Spring program 2026

KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s Spring Program 2026 explores Berlin—its materials, people, and histories—alongside KW’s own building as an active framework for artistic inquiry. Centered on artists and their processes, exhibitions by Klara Lidén, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, and Else Marie Pade engage with the social, technological, and ecological conditions shaping the present, situating artistic practice within the lived realities of the city.
—Emma Enderby, Director 

Klara Lidén: Kunstwerke
Curator: Emma Enderby / Assistant Curator: Lara Scherrieble.
Kunstwerke is the first large-scale survey as well as the first institutional solo exhibition of artist Klara Lidén (b. 1979, SE) in Berlin. Having lived in the city since the 2000s, Lidén has become a distinctive voice attentive to power relations, the dynamic between interior and exterior space, and forms of civil disobedience. The artist’s practice draws from the architecture and infrastructure of the cities in which Lidén has resided—Berlin, New York, and Stockholm—using materials from these urban environments.

Spread across three floors at KW, the exhibition brings together key works from the early 2000s to the present, including performances, sculptures, spatial interventions, and videos. Kunstwerke traces how Lidén tests the rules that govern buildings, streets, and markers of public space, often using the artist’s own body to reveal how such structures underlie our actions, and how one might navigate, even subtly reclaim, environments shaped through control and exclusion.

The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s most comprehensive monograph to date, co-edited with Kunsthalle Zürich and MoMA PS1, and published by Distanz. Support by Capital Culture Fund Berlin.

Jean Katambayi Mukendi: RATIO
Curators: Emma Enderby, Linda Franken.
RATIO is the first solo exhibition of Congolese artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi (b. 1974, DRC) in Germany. Constructed from locally sourced recycled materials, Katambayi’s sculptures engage with contemporary technological developments, ranging from the field of agriculture to military and robotics. His composite structures merge and transform machine functions, imaginatively exploring their ecological potential through recycling and repurposing. The artist’s drawings extend these inquiries, offering observations and speculative reflections on human experience in relation to ecology, economy, and language, among others.

The works featured in the show were created by Katambayi on site during a six-week residency at KW in fall 2025, using materials gathered from various locations in Berlin, such as KW’s storage and several of the city’s recycling yards. Spanning newly produced drawings and large-scale sculptures, RATIO addresses global structural inequities in resource extraction and power distribution, questioning the dualities that shape our world, between the natural and the artificial, growth and destruction.

The exhibition is co-produced by KW Institute for Contemporary Art and M HKA—Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium, where it will be presented for its second iteration in summer 2026. It is accompanied by Circuits, Katambayi’s first monographic publication co-edited by Leuven University Press, KW and M HKA.

Supported by KW Friends and in coproduction with M HKA—Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium.

Else Marie Pade: Partitur
Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen.
Partitur is the first international exhibition dedicated to Danish composer and sound artist Else Marie Pade (b. 1924–2016, Denmark), a path-maker of musique concrète and European electronic music. Over a career spanning multiple decades, Pade approached sound as a visual medium of intensities, multitudes, and dissonance. Her works carry listeners through fairy tales, cityscapes, and nightmares, with scores that capture notation, process, and life’s cacophonous narrative spaces.

With Pade’s seminal musical arrangements and works on paper as its point of departure, Partitur traces the composer’s artistic trajectory beginning in the 1950s. The exhibition unfolds as an immersive listening space, shaped by the spatial structures of her scores and the language she reimagined for electronic composition. It is accompanied by a live program that engages with, and extends on Pade’s legacy, featuring Berlin-based sound artists and contemporary discourse on music, collectivity, and the heritage of women artists in electronic music. Made possible by New Carlsberg Foundation.

Events
Press preview spring program 2026: February 20, 2026, 11am with pre-registration only via press@kw-berlin.de.
Public opening spring program 2026: February 20, 2026, 7pm with free entry to the exhibitions; first come first served. 

Press contact
Marie Kube, Head of Communication and Press, press@kw-berlin.de.

The exhibitions and projects within the Spring Program 2026 are in collaboration with and/or supported by: