Program 2025
KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present its Annual Program 2025, marking the first year under the new directorship of Emma Enderby.
“Since arriving in Berlin and starting at KW in May 2024, I have focused on seeing how the city and our building can be explored in a program centered on artists and their process, community and partnerships, and the social and ecological present. Whether the artists live in Berlin or not, the city serves as a nexus, shaping our work through its people, materials, and stories. A bodily understanding is key, from the transforming of the institution’s entrance and visual identity in collaboration with the design studio Correspondence later this year, to a program that centers ideas, research and lived realities. It will be experienced through the perception of light and tone, sound and song, image and word, always working in dialogue with the ecology of the building—both its interiors and exteriors as well as the spaces in between.” – Emma Enderby, director
Matt Copson, Age of Coming, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Lodovico Corsini, Brussels, Photo: Benjamin Baltus.
Matt Copson
Coming of Age.
Age of Coming.
Of Coming Age.
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15 February – 4 May 2025
Opening: 14 February 2025
Curator: Emma Enderby
Assistant Curator: Lara Scherrieble -
Coming of Age. Age of Coming. Of Coming Age marks the first institutional solo exhibition by artist Matt Copson (b. 1992, UK). Copson’s multidisciplinary practice explores existential questions surrounding life and contemporary subjectivity, increasingly defined by constant flux, spectacle, and attention. Drawing from pop culture, myths, fables, and cultural archetypes, he creates video works, sculptures, operas, and performative installations that incorporate lasers, sound, and text.
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The exhibition at KW will center on Copson’s recent large-scale immersive laser installation. His Coming of Age trilogy—an animated bildungsroman featuring a newborn baby as the protagonist—will take over KW’s main hall. The operatic work explores the basic truths of the human experience through the eyes of a baby exploring the sense and the nonsense of this world.
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The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first monograph, co-published with CURA..
- Supported by LUMA Foundation. Mediapartner: Yorck Kinogruppe
Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2024: Sung Tieu
1992, 2025
15 February – 4 May 2025
Opening: 14 February 2025
Curator: Léon Kruijswijk
Assistant Curator: Linda Franken
The research-driven work of Sung Tieu (b. 1987, VT) reflects on nuanced dynamics between individual lives and overarching systemic forces. Through installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, text, video, and sound, she investigates archival, bureaucratic, and institutional frameworks that govern inclusion and exclusion, legality and illegality.
In 1992, 2025, the artist interrogates the post-Wall repercussions for the Vietnamese contract workers of the former GDR and migrants like herself, examining how the socio-political conditions of the time shaped social roles and communities with lasting impact. Tieu foregrounds 1992 as a pivotal reference point—the year of her arrival in Germany, which is also marked by a wave of nationwide right-wing extremist violence, further exacerbated by the actions of state institutions, including the police.
Frequently adopting a critical perspective on her immediate working environment, Tieu takes a new commission as an opportunity to implement institutional changes at KW, set to take effect in 2025.
Sung Tieu is the recipient of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2024, which has been awarded jointly since 2020 with the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. In addition to prize money, the award includes an exhibition for which the artist creates new
work as well as a publication.
The Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research is supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion and awarded in cooperation with KW Institute for Contemporary Art.
Miloš Trakilović
Not a Love Song
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15 February – 4 May 2025
Opening: 14 February 2025
Curators: Emma Enderby, Léon Kruijswijk
Assistant Curator: Linda Franken -
Not a Love Song is the first institutional solo exhibition of the Bosnian-Dutch artist Miloš Trakilović (b. 1989, BA) in Germany. In his practice, the artist questions how digitalization processes influence our perception of history and reality. Often focusing on contemporary warfare, its mediatization and lingering consequences, he examines mechanisms of dissolution, fragmentation, memory and loss.
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At KW, Trakilović presents the installation 564 Tracks (Not a Love Song Is Usually a Love Song), for which he worked with artificial intelligence (AI) to research the past. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the war in Bosnia (1992–1995)—which resulted in mass expulsions as well as the genocide of thousands of Bosnian Muslims—had not yet erupted, though the tensions leading to Yugoslavia’s violent dissolution were already perceptible. In 564 Tracks, the artist revisits Yugoslav music produced between 1989 and 1992 and employs AI to analyze how the rising sociopolitical tensions resonated sonically. The work proposes considering to what extent cultural production could prefigure impending crises—a hypothesis that could offer insight into both past and present conflicts and their echoes.
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Supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and by Mondriaan Fonds.
Jessica Ekomane
Antechamber
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15 February – 4 May 2025
Opening: 14 February 2025
Curator: Emma Enderby
Assistant Curator: Nikolas Brummer -
With Antechamber, the Berlin-based sound artist and computer musician Jessica Ekomane (b. 1989, FR) presents a new sound installation in the attic of KW. The newly commissioned work continues Ekomane’s inquiry into how sound can act as a transformative force and intertwines her research into African mathematical knowledge systems with electronic compositional practices. Her compositions emphasize the cathartic and physical effects of sound created through the interplay of rhythmic patterns, melody, noise, and psychoacoustics. The multichannel sound installation transforms the attic into a site for embodied listening, offering a space for reflection on modes of knowledge, social listening habits as well as their cultural imprint.
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Supported by Institut Français and the French Ministry of Culture as well as Trampoline,
Association in support of the French art scene, Paris.
13th Berlin Biennale
for Contemporary Art
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14 June – 14 September 2025
Opening: 13 June 2025
Curator: Zasha Colah
Assistant Curator: Valentina Viviani
More information: 13.berlinbiennale.de -
The Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art takes place every two years at varying locations in Berlin. Its 13th edition is curated by Zasha Colah, Valentina Viviani is the assistant curator. Colah: “The large presence of foxes within the inner city of Berlin is a starting point for thinking through the 13th Berlin Biennale as an investigation of fugitivity. The encounter with urban foxes has been described by poets as presencing, a spinning in place, delaying in the fox’s presence for a time. The mind encounters otherness, but does not move on to associative thought chains—or prejudice. This encounter has less to do with the human identifying with the fox, but of entering a new sphere of equality with it. This proposal is a working concept of fugitivity understood as the cultural ability of a work of art to set its own laws in the face of lawful violence.”
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The Berlin Biennale is organized by KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V.
The Berlin Biennale is funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). The Kulturstiftung des Bundes is funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media).
Kazuko Miyamoto
String Constructions
18 October 2025 – 11 January 2026
Opening: 17 October 2025
Curators: Emma Enderby, Sofie Krogh Christensen
Assistant Curator: Lara Scherrieble
String Constructions at KW is the first solo presentation devoted to Japanese-American artist Kazuko Miyamoto (b. 1942, JP) in Germany, a leading figure in the post-minimal and feminist movements in New York since 1964. Her works on paper, photographs, sculptures of string and nails, as well as her spatial installations all present unique performative sensibilities towards the body’s relationship to space, material, and the politics of labor and display. During the 1970s–1980s, Miyamoto developed many of her works as part of co-organizing the artist-run A.I.R. Gallery in SoHo—the first exhibition space dedicated to women artists. In her own gallery space Onetwentyeight, she likewise continues to promote feminist and collective practices today.
Spread across the first, second, third floor and the courtyard of KW, String Constructions focuses on Miyamoto’s eponymous sculpture series and traces the shifts in her methodology. It is accompanied by a rich public program, highlighting collaborative structures in Berlin, and a collection of texts featuring new conversations and memoirs about Miyamoto, her practice, and approach by her friends, peers, and collaborators.
Supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
BPA// Exhibition 2025
November – December 2025
Artists: Umut Azad Akkel, Felisha Carenage, Will Fredo, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Tra My Nguyen, Stanton Taylor, Rexy Tseng, Prateek Vijan, Hana Yoo, Julija Zaharijević
KW and BPA// Berlin program for artists founded their partnership in 2020. BPA// is a two-year independent mentoring program that fosters exchange between emerging and established Berlin-based artists. Founded in 2016 by Angela Bulloch, Simon Denny, and Willem de Rooij, BPA// organizes studio visits, public talks, and presentations.The BPA// Exhibition 2025 at KW will show works by second year BPA// participants produced over the course of their working period with the program.
Commissioning Series
Asad Raza
2025 onward
Pogo Bar
Ongoing event series
Curators: Linda Franken, Lara Scherrieble
Pogo Bar is a monthly experimental format for live and time-based arts at KW. The series will take place on the third Thursday of each month during running exhibition seasons. It will offer a stage for works in progress, excerpts of existing works, screenings, or dialogue of Berlin-based emerging artists working with performance, sound, video, and spoken word. Pogo Bar primarily takes place in the KW basement, which has been used partly as a club and partly as a bar since the late 1990s.
Upcoming Pogo Bars with: Neva Demure, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Horizontaler Gentransfer
Due to the announced cuts of public funding in the art and culture sector, further exhibition
programs for 2025 cannot yet be published.
Press contact
Marie Kube
Tel. +49 30 243459-41
Anna Falck-Ytter
Tel. +49 30 243459-134
press@kw-berlin.de
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin
www.kw-berlin.de
KW Institute for Contemporary Art is institutionally supported by the Senate Department for Culture
and Community, Berlin.
The exhibitions and projects within the program of 2025 are in collaboration with and/or supported by:
Titles and exhibition dates are subject to change