Former Courthouse Lehrter Straße, 2025, Image: Raisa Galofre
13th Berlin Biennale
14 June – 14 September 2025
Berlin Biennale
The 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art will take place from June 14 to September 14, 2025, unfolding across four distinct venues in the city: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Sophiensæle, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, and a former courthouse on Lehrter Straße in the district of Moabit. With the inclusion of this former judicial site, the Biennale introduces a new space for contemporary art into Berlin’s cultural topography, extending its commitment to activating spaces marked by complex and layered histories.
Curated by Zasha Colah, with Valentina Viviani as Assistant Curator, the 13th edition pursues a distinct line of inquiry into contemporary artistic languages drawn from diverse geographies and histories. The curatorial approach reflects on the capacity of art to operate amid political turbulence, engaging with practices shaped by resistance, dislocation, and non-dominant narratives.
The selected venues — each carrying ambivalent and contested pasts — span moments of histories from the German Empire to the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, the divided Germany, and the post-1989 period. These spaces bear the physical and psychological traces of violence, protest, and surveillance, while also speaking to how artists have, over time, re-appropriated and re-commoned them as sites of cultural action and imagination.
From KW, where the Berlin Biennale was first founded, to the newly activated former courthouse in Moabit, the exhibition forms a walkable urban route through the heart of Berlin. This movement through the city is inspired by the circular paths of foxes—a recurring motif in the curatorial narrative—suggesting strategies of navigation, evasion, and urban coexistence.
Further emphasizing embeddedness and collaboration, the 13th Berlin Biennale has initiated co-curatorial projects with a number of local institutions, or “sisterhoods”, including the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), Filmrauschpalast Moabit at Kulturfabrik, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, and Sophiensæle. These partnerships underscore the Biennale’s engagement with Berlin’s living artistic networks and its intention to work from within its communities.
As the city continues to be a site of historical palimpsest and artistic experimentation, the 13th Berlin Biennale promises a resonant and politically attuned edition, navigating both the infrastructural and poetic dimensions of contemporary society from the vantage point of Berlin.
