Berlin Snapshot: Art and Culture
Berlin’s cultural landscape is always in motion—layered, unpredictable, and endlessly expansive. With this in mind, we’ve put together a personal selection of worthwhile cultural events and art exhibitions.
Should you wish for further context or tailored recommendations, we’re here for you.
Schinkel Pavillon - Pol Taburet 'The Burden of Papa Tonnerre'
29 March – 13 July 2025
In his first solo show in Germany, French artist Pol Taburet (b. 1997) transforms the Schinkel Pavillon into a dreamlike zone of shifting bodies and blurred identities. His airbrushed, hybrid creatures—part human, part animal—hover between presence and disappearance, inviting the viewer into a world where nothing stays fixed for long.
Sculptures cast in bronze echo the painted figures, anchoring their ghostly forms in space. The architecture itself becomes part of the work: the closed lower level and light-filled upper chamber mirroring Taburet’s own play between concealment and revelation, shadow and radiance.
At its core, the exhibition is about transformation—not just of body or space, but of self.
Tanz in den August
13 August - 30 August 2025
Tanz im August, presented by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, is a festival of contemporary dance in Berlin. Founded in 1989, it showcases contemporary dance performances, recognised companies, innovative choreographers and new aesthetics and formats from around the world. Tanz im August events are shown at locations throughout Berlin in collaboration with various venues.
Along with international companies, the festival features recent work by Berlin artists, together with numerous German and world premieres. With a series of encounters and discursive formats, Tanz im August also invites its audience to take an active part in the festival and to meet its participating artists.
The strengthening of forward-looking tendencies receives as much attention as large-format productions. Tanz im August displays a wide range of current developments in contemporary dance and places them within social and ecological concerns of our globalised world.
Neue Nationalgalerie - Lygia Clark: Retrospective
23 May - 12 October 2025
For the first time in Germany, a major retrospective brings Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–1988) to the Neue Nationalgalerie. Spanning four decades and featuring over 120 works, the exhibition traces her evolution from geometric abstraction to participatory, body-centered experiences that redefined the boundaries of art.
A pioneer of the Neo-Concrete movement, Clark challenged the notion of passive viewing. Her Bichos—foldable, sculptural “critters”—invite interaction, while her later sensorial objects and wearable pieces transform the visitor into part of the work itself. Many of these works are presented here as replicas, made to be touched, worn, and moved.
This is art not only to be seen, but inhabited—both playfully and profoundly. Performances throughout the run of the show will further activate her radical vision: art as something alive, collective, and deeply human.
Neue Nationalgalerie - Yoko Ono: Dream Together
11 April - 14 September 2025
Link to exhibition & tickets
Yoko Ono’s retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie is less a display than an invitation. From folding paper cranes to mending broken ceramics, visitors are asked not just to look—but to take part, to dream, to repair.
Spanning works from the 1960s to today, Dream Together centers on small, poetic gestures that ripple outward: a shared chess game played with identical white pieces; a sky puzzle missing one piece; a Wish Tree outside the gallery, waiting.
Inside, her song Hiroshima Sky Is Always Blue plays softly—a memory, a call. Nearby, newspaper prints from the WAR IS OVER! campaign trace decades of quiet resistance. This is Ono at her most generous and political: art as action, as invitation, as hope.
Gemäldegalerie - “Das alles bin ich!” Christoph Müller’s Gift, Part 1
A World Made of Words and Images
20.05.2025 to 24.08.2025
Link to the exhibition & tickets
The exhibition Das alles bin ich (I Am All That!) presents the generous gift of some 200 works that art collector Christoph Müller has made to the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings). The works on paper – drawings, prints and watercolours – not only show a broad panorama of visual themes spanning five centuries, but also reflect the influences on the collector and his interests. One aspect of the collection at a time will be featured in four successive presentations.
Portraits and plant studies, harbours and history paintings, landscapes and genre scenes: This exhibition shows the entire spectrum of an extraordinary collection. A fascinating cross-section of European art history unfolds within works from early modern history to the present. The exhibited works on paper originate from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and France – telling of people and nature, history and everyday life, beliefs, feelings and the power to create. Representations of figures and nudes are on view, as well as seascapes, nature studies, animals, forests and quite a lot more.
Christoph Müller (1938–2024) was a German publisher, theatre and art critic, art collector and patron, who made many generous gifts to public museums during his lifetime. As the editor-in-chief and co-publisher of the Schwäbisches Tagblatt, he shaped the German media landscape from 1969 to 2004. Müller’s passion for art is reflected in an impressive collection of works from various epochs and regions. He collected across the board, led by individual and personal preferences, as well as sound connoisseurship. His penchant was for 16th and 17th-century Dutch art. In 2007, he gave the Kupferstichkabinett a significant collection of 370 Dutch and Flemish drawings and prints from the 16th to 18th centuries. With the current gift all collection areas of the Kupferstichkabinett’s holdings are being appreciably enhanced and enriched.
Christoph Müller died in Berlin in 2024, at the age of 86. The exhibition should be understood as recognition of his impact in supporting the arts, as a sign of gratitude and an invitation to share his joy in art ‒ a thought that continually motivated him.
Gemäldegalerie - Paintings from the 13th to 18th Century
Permanent exhibition
The Gemäldegalerie holds one of the world’s most remarkable collections of European painting from the 13th to the 18th century. Masterworks by van Eyck, Dürer, Raphael, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer and others are displayed across 72 luminous rooms at the Kulturforum.
The collection invites you to trace the arc of Western art—from late medieval altarpieces to the luminous stillness of the Dutch Golden Age. Highlights include Italian Renaissance icons, German Gothic panels, and one of the largest ensembles of Rembrandt paintings in existence, anchored in an octagonal room at the museum’s heart.
Quiet, spacious, and beautifully arranged, this is a place to get lost in.
Silent Green - Breathing Matter(s) – Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor
17.07.2025 to 24.08.2025
This summer, silent green hosts Breathing Matter(s)—a retrospective of Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, whose boundary-dissolving films have redefined what cinema can be.
Known for the haunting deep-sea immersion of Leviathan (2012), the duo creates works that bypass narrative and explanation entirely. No voiceovers. No scripts. Just image, sound, and sensation—capturing raw experience in all its discomfort, beauty, and strangeness.
Their films blur the lines between anthropology and art, horror and reverence, body and landscape. This is cinema as encounter: with fish, flesh, dreams, and the silent interior of the human form.
Entry is free. A parallel programme of talks and screenings invites deeper immersion.
Bode-Museum - The Angel of History
Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and the Berlin Angels 80 Years After WWII
08.05.2025 to 13.07.2025
At the center of this quietly arresting exhibition is Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920)—a small, strange figure with wide eyes and wings outstretched. Once owned by the philosopher Walter Benjamin, the painting became a powerful symbol in his writings: the “angel of history,” helplessly watching the wreckage of the past as it is swept into the future by a storm we call progress.
This rare loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is joined by Benjamin’s original manuscript and a selection of broken angels—sculptures damaged during the Second World War—alongside film excerpts from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.
Together, they form a poignant meditation on exile, memory, and the unfinished mourning of modern history. The effect is subtle, devastating, and timely.
Feuerle Collection
Permanent exhibition
Inside a renovated World War II telecommunications bunker, The Feuerle Collection offers a rare and reverent encounter: Chinese Imperial furniture, early Khmer sculptures, and works by artists like Anish Kapoor and Zeng Fanzhi are presented side by side in near-darkness.
Designed by architect John Pawson, the space unfolds slowly—cool, meditative, almost subterranean in feel. Light reveals details gradually; sound and scent play active roles. The effect is both intimate and monumental.
Highlights include the world’s first presentation of Chinese Incense Culture as a live, performative art form, held in a dedicated Incense Room, alongside a Sound Room and a submerged Lake Room.
Boros Collection
Permanent exhibition
Link to exhbition & to book a visit
Since 2008, the Boros Collection has presented rotating exhibitions of international contemporary art within a five-story World War II bunker in central Berlin. Transformed by architect Jens Casper into a network of contrasting rooms—some sleek and minimal, others bearing raw traces of the building’s past—the space itself shapes the experience as much as the work on display.
The collection spans painting, sculpture, installation, and photography from 1990 to today. Many pieces are site-specific, engaging directly with the bunker’s layered history as wartime shelter, prison, storage space, and legendary techno club.
Access is by guided tour only, Thursday through Sunday. Booking well in advance is advised.