Berlin Art Week 2026: Kyiv Biennial, Carrie Mae Weems, and Maurizio Cattelan Explore Displacement and Belonging

Key facts

• Berlin Art Week 2026 took place the day after the AfD's victory in Saxony-Anhalt
• Maurizio Cattelan's "NIGHT" at the Neue Nationalgalerie was his first major solo exhibition in Germany
• The Kyiv Biennial's "A Bird That Cannot Land" at KW Institute for Contemporary Art was its second edition in Berlin
• The Kyiv Biennial was founded in Kyiv in 2015 and has become nomadic since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine
• The Kyiv Biennial exhibition brought together more than forty artists and participants across generations
• Carrie Mae Weems's "The Heart of the Matter" at C/O Berlin featured more than a hundred photographs and videos spanning over four decades
• Arash Nassiri's "A Bug's Life" at Fluentum was his first institutional solo presentation in Germany
• Hamid Omrani was an Iranian architect whose Beverly Hills mansions were sought after by wealthy Iranian diaspora families who settled in the USA after the 1979 revolution
• Polish twins Alicja and Bożena Wahl opened what became the first commercial gallery in Poland in the 1970s
• "Projections onto the East" at n.b.k. and Schinkel Pavillon featured artists from Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and Germany
• The 36th Bienal de São Paulo's contribution to Berlin was titled "Not All Travellers Walk Roads of Humanity as Practice" at Haus der Kulturen der Welt
• John Berger wrote a posthumous letter to Rosa Luxemburg in 2015; Luxemburg wrote letters from prison in 1918