BERLIN.- “KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s 2026 program continues to explore how the city of Berlin and KW’s building can serve as a framework for a program centered on artists and their processes, local production, community and partnerships, and the social, technological, and ecological present. Our opening season draws from the city itself—its materials, people, and architecture. In the summer, a collaborative festival with the Kyiv Biennale centers a local diaspora with a global concern, and in the fall, the program plays with our perceptions and memories of place and time.” —Emma Enderby

Klara Lidén: Kunstwerke
February 21, 2026–May 10, 2026

The first large-scale survey as well as the first institutional solo exhibition of artist Klara Lidén in Berlin. Having lived in the city since the 2000s, Lidén has become a distinctive voice attentive to power relations, the dynamic between interior and exterior space, and forms of civil disobedience. Spread across three floors at KW, the exhibition brings together key works from the early 2000s to the present, including performances, sculptures, spatial interventions, and videos.

Jean Katambayi Mukendi: RATIO
February 21, 2026–May 10, 2026

Constructed from locally sourced recycled materials, Congolese artist Mukendi’s work addresses global structural inequities in resource extraction and power distribution, questioning the dualities that shape our world, between the natural and the artificial, growth and destruction. Ratio is Mukendi’s first solo exhibition in Germany, and features works created on site during his six-week residency at KW.

Else Marie Pade: Partitur
February 21, 2026–May 10, 2026

The first international exhibition dedicated to late Danish composer and sound artist Else Marie Pade. A path-maker of musique concrète and European electronic music, her works carry listeners through fairy tales, cityscapes, and nightmares, with scores that capture notation, process, and life’s cacophonous narrative spaces. The exhibition unfolds as an immersive listening space, and is accompanied by a live program.

6th Kyiv Biennial: A Bird That Cannot Land
June 11, 2026–September 13, 2026

The Kyiv Biennial is a nomadic, international project that interweaves artistic, political, and social issues. For its tenth anniversary, it took place across Europe through a series of exhibitions and events. In a context of growing conflicts and shifting political realities, A Bird That Cannot Land, its chapter at KW, centers on the notion of a “Middle-East-Europe” and its histories of coloniality and imperialism. By expanding the scope of the Kyiv Biennial and linking post-Soviet Europe with the Baltics, Central and Southwest Asia, and the Mediterranean, the exhibition and its live and discursive programs aim to open space for listening to interconnected pasts and presents, and for rethinking how geographies, histories, and realities are told and perceived.

Susan Hiller: Bad Dreams
October 17, 2026–January 10, 2027

Known as a groundbreaking figure in conceptual and video art, the exhibition reveals British artist Susan Hiller’s atemporal yet strikingly contemporary reflection on how personal and communal imaginaries are formed and circulated within cultural artefacts, mass media, and popular culture. The artist’s first survey in Berlin, it features hypnotic and phantasmagorical audiovisual works alongside sculptures of collected domestic objects and images drawn from the internet, film, and television.

KOO JEONG A: OUSSSEAN
October 17, 2026–January 10, 2027

The first major solo show of South Korean artist KOO JEONG A in Germany. Through modest yet enigmatic forms, KOO assembles intangible elements, such as forces, light, scent, sound, and temperature, into multisensory environments that probe perception and the limits of our visual register. Newly reconfigured in response to KW’s architecture, the exhibition brings together key works from the past decades.

Rafik Greiss
October 17, 2026–January 10, 2027

The first institutional solo by Egyptian artist Rafik Greiss and the premiere of a newly commissioned film. Across a body of work that unfolds through different temporalities and media, Greiss explores how time surfaces, erodes, and flickers back as sensation or afterimage. Conceived as a cinematic essay, Greiss’s new film unfolds through fragments, accelerations, pauses and returns, suspended between personal recollection and collective history.

KW as Kunst-Werke

Building on the institution’s longstanding role as a place of encounter and production rooted in Berlin, KW continue to develop its artist residency and commissioning series, along with Pogo Bar, its monthly experimental program dedicated to live and time-based practices by Berlin-based emerging artists, as well as its partnership with BPA// Berlin Program for Artists, presenting the fellows’ annual exhibition.

KW x DAAD

This series of encounters centres around film and literature. Taking the form of lectures, discussions, screenings, and other formats, it gathers alumni and fellows of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program with Berlin-based practitioners within a space where mediums, voices, and imaginaries meet and resonate.