Susan Hiller, KOO JEONG A, Rafik Greiss
October 17, 2026–January 10, 2027
Berlin 10117
Germany
Hours: Monday and Wednesday–Sunday 11am–7pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art's Fall Program 2026 brings together three artists—Susan Hiller, KOO JEONG A, and Rafik Greiss—in a season that navigates the unseen forces, technological, sensory, and material, that mediate human experience and memory. Drawing on an enduring fascination with the possibility of translating phenomena that resist easy explanation, each artist reflects, in their own way, on transformation, memory, and the shifting states of images and objects. Together, the exhibitions ask how much we allow our senses to inform our reading or perception of a thing, a place, or a moment. —Emma Enderby, Director
Susan Hiller: Bad Dreams
October 17, 2026–January 10, 2027
Curators: Emma Enderby, Liberty Adrien
Assistant Curator: Lara Scherrieble
Dreams, trance, hallucinations, spirituality, faith, altered states of consciousness, encounters with the otherworldly, and mystical phenomena of all kinds have, across cultures and times, given form to desires, fantasies, fears, and beliefs. For five decades, British artist Susan Hiller (b. 1940, US–d. 2019, UK) explored these uncanny territories, tracing how such experiences are represented, remembered and recounted, and how they acquire meaning.
Bad Dreams, the first survey of Hiller’s work in Berlin, a city that shaped her practice in the early 2000s, delves into the artist’s enduring yet strikingly contemporary investigation into how our personal and collective imaginaries are shaped by and revealed through images and objects, mass media, and popular culture. Drawing on her enduring fascination with the (im)possibility of translating phenomena that resist easy explanation, the exhibition unfolds as a series of encounters. Ghostly images seem to appear, bodies to defy gravity, and children to display supernatural abilities, while voices recount UFO sightings and near-death experiences.
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KOO JEONG A: OUSSSEAN
October 17, 2026–January 10, 2027
Curators: Emma Enderby, Liberty Adrien
Assistant Curator: Lara Scherrieble
Since the early 1990s, South Korean artist KOO JEONG A (b. 1967, Korea) has worked with varied materials, from found objects to large-scale public installations, to create works that play with our perception and connect us to hidden forces that lie beyond the visible, asking us to consider how we allow our senses to inform our reading of a thing, a place, or a moment. The exhibition marks KOO’s first major solo show in Germany, where they lived in Berlin during the 1990s and 2000s.
The title of the exhibition relates to Ousss, a fictional territory that the artist invented — a type of kingdom that they imagined could be perceived by the mind but not by the eye at first glance, demanding presence and patient attention. Much of their work sits within this realm, where invisible phenomena can be experienced through light, color, vibration, and smell, but only if the viewer commits to a presentness that allows for this observation. Newly reconfigured in response to KW's architecture, the exhibition brings together key works from the past decades, from shaking walls and magnet towers to drawings and phosphorescent paintings.
Rafik Greiss: The City and the City
October 17, 2026–January 10, 2027
Curators: Emma Enderby, Liberty Adrien
Assistant Curator: Lara Scherrieble
Working across film, photography, and sculpture, Egyptian artist Rafik Greiss (b. 1997, Egypt) considers time not as a linear movement from past to present but as something composed of fragments—moments that accumulate, dissolve, and may unexpectedly resurface as sensation or afterimage. Spanning digital and analog processes, his practice moves between the distant and the proximal at once, reflecting more broadly on transformation, memory, and the shifting states of images and objects.
At the center of The City and the City, Greiss’s first institutional solo exhibition, is the artist's newly commissioned film of the same title. Withholding geographical and historical markers, Greiss shifts attention from interpretation toward experience, leaving room for us to shape how the images might be understood. In his oeuvre, memory hovers at the edge of consciousness, shaped by what is seen and half-remembered, suspended between personal recollection and collective history.
Press contact
Anna Falck-Ytter, Head of Communications, press@kw-berlin.de
KW is institutionally supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.
The exhibitions and projects within the Fall Program 2026 are in collaboration with and/or supported by:
