What did I miss? It has been my belief ( and I know I am not alone in this!) that when Bernie got ousted from the primaries on March 1st, 2020, we entered a dark and twisted alternative universe where things get progressively worse in a more complex and, at the same time, exceedingly ridiculous way every season. A Clown Upside Down world, if you wish. Hey, Happy New Year of the Fire Horse! I am binge-watching this train wreck of a humanity plot where a global pandemic era gave way to an extreme cancel culture era, which gave way to a mix of natural disasters, hostile takeovers, a drooling president who said he will be the bridge to a new generation but just sat there, the starvation of a captured population in Gaza, a second Trump presidency, Greta Thunberg on sailboats and so so many war crimes on Instagram. I often feel the need to turn to my fellow human and ask, "Are you still watching this?" If you had told me in the summer of 2020, at the height of the George Floyd protests and Defund the Police demands, that there is an even more racist state agency, A Bush-era orphan Obama took in and funded but dormant at the time, that ends up unapologetically shooting a white woman in the face for being annoying, a few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed (!!!) I would have turned to Madonna and said, " Can you believe this shit? If you had told me in July that the same people who cheered Trump and Netanyahu on for bombing the sh*t out of Iran would also cheer the brave young people's ( and yes, women, it is always the women who need to be the poster victim for supremacy) revolution this week, well, I would have believed that. I know by now we have all become expert content manipulators. The people of Iran revolt against an oppressive regime; no, not the oppressive regime the US installed in the 50s or the one US and Israel want to install now, the one in between. And somehow the US stole Venezuela's president and then paraded him in NY in a van as if it was a Kanye West ad. Women, Life, Oil Company Interests, ammaright? 

This is an essential read; I don't know why they buried it right before the holidays. It took me a bit to get over the fact that David Velasco considered himself and Artforum "a leftist art publication" affectionately called "Wokeforum", I mean... lolz. But he writes sincerely, intelligently, and yes, from an unapologetically leftist position of solidarity with Palestinian self-determination. He has worked for 18 years at Artforum, the last six as Editor in Chief after a MeToo ousting, and was fired in October 2023 for publishing one of the first Palestinian solidarity letters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. He seems genuinely surprised that something so beneign (and banal) got him fired. Going after the Sackler family didn't get him fired; commissioning a fiery polemic that cinched the departure of weapons manufacturer Warren Kanders from the Whitney's board didn't do the trick; nor did his support for bail funds and defund-the-police demands in 2020. (It was all fun and games when we could cancel bad people, and each other.) Unsurprisingly, it is Palestine that got him fired.
 “The art world, with all its progressive scaffolding and humanist ornamentation, was practically designed to celebrate and aestheticise every rebellion, but it couldn't metabolise Palestine. It still can't.”

Velasco describes Nan Goldin's opening at the Neue National Galerie in detail and reveals something I didn't know: Biesenbach gave a rebuttal speech to Goldin's (after being booed off the stage) when everyone had left. "A puzzling speech describing how he turned 20 in Israel, how he met Nan in 1992, how he was a caregiver for Susan Sontag in 2004, how Susan taught him to "be unafraid"- Biesenbach always be namedropping even when he must have been very much afraid for his livelihood.

I feel this. Opportunities just sizzled all around me the last two years. Civilized smiles and turned backs. I post and unpost the little watermelon emoji on my profile. Such a joyful little image can it signlehandedly implode my career? Not to mention the self-doubts: Is it mid-career, is it Palestine, or is it me? One by one, my Instagram comrades have fallen silent. People want to live their lives. People move on. The algorithm is relentless in training us on what can be said and what cannot. 

Unlike David, I never really had the cushy blanket of establishment to warm my revolutionary ambitions, a crochet blanket at best, but I try to keep the flame alive. The more of us there are, the more of us are there—two tiers of involvement. You can speak up. You can protect the people who speak up by continuing to employ them. And here is a not-so-subtle thank you to all the galleries who are still members of Berlin Independents Guide.

 

Equator is a new magazine for politics, culture and art. You can become a free or a paying member. They accept fiction, non fiction and poetry pitches. 

In Madness and Practice, Liz Dawson's paintings and drawings and Lucy Teasdale's sculptures draw us into a space where gestures, surfaces, and fragments fold back onto themselves, narrating a persistence in small but deliberate shifts. Marks that initially suggest they were quickly made and forms that appear pliable reveal how the seemingly futile can overlap with an attentiveness that is breathtakingly poetic. (Text: Ilyn Wong)

Welcome Address: Thomas Isenberg, Deputy chairperson of the board and Dr. Marc Wellmann, Artistic Director Haus am Lützopwlatz (HaL)
Introduction: Max Dax, Curator of the exhibition. The artist will be present.

Post-Millennium Tension is Radenko Milak's first exhibition in Berlin and his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany since his critically acclaimed show 365 at Kunsthalle Darmstadt in 2014. The title of the exhibition points to the show's underlying current depicting a world that has come off its hinges in the still-young 21st century. It refers to the second album by the British artist Tricky, who released Pre-Millennium Tension in 1996.

Milak's watercolours establish a connection to the collective unconscious by referencing decisive events of the early 21st century. In numerous black-and-white watercolours—some composed of many individual sheets assembled into monumental images—the artist, born in 1980 in Travnik, Bosnia, presents key moments of world history. These works, based on iconic photographs of current and past political and social events, are rendered in watercolour. By shifting from one medium (photography) to another (watercolour), Milak captures and reflects the growing tension, instability, and uncertainty of the world while maintaining a consistently neutral standpoint.

The exhibition forms a complex narrative that mirrors contradictory developments whose loose ends converge in the 21st century. Beginning with a reference to Francisco de Goya's Desastres de la Guerra (1810–14), Milak's paintings depict scenes ranging from the destruction of Cologne during the Second World War, to Stanley Kubrick's portrayal of artificial intelligence in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the Munich massacre of 1972, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and Berlin's present-day Berghain.

wih Brenda Alamilla, Yedam Ann, Mara Kirchberg, Kodac Ko, Malin Kuht, muSamichelle mattiuzzi, Sarah Reva Mohr, Mio Okido, Paulette Penje, Belén Resnikowski, Aura Roig, Victoria Sarangova, Sophia Tabatadze, Saša Tatić, Marie Zbikowska

The exhibition shows current works by fifteen visual artists working in Berlin: surreal paintings and archival photographs that challenge our visual perception, while multimedia installations xplore power structures and open up portals to other worlds. In research-based video works and drawings, temporality becomes tangible as a gesture of remembrance. What the diverse motifs and media have in common is that they take a look up close—at individual biographies, at social conditions, and at political struggles.

Wednesday, February 25, 2026, 6 pm Finissage: exhibition tour with Yolanda Kaddu-Mulindwa & Hannah Kruse

Friday, 23 January to Saturday, 24 January, with free admission from 8 PM to 10 AM the next morning.
ONLY 2 WEEKS LEFT to see The Clock — the exhibition ends Jan 25, 2026!
Open Tuesday–Sunday, daily until 8 PM 
The exhibition is made possible by the @freundedernationalgalerie.

Neue National Galerie 

Potsdamer Straße 50, 10785 Berlin

Mon 26th January, from 6–10 pm @BcmA opening of the group exhibition Our Voice
Participating artists: Tatiana Zhabina, Kasia Knychała, Hanna Hajda, Océane Houssin, Adeline Meilliez, Sarah Maria Serve, Suska Bastian, FEMEN GERMANY
There is a strength within us.
Sometimes we feel it, sometimes we forget it, sometimes we are convinced it does not exist, that we have lost it, that we never had it, and yet it is always there.
It is this strength that the exhibition “Our Voice” speaks of. Through the work of various women artists, the exhibition explores sexual violence, the impact it has on our lives, and, above all, how we continue to move forward in our bodies, in our everyday lives.
“Our Voice” invites us to look at what is said and what is left unsaid, through works that tell stories of pain, fracture, and anger, but also of creativity and the capacity to rebuild, or not. Because rebuilding oneself can also be an obligation that weighs heavily.
This work takes place within a reality that, in Germany in 2024, shows:
53,451 women were victims of sexual violence;
Prostitution is legal, rendering the trade of women’s bodies and sexuality legal, along with the sexual violence that can result from it;
308 women were killed. Among these, 191 by a partner, ex-partner, or family member;
18,224 women were recorded as victims of digital/online violence (threats, harassment, stalking, etc.)
The list goes on. These figures only represent violence reported to the authorities; many instances remain unreported.
Talking about it again and again is vital to make our voices heard.
Curated by @claire___bouchard

At the intersection of two generations, the exhibition "Like Wolves on the Fold" presents the works of Gerhard Hoehme, a key figure of post-war German Informel, and Delia Jürgens, a young artist who explores questions of contemporary painting in the information age.

"Fold" stands for the invisible in between: on the one hand, as a seismographic mountain fold that opens up a new meaning between the two artistic positions. On the other hand, "Fold" refers to Jürgens' series "Fassaden – A Morning Full of Dust, You're Half Inside and Half Way Out," in which she processes impressions of street life in Los Angeles, alluding to the greedy, intrusive behavior of investors towards distressed properties.

The exhibition combines the two artistic perspectives in the day and night rhythm of light and invites the audience to discover the tension-filled spaces between history, the present and urban life.

Mateusz Choróbski: P.OST @Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz 
P.OST, the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by Polish artist Mateusz Choróbski. Developed specifically for the Kunstverein, the exhibition brings together sound, video, light, and sculptural installations that reflect on memory, transformation, and the layered identity of Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Choróbski’s work explores the tension between nostalgia and memory, questioning the tendency to idealize the past and examining how nostalgia can be understood - as sentimentality, heritage, or misunderstanding.

The title P.OST refers both to the vanished OST sign on the Volksbühne and to the question of what comes “after the East.” Drawing inspiration from the architectural and cultural history of Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, particularly Hans Poelzig’s designs for the Babylon cinema, he transforms the gallery into a stage built from traces, shadows, and fragments of the surrounding urban fabric.

His broader practice spans video, installation, performance, sound, and sculpture. Choróbski frequently juxtaposes the human body with architecture, exploring what remains when social, political, or material systems reach exhaustion—ruined modernist buildings, the weight of debt, or the fragile body at rest. 

On January 24, we invite you to the matinée “The Just City – Zine E: Self-Determined Urban Practice.” Over coffee, snacks, and mimosas, we’ll come together to flip through zines and casually brunch the system away! As part of the event, we will introduce the LIVErary and launch an open call for publications on collective urban practice. We welcome published and self-published works in all formats, especially from intersectional perspectives. Simply bring your contributions with you and exhibit them together with us. At the same time, they will become part of our growing archive!
The highlight of the day is the release of the new issue of The Just City, created in cooperation with New York University Gallatin. You can also look forward to workshops on zine-making and linocut printing, as well as a curated zine selection from the LIVErary.
Come by, read, listen, and think ahead with us. Or brunch your way deliciously into tomorrow with waffles by @buendnissfeuerundflamme.
Image: @jakobwirth