Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien jointly present works by the recipients of the Berlin Senate’s 2025 visual arts work stipend. Staged in parallel across both venues, the exhibition gathers international positions from artists living and working in Berlin. The show once again highlights the vital role that reliable funding structures play in the production and dissemination of contemporary art.

United by an engagement with societal, political, and historical questions, the artists critically reflect on power dynamics, norms, and ideologies. Spanning a broad spectrum of aesthetic approaches and media – including video, sound, photography, painting, drawing, installation, and performance – the works negotiate diverse, and at times contradictory, realms of experience and reality. They address the visible and invisible power structures that govern individual and collective perception in physical and digital space alike, and determine how knowledge and cultural expression are canonized.

Other works revolve around the phenomenon of memory – its processual nature, its fragility, and its inherent ambivalence. This theme is echoed in the exhibition title, which borrows a line from a letter by American poet Emily Dickinson (*1830 †1886) to a close friend: “Memory is a strange Bell – Jubilee, and Knell.” Through the metaphor of a ringing bell – signaling both joy and loss – memory is framed as an ambivalent, dynamic process rather than a static state. Simultaneously, the quote evokes a present defined by paradoxical tensions, a perpetual oscillation between multiple crises and the pursuit of progress and growth.

Exhibitions

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Chausseestraße 128/129, 10115 Berlin

Opening: March 13, 2026, 7 pm

Duration: March 14 – May 3, 2026

Artists: Nadja Buttendorf, Markus Draper, Martin Eberle, Noi Fuhrer, Shaun Motsi, Leonie Nagel

Curator: Lidiya Anastasova

Discourse and Outreach Program in collaboration with Feben Amara

Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kottbusser Str. 10/d, 10999 Berlin

Opening: March 19, 2026, 7 pm

Duration: March 20 – May 17, 2026

Artists: İpek Burçak, Olga Monina, Ania Nowak, Niclas Riepshoff, Max Schaffer, Alina Schmuch, Antje Taubert, Sergio Zevallos

Curator: Antje Weitzel

bethanien.de

Discourse and Outreach Program at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.)

Saturday, March 21, 2026

Exhibition Tour

3 pm at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein / 5 pm at Künstlerhaus Bethanien

In German and English

Thursday, April 16, 2026, 7 pm

Shaun Motsi, Masters, 2023

Film screening

In English

Samstag, 25. April 2026, 17 Uhr

Technofascism: Power and Authoritarianism in Digital Space

Panel discussion with Anna-Verena Nosthoff (Junior Professor for the Ethics of Digitization, University of Oldenburg) and Paul Feigelfeld (Professor for Digitality and Cultural Mediation, Mozarteum University Salzburg), moderated by Christine Watty (journalist, Deutschlandfunk Kultur)

In German

Sunday, May 3, 2026, 5 pm

Film Presentation

In the context of Leonie Nagel’s displayed collage series, with Berlin youth theater participants.

In German

Free admission to all events

For the discourse program at Künstlerhaus Bethanien see bethanien.de

Publication

On the occasion of the exhibition, a bilingual publication (DE/EN) will be published in the series “n.b.k. Berlin” published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König.