Daniel Spoerri — ballet dancer, explorer of the ‘multiple’, Nouveau Réaliste, occasional master of chance — would have been celebrating his 95 birthday this year. LEVY Galerie and alexander levy are opening a two-part exhibition titled “Kein Freund Von Stillstand.” Thomas Levy and the artist developed a friendship for over 45 years that led to a life-long collaboration. Spoerri, despite being known for his trap-pictures, bread-dough objects and eat-art, loved subverting expectations and favoured change and experimentation over the tried and tested. 

The boreal forest — one of the world’s largest primeval forests, expanding north and south of the Arctic Circle — was the common source of inspiration for the 13 artists from Scandinavia, Finland and Canada whose work will be exhibited in “Northern Lights” at Fondation Beyeler. For the first time in this configuration, the exhibition will feature masterpieces, dating from 1880 to 1930, by Hilma af Klint, Akseli Gallen-Kallela or Edvard Munch among lesser known positions such as Anna Boberg, Harald Oskar Sohlberg or Iwan Schichkin.

After over two decades of Loop Barcelona, the format rendering tribute to the moving image has consolidated and crystalised. Split into three pillars—Festival, Fair and Symposium—the programme attracts video art specialists, art world professionals at large and a curious, broader public every November. The Festival, sprinkled throughout the city, will feature artists such as Laure Prouvost, Metahaven and Thomias Radin. The Fair, housed in the rooms of the Almanac hotel, will host more than 40 exhibiting galleries. In parallel, the Symposium curated by Filipa Ramos will dig deeper into the world of commissioning, exhibiting and collecting Artists’ Cinema.

Photographer and video artist Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959) focuses on depicting identity in her portraits. Rineke Dijkstra. Still — Moving. Portraits 1992 – 2024, her solo show at the Berlinische Galerie will give an overview of her work, concentrating on the theme of ‘transition’. By isolating people from their everyday contexts and searching for glimmers of individuality she encourages the viewer to look closely at people, pared down to essentials, focusing on their posture and gaze.

Ana Lupas has been an outstanding figure in Eastern European art since the 1960s. Despite state repression until 1989 her work has been shown in various group exhibitions in Europe and America for the past 50 years—against all odds she has created an independent oeuvre. In 2024, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam are dedicating what will be the most comprehensive solo show so far to Ana Lupas, Intimate Space — Open Gaze, featuring hitherto unseen works from the 1960s to the present.

Draw love build / sauerbruch hutton tracing modernities is opening at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg. Containing some 60 architectural models and around 100 drawings by the Berlin-based architectural team sauerbruch hutton, the double exhibition shows work produced over the space of three decades, setting it in dialogue with historical visions from the Akademie’s Architectural Archives. This revised concept for the retrospective draw love build, expands it to include a key component: a view of the archive itself.

Since 2021, the Bauhaus-Archiv has explored the link between Bauhaus and music through the ‘Bauhaus Music’ project. This year’s festival, themed ‘Freedom,’ will feature five concerts over three days. A highlight is the debut of excerpts from Marc Blitzstein’s lost 1929 opera Parabola and Circula, discovered during research into Bauhaus’ musical history. The festival will also showcase works by composers like Schönberg, Bartók, and Berg, with performances by artists including Claudia Barainsky, Kolja Blacher, and the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin.

The young satellite fair Minor Attractions, running parallel to Frieze London, returns this Autumn together with some of the most exciting contemporary art galleries and non-profit art spaces from North America to Central and Eastern Europe. Following the footsteps of the original Armory Show or Loop Barcelona and non-traditional fairs such as Basel Social Club or Spring/Break, the second edition will take over the rooms and common areas of The Mandrake and offer a robust performance and evening program.

Luxury, peace and pleasure (luxe, calme et volupté) −the poetic leitmotifs of Charles Baudelaire’s poem «Invitation to the Voyage», dating 1857− capture the very essence of Henri Matisse’s artistic output. This Autumn, the Fondation Beyeler departs from these guiding principles to invite visitors on a journey spanning the full range of the modern artist’s career. The much-awaited retrospective features 70 iconic and rarely-seen works including sculptures, paintings, drawings, and cutouts from major museums and private collections. 

Göksu Kunak’s new performance / installation at Sophiensæle is based on the Susurluk scandal, a notorious car crash in Turkey in the 1990s that led to the discovery of criminal links between state institutions, the drug mafia and deep state relations. Kunak reflects on the policy of concealing and erasing and uses the accident as a metaphor for a corrupted patriarchal, political system. “Innocence” is an attempt of a genealogy of corruption and the effects of western imperialism on the country and the Middle East. 

Much visited, sung about, admired and filmed: The Wannsee lido is a Berlin icon and its architecture is a listed building. What most Berliners don’t realise, however, is that most of the complex is now empty. While up to 12,000 bathers enjoy the sandy beach on summery days, a unique architectural monument — and a large spatial resource with great potential — is falling apart just metres behind it. The exhibition Wanna See Wannsee? will show how architecture and history can be combined with sustainable reuse: to save and restore the monument and, in doing so, carry the torch of the social idea of the lido and its founder Herman Clajus.  

Following the great success of the Basel Social Club 2023 at a former mayonnaise factory, this upcoming edition will take place outdoors, on 50 hectares of farmland fields. The week-long event, core of which are landscape, agriculture, and farm animals, will offer a rather slow art experience — in seeming stark contrast with Art Basel. Fellas’ venturing out there will be met with an open-air exhibition proposed by galleries, farm-to-table gastronomy, and an impressive performance program. The latter, curated by the Performance Agency, will count with Margaret Raspé, Jean Tinguely, Paulo Nazareth, Juliette Blightman and many more.