care, and feminist connections, reminding us that Minimalism’s supposedly “neutral” forms were always shaped by specific people and histories.
A special place in Berlin belongs to the Neue Wache. It stands as city’s central memorial to the victims of war and dictatorship, its neoclassical space is almost empty except for a single, devastating artwork: Käthe Kollwitz’s Mother with her Dead Son (1937–38). Enlarged into a monumental bronze and placed directly beneath the oculus, the sculpture is exposed to rain, cold, and shifting daylight – a gesture for the vulnerability and grief. Kollwitz, whose oeuvre depicts poverty, motherhood, political struggle, and the brutality of war, occupies a singular place in art history: one of the first women admitted to the Prussian Academy, an artist whose empathetic realism countered the heroics of official war monuments, and a figure whose work bridged Expressionism, social activism, and modernist graphic art. In Neue Wache, her sculpture functions not simply as a memorial but as a mournful moment over the triumphal, reminding viewers that our most enduring monuments are often those that insist on human fragility rather than power.
Just down the street at Galerie Molitor, the current exhibition of Malabou presents the work of Emanuel de Carvalho, whose solo presentation draws on the philosophical concept of “plasticity,” that meaning doesn’t sit in a single sign but is constantly pushed from one image to the next. Visiting the show is to enter a space where painting and sculpture don’t promise closure but propose open-ended questions – about how images hold memory, how form carries trauma, how meaning is always provisional.
At Tanya Leighton, the current exhibition is Berlin-based painter Lunita-July Dorn’s first solo with the gallery, Wenn man Musik malen könnte, wär die Welt ne schönere (“If one could paint music, the world would be a more beautiful place”). Large acrylic canvases take classic tracks – Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Time, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, or punk and indie songs like Drehtür by Pisse, translating rhythm and mood into fields of color and floating figures. In a way it ties nicely back to Issy Wood’s concert-that-never-starts at the Schinkel: in both cases, Berlin’s current painting scene feels less interested in representation per se than in how different emotional registers can be part of intellectual mind..
Text by Triin MetslaPhotography by Elvira AkzigitovaMake-up by Marie-Carmen Kreutzfeldt