Encounters program in September

The 13th Berlin Biennale, passing the fugitive on, presents more than 60 artistic positions across four venues until September 14, 2025. The artists’ events form an integral part of the exhibition, investigating fugitivity. Together, they comprise the Encounters series. From September 10 until 14 these events take place as part of Berlin Art Week 2025.

Jelena Petrović in conversation with Aleksandar Matković and Godofredo Enes Pereira
What Does the Name of War Stand for Today?
Sequence 2: Is There Anything in This World You Would Be Ready to Give Your Life For?
September 5, 2025, 5–6:30 pm
Former Courthouse Lehrter Straße

Connecting local sites across planetary mines, the second part of the event series initiated by Milica Tomić takes a conversation on the extractivist frontlines where war economies persist—not despite peace, but through it.

Margherita Moscardini, Lawrence Liang and Emîne Osê
The Stairway on Trial
“Give me a legal personhood, and I will be state-less.”
September 6, 2025, 4:30–6:30 pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Mimicking a flight of stairs in East Jerusalem—from the Palestinian Occupied Territories—the walkable stone sculpture by Margherita Moscardini becomes a fitting stage for the talk The Stairway on Trial. A lawyer from the artist’s legal team and one signatory of a single stone composing the staircase, imagine scenarios from legal speculative fiction or the lived experience of the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria/Kongra Star. 

The Claims of Art from a World of Crisis
Zasha Colah, Marita Muukkonen, Selma Selman, Valentina Viviani, moderated by Timea Junghaus
September 10, 2025, 4:30 pm
ERIAC (European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture)

If art exists, most explicitly, in moments of crisis and catastrophe, what are its languages and preoccupations? Is it what we expect, or can even understand fully in the present? In an era where crisis has become the status quo, we ask which are the artistic claims of our times?

Program of the Sister Organization Sophiensæle:
Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm: subjoyride
September 10, 2025, 8–10 pm
September 11/12/13, 2025, 9–11 pm
Sophiensæle

subjoyride takes audiences on a visceral journey through the extraordinary life and work of German Dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven—a scatological cosmos of performance, poetry, and sculpture.

Program of the Sister Organization Sophiensæle:
Oliver Zahn: Crowd Control
September 11/12/13/14, 2025, 7–9:30 pm
Sophiensæle

To prepare for protests, riot police forces stage scripted simulations of such scenarios. In Crowd Control, seven performers transpose these police tactics and practices into the black box of the theater.

Mila Panić with Tamer Kattan
Big Mouth
September 11, 2025, 8:30–9:30 pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art

For her stand-up comedy nights, Mila Panić is joined by local Berlin-based comedians. With her texts, she dives into topics like war, empathy, and victimisation—told through personal stories of growing up in Bosnia and moving to Germany.

Sarnath Banarjee
Critical Imagination Deficit Lecture 3: Other People’s Nostalgia
September 12, 2025, 6–7 pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art

When a comic book is staged well, it can produce unexpected experiences—melancholy, unease, joy, longing, and disquiet. Through his picto-textual performances, Sarnath Banerjee seeks to record the emotional history of our times.

Part of the film series of the Sister Organization SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA: Fugitive Traces: Challenging Narratives and Power Structures:
Esquirlas [Splinters] (Argentina 2020, D: Natalia Garayalde)
September 13, 2025, 6–7:15 pm
SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA

In 1995, in the Argentine city of Río Tercero an explosion at a military arms factory left devastation in its wake. Filmmaker Natalia Garayalde offers a profoundly intimate perspective on this collective memory by turning her lens toward her own family’s experience.

Gernot Wieland with Carla Åhlander and Konstantin von Sichart
Monologue of a sock or What would we have told the children?
September 14, 2025, 3–3:40 pm and 5–5:40 pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Three voices lead the audience through stories of animals and childhood, hierarchies and homes, and the quiet comedy of trying and failing. With a mixture of storytelling, moving image, and the occasional threadbare puppet, this performance is not quite theatre, not quite a lecture.

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).