The persistent feeling of multiple existential threats is a central symptom of our contemporary society. These threats manifest themselves directly in the individual’s perception, but they are also communicated through the media, thereby shaping the collective awareness of entire communities. Contemporary art often functions like a seismograph, registering with incredible sensitivity the “vibrations” of all kinds of dangers and threats. Both concretely tangible and only perceptible through mediation. How do artists from the neighboring countries of Germany and Poland analyze similar threats? How do they react to them, how do they process them, and what strategies of resilience or direct response do they develop?

The artistic contributions to the German-Polish exhibition, which jointly presents leading faculty members from the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań and guests from Berlin, navigate the tension between acute and perceived threats, between experience and fear.

Natalia Brandt, Zehra Doğan, Nezaket Ekici, Diana Fiedler, Adam Gillert, Joanna Hoffmann, Anna Kędziora, Karolina Komasa, Kamila Kobierzyńska, Maciej Kozłowski, Katarzyna Klich, Ewa Kubiak, Katarzyna Kujawska-Murphy, Maciej Kurak, Ewa Kulesza, Hanna Łuczak, Janusz Marciniak, Paul Magee, Anahita Razmi, Sonia Rammer, Magda Starska, Sebastian Trzoska, Anna Tyczyńska, Veronika Witte, Marc Tobias Winterhagen

Curated by Prof. Dr. Marta Smolińska and Dr. Ralf F. Hartmann

With the kind support of the Foundation for German-Polish Cooperation and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

Clear the runway for current works by students, graduates, and master’s students from Prof. Kerstin Drechsel’s Painting and Graphic Arts class at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, and Prof. Tilo Baumgärtel and Prof. Heide Nord’s Painting class at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle. The participating artists work with painting in a thoroughly classical manner while also exploring the medium’s boundaries: from artistic graphics to video and comics, and on to object art and installation. The panorama of selected works offers a comprehensive insight into the vitality and freshness of the classical medium, as it is taught today at two of the most significant art academies in eastern Germany, each with its own long-standing traditions. With Kerstin Drechsel and Tilo Baumgärtel, two very different painterly approaches shape the work in the specialized classes and make the exhibition a fascinating panoramic view of young painting and its perspectives on the artistic future.

Featuring works by:

Luke Carter, Anne Chpakovski, Franziska Dathe, Niklas Dietzel, Leon Friederichs, Kristina Hajduchova, Luna Haser, Selma Kan, Mathilda Köhler, Marthe Lallemand, Felix Lorenz, Klara Schöll und Anali Vakili aus der HGB  Leipzig

Rike Bewer, Ben Billhardt, Sarah Goerke, Henning Gundlach, Nina Hach, Luca Japkinas, Youjeong Kim, Yerina Lee, Louisa Pieper, Naomi Pietros, Tom Plehn, Michelle Sorin, Johanne Iris Kyrilla Steiner und Elektra Tzamouranis von der Burg Giebichenstein Halle

In 2025 and 2026, two art-in-architecture competitions were held in the Spandau district. A total of 20 designs by 28 artists are being presented in a joint exhibition.

Competition participants:

New construction of a high school on Rhenaniastraße in Haselhorst

Christiane Dellbrügge & Ralf de Moll / Andreas von Ow / Marta Dyachenko & Albert Weis / Kasia Fudakowski / Cisca Bogman & Via Lewandowsky & Oliver Störmer / Neda Aydin / Alice Hauck & Amelie Plümpe / Malte Bartsch (Contest prize) / Manaf Halbouni & Roberto Uribe / Abie Franklin & Daniel Hölzl

Construction of the Insel Gartenfeld Comprehensive School in Siemensstadt

Martin Binder / Zuzanna Czebatul / Roland Fuhrmann / Dagmara Genda / Stephan Kurr / Marion Orfila / Pfelder / Judith Seng / Studio KIM & ILLI / Anna Witt

(Jury meeting to be held after this map goes to press)

The two competitions were organized in cooperation with HOWOGE Wohnungsbaugesellschaft mbH/Schulbau, which is constructing both schools for the Spandau district. The schools are scheduled for completion in 2028 and 2029.

The Julius Cultural Award is intended to express clear appreciation for Spandau's creative artists and strengthen the cultural diversity of the district. In 2025, the prize was dedicated to the visual arts and was awarded to photo artist Georgia Krawiec (1st prize), illustrator Karen Scheper (2nd prize), and painter Aydin Öztek (3rd prize). The cabinet exhibition provides a concentrated insight into the work of the three prize winners.

Matysik uses tools from the natural sciences and visual arts for his speculative biology of the future. Recording, describing, and classifying are just as much a part of his artistic practice as camouflage, deception, and irony. Models of post-evolutionary species with proliferating forms reveal that the biological nature of humans is a dead end on the path to the future and can only survive through entanglement and transformation with other realities of life. 

The Swiss-American photographer Vera Mercer (1936 in Berlin) initially trained as a dancer before turning to the photography of objects, portraits, and neo-baroque still lifes. Mercer worked with photography and quickly became known primarily as a portraitist. From the 1990s onward, she also created wall murals for restaurants. Her richly detailed still lifes masterfully stage natural and cultural objects and are exhibited internationally.

Sharon Kivland’s exhibition of 120 hand drawings refers to the Republican Calendar introduced in France from 1792 onwards, which established an entirely new way of measuring time based on the decimal system. Natural phenomena, living beings, and plants were the primary reference points. Instead of the Gregorian calendar’s allusions to gods and kings, this was conceived as an instrument oriented toward reform, although it did not endure for long.

The exhibition project Urban Reflections explores the city with its urban “images” and public space as a metaphor, medium, and matrix for current, socially relevant developments. Urban Reflections creates, through specific interventions in the spatial settings of the ZAK, installative microcosms that invite viewers to engage constructively in a dialogue with the art and, in this way—much like on an adventure playground—to keep building upon their own reality.

Pfelder’s artistic approach and work involve giving certain spaces or locations an appropriate new use, repurposing them, or enabling their use in the first place, thereby redefining them. In his situational interventions in urban environments, he engages very concretely with urban and social structures. Questions concerning public space are addressed, and the notion of publicness itself becomes a central theme. The integrative and communicative character of his works is particularly important in this context.

The Franco-Canadian artist duo Michelle Héon (*1948) and Gilles Morissette (*1955) are exhibiting  for the first time together in Berlin installation works made from handmade paper. For their exhibition, which ZAK is showing as the second station after Kunstverein Leverkusen at Schloss Morsbroich, they have explored the themes of nature and landscape, or more precisely the island situation of both the moated castle of Morsbroich and the citadel of Spandau. 

On the ZAK Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst 1st floor we are showing selected objects from the Spandau art collection with works by Barbara Hindahl, Alf Löhr, Daniel Sambo-Richter and others. You might think that focussing on one’s own collection is a phenomenon of old art museums. Not at all, because the district of Spandau also has a collection of works of fine art – from the early 20th century to the present day.

The starting point for the exhibition by Anna Werkmeister (* 1949) is ‘rain’ and its tonal quality, defined in colour and written down as ‘white noise’ in the eponymous story by the author Ferdinand von Schirach. The experience and knowledge of nature – in this case the rain on Lake Lucerne, continuing in the grounds of the Neues Atelierhaus Panzerhalle – is first documented on film, from which a video is edited, from which stills are taken, which are then transferred as prints on paper into a spatial installation.

With a comprehensive retrospective, the ZAK Center for Contemporary Art presents the painterly work of African American artist Ellen Banks (1938–2017). Under the title “mood indigo”, the exhibition brings together around 100 works from nearly all creative phases of the artist, along with documents and photographs from her personal estate.

The installation is the second part of the project “Denkmal Streicheln – Denkmal Hören” (Touching Monuments – Hearing Monuments) by Justin Time and Sabine Ercklentz, which deals with monuments in public spaces and chooses unusual ways of approaching them. During three participatory city walks, bronze and stone sculptures in public spaces in various districts of Spandau were touched and “felt.” Audio recordings of these encounters are processed into a sound sculpture that visitors can walk through in the exhibition.

From autumn 2023 to spring 2024, the illustrator Matthias Beckmann was an almost daily guest at the Citadel in the exhibition ‘Unveiled. Berlin and Its Monuments’. At a time when people around the world are reflecting on how to deal with so-called ‘toxic’ monuments and calling for a more critical approach to them, Beckmann’s impulse was to engage with this topic artistically in his own unique way. 

Axel Anklam (1971 – 2022) is a sculptor known for his abstract, organically shaped, light-flooded sculptures. In his works, he combines classic and contemporary materials – hard materials such as stainless steel and innovative materials such as glass fibre-reinforced plastic, epoxy resin and carbon. With his profound knowledge of static and musical-rhythmic laws Anklam combines weightlessness, transparency and mass in his sculptures in a fascinating way. 

In 2024, two art-in-architecture competitions were organised in the Spandau district. A total of 15 entries by 22 artists are now being presented in a joint exhibition.

Interwoven into a wide-ranging network of autobiographical references, Alex Müller’s first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin is a fascinating presentation of painterly, sculptural and installation works. Both poetic and objective, her paintings, objects and site-specific interventions mark stations and turning points in her personal and artistic life. Wall.

Guided tours with Alex Müller: 2.2.2025, 2 pm | 20.3.2025, 6 pm | 6.4.2025, 2 pm

Artist talk with Alex Müller and Pola van den Hövel, Special guest Isabelle Pabst: 14.3.2025, 7 pm

Based on generally available painting instructions for amateurs and in an examination of centuries of art history, Georg Weißbach develops a broad panorama of painterly approaches that condense into a comprehensive picture of contemporary artistic strategies in dealing with a medium that has often been declared dead. The boundaries between high and popular culture begin to blur, opening up a liberated view of analog image worlds in the digital age.

Anette Rose’s video installations are part of her long-term project of an “encyclopaedia of handling”. They focus both on mechanical production processes and on the body language of people performing various manual tasks. Between the fascination for technical processes and the concentrated attention on movements, a panorama of cultural realities emerges. The unifying theme of the installations ist he textile production.

The MITKUNSTZENTRALE at HAUS DER STATISTIK sees itself as a studio, laboratory, project space and discussion forum for the urgent questions of urban social future from an artistic/design perspective. The radical rethink from consumption to re-use, from resource exploitation to a sustainable approach to living beings, materials, energies and concepts determines the basis for joint thinking, discussion and work.

In the ZAK lounge we are showing the new additions to the Spandau art collection with works by Nasan Tur, Chloe Sherman, Anna Werkmeister, Sabine Herrmann, Doris Hinzen-Röhrig, Karen Scheper, Margareta Hesse, Carsten Borck, Deborah S. Philipps, Jase Kala and others.

Object-related, illusionistic, mimetic, transformative: the interiors of the painter Fides Becker (* 1962 in Worms) and the photographer Anja Teske (* 1964 in Minden) find both points of contact and contrasts in an installative spatial situation. Both artists are inspired by everyday objects from different eras and capture carefully arranged home furnishings on the surface. With camera and brush, they direct the viewer’s gaze into hidden areas of the personal.

The topic of Hartmut Kiewert's artistic work is the reflection on future possibilities of the relationship between humans and animals. Based on the utopian idea of peaceful and equal coexistence, the painter develops social images and narratives in which animals are no longer objects of exploitative practice, but become subjects of a changed and emancipatory world.

In 2023, three art-in-architecture competitions were announced in the district of Spandau:

New construction of the STEIG youth leisure center
Renovation of an external location of the adult education center and music school
New construction of an elementary school at Fehrbelliner Tor

A total of 16 entries by 24 artists from Berlin will be presented in a joint exhibition, including the award-winning designs. 

The term “anti-landscapes” describes desolate areas that are hostile to human life – also as a result of economic exploitation. Value attributions are applied beyond resources to people and ways of life: as less valuable, less human. The exhibition AntE-Landscapes by Abie Franklin (* 1995 in Jerusalem) takes up this entanglement of the micro and macro levels on the basis of two current groups of works.

The human body as an object of media staging, political appropriation and projection site of collective attributions, but also as a topic of human aestheticization is the focus of the works of Berlin artists Jürgen Baumann and Birgit Dieker. In a jointly developed exhibition concept, they juxtapose sculptural and photographic groups of works in a dialogical manner, thus creating an artistic space for the complex discussion of body-specific aspects of the present.

The human body as an object of media staging, political appropriation and projection site of collective attributions, but also as a topic of human aestheticization is the focus of the works of Berlin artists Jürgen Baumann and Birgit Dieker. In a jointly developed exhibition concept, they juxtapose sculptural and photographic groups of works in a dialogical manner, thus creating an artistic space for the complex discussion of body-specific aspects of the present.

Painting, sculpture and drawing strategies of camouflage, fakes and trompe-l'oeil are at the centre of the exhibition Boosted Mimicry. As typical representatives of a post-postmodern generation, the three artists Tom Früchtl (* 1966), Sabine Groß (* 1961) and Barbara Hindahl (* 1960) dedicate themselves to a critical examination of the art context and investigate the different categories of our perception when we look at art.

With Bildhauerei. Und Anderes, ZAK presents the Berlin artist Simon P. Schrieber, who places the human figure at the centre. The figures oscillate between archaic, arabesque and abstraction and showcasing Schrieber's unique artistic language. His works are characterized by concentrated volumes, exceptional compositions, and masterful handling of materials. In addition to sculpture, watercolours and drawings offer insight into his artistic development.

The Oriental tales of the bestselling author Karl May (1842-1912) serve as a connecting cultural-historical narrative for the self-portrayal of the three communities with cultural-historical objects, photographs and documents. The problems and topicality of his novels are discussed against the background of current debates.

A cultural-historical exhibition by Dr. Thomas Kramer

Known for their impressive spatial techniques, the Berlin-based artists Asako Tokitsu and Andreas Schmid will use artistic means to re-experience the rooms on the upper floor of the ZAK from 22nd of September. They stand in the tradition of Minimal Art. For the elongated rooms of the ZAK, they will use spatial techniques to reenvision the alignments of the halls. The change of layout will make a visit to the exhibition a special aesthetic-artistic experience.

During his lifetime, Otto von Bismarck's admirers dedicated more than 30 monuments to him – today, more than 700 monuments and a large number of Bismarck products are documented. The exhibition provides information on the Chancellor and the development of the cult figure. The artworks on display focus primarily on Bismarck's role in colonialism. Visitors are invited to engage in constructive debate and further develop the exhibition as a place for democratic debate.

For 20 years, Berlin photographer Jan Sobottka has been an attentive observer of the Berlin art scene. He portrays well and less known celebrities as well as the typical Berlin public. Although he does not work in a studio but in galleries and museums, he manages to create well-composed photo portraits in addition to spontaneous snapshots. His “models” – from Patti Smith to Bruno Ganz – follow his sparing and clear instructions.

The painter and installation artist Bernhard Striebel works in the expanded coordinates of constructive-concrete art and combines space, image and language in his exhibitions, which are often site-specific. The elongated exhibition halls of the ZAK – Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst (Centre for Contemporary Art) in the Old Barracks on the Citadel inspired him to create an expansive installation of light, colours and words.

Under the title Big City Baby, 39 young artists studying at the Weissensee School of Art bring the big city into the "small city" - the citadel. Located in Berlin but shielded from the outside world by thick walls, the Spandau Citadel becomes a model city, a conurbation of observations, counter-designs and commentaries on the metropolis.

The exhibition "Ausnahmezustand. Polnische Fotokunst heute" - curated by Grazyna Siedlecke and Jens Pepper - provides for the first time an overview of the vital contemporary Polish photo scene. Particularly against the backdrop of the worsening political situation and the progressive censorship of cultural processes, the work of the 28 photographers involved articulates the possibilities and limits of artistic production.

The exhibition “Über die Zeichnung hinaus” shows the abundance of current drawing positions in Berlin: exuberant pictorial narrative and strict reduction, figuration and abstraction, documentation and site inspection, illusion and its suspension, the microscopic and the generous, drawing as performance, in books, in space or in animation film. Whether on paper or in combination with other media, drawing goes beyond itself and crosses borders.

We perceive Nachbilder with closed eyes, as memories, when the original light stimulus of the concrete pre-image has already faded away. It is similar with the works of Jochen Schneider – what we have seen resonates and provides the impetus for his drawings and then for images within us that now tell their own, new story – without providing final answers.

The ZAK -Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst presents in the comprehensive exhibition Die weite Ebene nach Westen, bis zum Horizont the work of the painter Horst de Marées, whose biography and work development reflect in exemplary form contemporary history and formative aspects of the art of the last century.

In cooperation with the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Spandau, students of the master’s program “Bühnenbild_Szenischer Raum” of the TU of Berlin have taken part in the project “Idea Seminar for the Expansion of the Exhibition: ‘Enthüllt. Berlin und seine Denkmäler’ in connection with Josef Thorak’s pacing horses'” in the winter semester 2021/22. They dealt with the development and testing of new forms of narrative spatial design.

The exhibition “Train Lines” is dedicated to the microcosm of “public transport” from the perspective of an artist who has been working as a driver for the Leipzig tram since 2014 and for the Berlin underground since 2021. This gives rise to drawn systems of notation of a social, political and psychological nature that provide a very concrete insight into the world of thought. Filtering and abstracting mirrors of our cities over a longer period of time and thus an artistic social atlas.

The exhibition brings together new, space-related works by the Berlin artists Eva Berendes, Heike Gallmeier and Gloria Zein. They deal with capacities of pictorial setting under the aspect of being temporary, fragile and ephemeral. The artists juxtapose the architectural complex of ideas of political and material permanence of the Citadel with concepts of provisional lightness, changeability and movement.

The four female painters in the exhibition “Figure. No Figure. X.” position themselves in the border area between figuration, structure, systematics and colour field. Their works unfold a field of contemporary painting that is as contrasting as it is rich in relationships and that is both classical and experimental.

The Berlin Senate’s Emigrant Programme has been in existence for over 50 years: While the Federal Republic of Germany was gradually coming to terms with its National Socialist past, the Berlin Senate launched the Emigrants Programme in 1969. Former Berliners who had to leave the city due to persecution under fascism were invited to see their old home again. Over 35,000 people, the majority of them of Jewish origin, accepted the offer.

Wolfgang-Borchert-Schule

Maria Anwander + Ruben Aubrecht

/ Oliver Arendt + Fritz Poppenberg / Olaf Bastigkeit / Daniela Comani / Kerstin Ergenzinger / Thorsten Goldberg / Thomas Henninger  / Sven Kalden / Yves Mettler / Lorenz Pasch

Jugendfreizeiteinrichtung Triftstraße

Cécile Belmont

/ Anna Myga Kasten / Katrin Wegemann

Sporthalle Christoph-Földerich-Schule

Tatjana Schülke

/ Douglas Henderson / Iréne Hug / Catherine Lorent / Pfelder / Alona Rodeh / Roland Stratmann

Wolfgang-Borchert-Schule

Maria Anwander + Ruben Aubrecht

/ Oliver Arendt + Fritz Poppenberg / Olaf Bastigkeit / Daniela Comani / Kerstin Ergenzinger / Thorsten Goldberg / Thomas Henninger  / Sven Kalden / Yves Mettler / Lorenz Pasch

Jugendfreizeiteinrichtung Triftstraße

Cécile Belmont

/ Anna Myga Kasten / Katrin Wegemann

Sporthalle Christoph-Földerich-Schule

Tatjana Schülke

/ Douglas Henderson / Iréne Hug / Catherine Lorent / Pfelder / Alona Rodeh / Roland Stratmann

Wolfgang-Borchert-Schule

Maria Anwander + Ruben Aubrecht

/ Oliver Arendt + Fritz Poppenberg / Olaf Bastigkeit / Daniela Comani / Kerstin Ergenzinger / Thorsten Goldberg / Thomas Henninger  / Sven Kalden / Yves Mettler / Lorenz Pasch

Jugendfreizeiteinrichtung Triftstraße

Cécile Belmont

/ Anna Myga Kasten / Katrin Wegemann

Sporthalle Christoph-Földerich-Schule

Tatjana Schülke

/ Douglas Henderson / Iréne Hug / Catherine Lorent / Pfelder / Alona Rodeh / Roland Stratmann

Susanne Specht (*1958 in Saarbrücken) is an abstract sculptor with an immensely wide and fascinating range of materials. As a master class student at the Berlin University of the Arts, she began with characteristic work in granite and eclogite.

World-shatteringn is an installation of lifebuoys at sea on the roll call grounds of ​​the Spandau Citadel. They stand as a symbol for salvation and as a sign for people who have to flee from different places and times due to war, conflict, violence, poverty, ethnicity, political, religious or sexual attitudes and / or climate change.

The Leipzig painter Henriette Grahnert (*1977 in Dresden) moves brilliantly between, in and above the visual coordinate systems of a post-postmodern image culture. Her painterly compositions – which sometimes seem like collages at first glance – are fed by quotations, associations and reminiscences.« [In German: Harriet Zilch]

KGB Young Workshop

We taste, smell and hear each other through the world of art and get to know the ZAK on the citadel.

Further information on the event and registration at: www.zitadelle-spandau.de

With his exhibition “Archipelago of the mind”, Christopher Winter takes us on a journey to his very personal mythologies at the productive interface between joyful affirmation and subtle criticism.

The exhibition “Konrad Sommer and the Butterfly on the Nose” shows the largely unknown work of the Munich painter in an extensive retrospective. Konrad Sommer (1915 – 2012) can be seen as an exception in the art of the second half of the 20th century. After the Second World War, he devoted his work, which unfolded in various media, primarily to depicting landscapes.

“feldern” stands for exchange, expansion of one’s own thought and action patterns and experimental interaction. The artists in the exhibition cooperate with a wide variety of disciplines and are now bringing together their studies and thoroughly controversial reflections on the interplay between systematics and randomness, self-observation and external observation, knowledge acquisition and artistic form-finding processes in a space-consuming installation.

/ anmeldung@zitadelle-berlin.de

Over the summer months, Michael Hischer's kinetic large-scale sculptures turn the citadel into an outdoor art space. 20 works from a multi-year cycle will be shown.

They are designed for the outside space, the wind moves them and allows them to be recognized as kinetic sculptures. The movement of its elements is left to chance due to the weather. In this way, time is inscribed in the sculptures and not only made tangible as four-dimensional objects.

The search for aesthetic appeal and intellectual stimulation characterizes Martin von Ostrowski’s passion for collecting. At flea markets and online auctions he not only finds curios, decorative items and kitsch, but also special historical finds. His studio resembles a cabinet of curiosities made of precious and banal things, of art, kitsch and above all – to speak with Susan Sontag – of the corresponding portion of camp, which is often one of the strategies of queer (self-) staging.

The sculptor Monika Brandmeier (* 1959 in Kamen, NRW) works also with formal reduction and material opulence. For the ZAK she is developing an extensive exhibition with installation objects, sculptures, drawings and video works that were created between 1984 and today. In the comparison, grouping arrangement or concentration of selected works, two basic approaches of the artist become clear.

One of the main focuses of the Spandau art collection is landscape painting from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century. In the past four years, works by Hans Zank / Willy Gericke and Hans Szym have been added through donations, bequests and acquisitions. In future, they will supplement the holdings for the new museum presentation in the Neukladow manor.

Which people flee for which reasons?What responsibility does Europe have when it comes to the causes of flight or the reception of migrants? “Migration in focus” is an analysis of these correlations and explains our immigration society as a continuous process. “Escape forwards” ties in with this on the individual level: The exhibition portrays different people with migration experiences in regards to their wishes, their achievements and their struggle for recognition in Germany.

The existence and contributions of people of African origin are still insufficiently recognized in Germany, both in historiography and in public discourse. And if they are, they are often spoken about by others instead of letting them have their word. Homestory Germany breaks with this: 27 biographies tell of racism and exclusion in Germany, but also of the diversity and work of black people – in the course of our common history and in all areas of our society.