VIDEOART AT MIDNIGHT AT BAW GARTEN | NEUE NATIONALGALERIE
For four evenings, the Berlin Art Week Garden 2026 at the Neue Nationalgalerie will once again become an open-air cinema for contemporary artist films. This year’s programme will feature recent works by artists at the start of their professional careers, drawn from four different Berlin-based programmes and initiatives: Nina Fischer’s Experimental Film and Media Art class at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), the Lensbased Community – which grew out of the UdK’s Multimedia Art Class under the direction of Hito Steyerl and has been led by Mykola Ridnyi since 2023 – the BPA// Berlin programme for artists, a mentoring programme founded in 2016 by Angela Bulloch, Simon Denny and Willem de Rooij, and the residency programme run by Between Bridges, a foundation established in 2017 by Wolfgang Tillmans. The selection includes, in part, the artists’ most recent works and offers an insight into a young, internationally oriented Berlin art scene.
Videoart at Midnight invites the four partners to present a selection of their artists and their current works, thereby bringing their diverse perspectives to life in a unique public space. The films are not presented as individual works in the exhibition space, but as a shared cinematic experience – from start to finish, in the dark and under the open sky. This creates a temporary space for encounter between artists, their works, the institutions and an audience invited to discover new forms of the moving image.
What unites them is an understanding of film and video as an open artistic practice that transcends fixed genre and media boundaries. The moving image emerges through dialogue with the visual arts, installation, performance, research and social issues. At the same time, these institutions and programmes are key venues for artistic development in Berlin: they create spaces for artistic production, research, mentoring, exchange and public presentation, thereby fostering the emergence of new artistic perspectives.
Many of the artists will be present.
Admission is free, everyone is welcome.
SCREENING #1 – THU 10 SEP
Experimental Film and Media Art
8:30–9:30PM
The class Experimental Film and Media Art is a specialized art class within the Art and Media program at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), that provides an experimental approach of the medium film and video. The focus is on the interface of visual art and film. Students create experimental films and multimedia installations, that address contemporary discourses and current phenomena in society.
The selected videos focus on topics such as: #Future Ecologies/ #individual and collective memory / #transitory spaces / #language and identity / #migration / #kinship
Exp. Film and Media Art Class: Prof. Nina Fischer
Artistic Research Associate: Sabrina Labis
Inti Gallardo, Lorenzo Tani – Autotrophic Archaeology, 2026, 9:15 min
Schlesischer Busch is an ecological remnant of the old coppice forest of Köllnische Heide in Berlin. During a sustained observation of six trees living in this place, today a small park on the banks of the canal between Kreuzberg and Treptow, the fi lm speculates on the idea of autotrophic organisms as archaeological agents whose temporalities unfold alongside and within human history.
ZouZou – Will We Still Meet?, 2026, 5:30 min
Will We Still Meet? asks whether we can still encounter one another beyond language.
Maggie Rouleau – Apple Pie, 2026, 2:06 min
Apple Pie is an analogue 16mm black-and-white film
documenting a concert, shot frame by frame at intervals to transform the mood and structure of Harmony Tividad’s song of the same name into a raw, rhythmic and fragmented visual experience of close-ups, light and shadow.
Yumeng He – Jiejie, 2026, 12:27 min
On Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld, a filmmaker waits for her estranged sister. As she wanders the vast open fi eld, fragments of memory, landscape, and buried histories surface.
Ilgın Uçar – FIRFIR, 2026, 10:00 min
After starting a new job as a cleaning worker, Bekir gradually enters a parallel space where a feather duster aka. The Staubwedel in the colours of the German fl ag begins to stir in the back room of Stabi. It senses something. A hand. And it wants to be held. What begins as an absurd encounter slowly unfolds into a tender and unexpected romance between Bekir and the object.
Simón Jaramillo Vallejo – Huellas de Carbón 001, 2025, 8:41 min
In collaboration with Leobardo Alberto Sierra Apasahana
Huellas de Carbón 001 is a trail of open scars: a cartography of dispossession inscribed on the body of La Guajira, Colombia, traced through conversations with Leobardo Alberto Sierra Apasahana, a social leader of the Wayuu community, and through images and 3D scans of the territory that is disappearing. A journey along the spine of coal, asking how much silence and how much thirst sustain the glow of a wellbeing that belongs elsewhere, thousands of kilometres from the territory that feeds it.
Ran Ren – Land of Ulro, 2026, 12:30 min
The concept of Ulro, inspired by William Blake and Czesław Miłosz, explores spiritual exile through dreams. I sleep in the Berlin Zoo and dream of my hometown—or the other way around. I dream of a tiger, or it dreams of me. Fragmented images and sounds create an unknown “I,” wandering between consciousness and the unconscious, the real and the unreal, neither present nor absent.
Ying Chen – Ciao Ciao Guo, 2025, 6:21 min
A glorified childhood memory of a crispy, ring-shaped dessert seen in a Japanese cartoon becomes the starting point for a fi lm that explores the instability of subjective perception, where images, sounds, faces, street noise, and fragments of interviews overlap while unseen questions leave space for consciousness to accumulate.
Edlin Jap – The Wedding Photo, 2025, 3:26 min
Inspired by grandparents’ photographs and the pre-wedding industry in Medan, Indonesia, a tale unfolds of two people coming together to be captured in a single image—one that will hang on their living room wall for their children, and their children’s children, to see.
SCREENING #2 – FRI 11 SEP
BPA// Berlin program for artists
8:30–9:30PM
BPA// Berlin program for artists is an independent mentoring program that fosters exchange between emerging and established Berlin based artists. BPA// was founded in 2016 by artists Angela Bulloch, Simon Denny, and Willem de Rooij. The program’s goal is to strengthen connections across artistic media and generations. BPA// supports 20 emerging artists over a two-year period; ten new participants are selected each year.
The program presents works by current and past BPA// participants. It was curated by Anna-Lisa Scherfose.
Andrés Mora Balzaretti – Paradisi, 2023, 17:32 min
Reluctantly, the protagonist—half artist, half bird of paradise—leaves his studio and sets off through Berlin. The city provides the backdrop for his preparations for the elaborate dance for which this species of bird is known. Our artist-bird will also perform it, and just like his animal counterpart, he chooses the best spot for the dance with great care.
Tang Han & Xiaopeng Zhou – Ordinary Affects, 2025, 16:00 min
While two people reflect on the years-long relationship between a young art teacher and an older woman, tulips take shape on paper. The art lessons and their results intertwine with the woman’s advancing dementia and questions about labour, ethics, illness, diaspora, and identity.
Hana Yoo – I Came for the Flowers, 2025, 9:15 min
Drawing on a study of female frogs that play dead to escape mating, I Came for the Flowers explores how intergenerational memories of systemic violence against female bodies persist in women over time. The work reflects on the concept of passivity—often associated with femininity—by combining the visual aesthetics of South Korea in the 1990s and 2000s with archival footage of …comfort women” from the 1940s and personal video recordings.
Alejandra Morote Peralta – The Drug Stores, 2025, 2:22 min
The Drug Stores is an early 20th-century British song depicting pharmacies as whimsical spaces offering easy solutions. Alejandra Morote Peralta reactivates the composition through a new performance by a soprano and pianist, based on the original sheet music. The sound is brought together with footage of UK pharmacies, introducing computers and automation into their workflow for the first time.
Tra My Nguyen – She Who Moves, 2025, 14:00 min
A young woman’s fragmented, symbolic journey begins with a scooter ride through rural Vietnam. The landscape increasingly blends with dream sequences, while fixed timelines and real locations fade away. In their place emerges a state of disorientation in which memory, identity, and surroundings merge. These elements depict the protagonist’s transition—both psychological and physical—leading up to her final metamorphosis.
Jan Berger – S1E6: Die and Rejoin the Stars, 2026, 3:50 min
The series Die and Rejoin the Starsand its cast originate from the online game Roblox. The platform is primarily used by teenagers and generates revenue through user-generated content. Jan Berger subverts the Roblox system by using the infrastructure of this online space to create worlds that serve as meeting places for conspiracies, which in turn function as film sets and shooting locations.
SCREENING #3 – SAT 12 SEP
The Lensbased Community
8:30–9:30PM
The Lensbased Community formed around the multimedia art class at the Berlin University of the Arts, developed under the leadership of Professor Hito Steyerl and taken over by Mykola Ridnyi in 2023. This community includes students, alumni, friends, and collaborators from diverse national and cultural backgrounds, for whom international solidarity and mutual support are essential. Personal testimonies and experiences of violence, representations of collective trauma, and complex relationships with national memories and histories have become subjects of artistic reflection.
The video programme explores the links between violence and technology, dystopia and historical memory, and encourages reflection on the catastrophic nature of the current political situation.
Curated by Mykola Ridnyi
Kaiwen Kang – Double Surroundings, 2024, 10:00 min fragment
Double Surroundings uses thunderstorms as a planetary mechanism of apocalypse to explore perception under postcolonial and posthuman conditions. Filmed across Greek cities, mines, fishing boats, and night ferries, the work treats sound as a primary medium, forming a decentered acoustic cosmos shaped by weather, geology, and the sea. Alongside the filmed landscapes, the film presents AI-generated still interiors known as “demon’s rooms,” which share the same sun, universe, and temporality as the real locations.
The narrative begins with the biblical story of the Gerasene demoniac and is later rewritten through the cosmology of the Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas, shifting from a structure of conflict and redemption toward one of relationality, transformation, and coexistence.
Lena Kocutar – The sun that fell into the water, 2025, 20:55 min
The sun that fell into the water observes computation as a site. It follows the story of a hydropower plant built in present-day Slovenia under German occupation. To run the war and reproduce its war economy, pre-WWII Germany set to expand energy infrastructure on the land annexed and occupied. The plant, completed in 1960 Yugoslavia, has been operational ever since. It will now supply electricity to a data centre, a high-performance computing centre, and an “AI factory,” built on site.
The film is partly recorded with thermal camera, infrared vision that prioritises heat over visible light and maps presence that lingers, revealing something of a porous world heating up.
Esteban Rosales Somayoa – Venus Cycles, 2025, 10:00 min
The video unfolds in three parts, interweaving stories of violence and technology, tracing the forces that render Apocalyptic Imagery (AI). Generating a picture of the End of the World, simultaneously materializes damages to both environmental and social fabrics. The separations between fabulation and factuality blur.
The Dresden Codex, one of the four remaining manuscripts that survived the book burnings during the Spanish invasion, was used as a predictive, algorithmic tool to prophesy future events. The End of the World is regarded as something that has already happened multiple times, like in the Invasion of the Americas or in the recent genocide against the Ixil population during the civil war in Guatemala.
Daria Syvakos – What We Lost in the Water, 2022–2025, 17:00 min
What We Lost in the Water follows the restless spirit of a woman who perished in the flooding of Velykyi Luh. The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature permanently altered the land and rivers, displacing thousands of families and reshaping entire ecosystems. Decades after her death, the ghost wanders through the silent ruins, longing to escape, held by the looming threat of nuclear catastrophe.
Drawing on family archives, historical material, and speculative imagery, the work moves through landscapes transformed by large-scale hydrological projects in Ukraine and Central Asia.
SCREENING #4 – SUN 13 SEP
Between Bridges
8:30–9:30PM
Between Bridges is also a non-profit exhibition space, initiated in 2006 by Wolfgang Tillmans. After its first chapter in London (223 Cambridge Heath Road, 2006–2011) and its second chapter in Berlin (Keithstraße 15, 2014–2019), its third chapter in Berlin (Adalbertstraße 43) began in July 2022.
In addition Between Bridges offers a six-month working and exhibition residency for artists and collectives through an open call twice a year. The residency provides space and time to develop and publicly present individual projects in a supportive environment. The studio and exhibition space is situated at Keithstraße in Berlin-Schönberg. Previous residents include Yalda Afsah, Didem Pekün, Lucy Beech, Harry Hachmeister, Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Kristian Vistrup Madsen, caner teker, and the collective Viscose.
In 2017 Between Bridges was also established as a foundation, which is committed to humanism, solidarity and the advancement of democracy. It supports the arts, LGBTQ+ rights and anti-racism work.
Lucy Beech – Out of Body, 2025, 22:00 min
Out of Body is a poetic and psychedelic journey, tracing flows of waste materials across species boundaries, in and out of hum/animal bodies through sites of scientific control. Oscillating between poetry, documentary, and reenactment, the film slips between the cracks of industrial spaces; below ground, across membranes, factory walls and into orifices and hidden worlds of work. The film is woven together by a series of poems performed by Logan February in which borrowed language accumulates. Sourced from different fields these lyrical experiments refer to fluid dynamics, spirituality, medical history, psychoanalysis and reproductive science.
Yalda Afsah – Curro, 2023, 28:00 min
Curro explores the ritualized taming of wild horses in the Galician tradition of “Rapas das Bestas,” raising questions about the social construction of masculinity, dependency, and alienation from nature that emerge through acts of “taming” in interspecies relationships. In this form of domestication, wild horses are driven down from the mountains into the valley, where they are shorn and marked by the “Aloitadores” (Galician for “fighters”). The supposed assumption of responsibility for the animal stands in contrast to the sense of disorientation experienced by the human protagonists as they wait in the wilderness, seemingly estranged from the natural landscape around them. The reciprocal dynamic of this sometimes violent encounter between humans and animals in the arena (the so-called “Curro”) comes to a standstill in the eponymous film at unexpected moments of intimacy.
Didem Pekün – Leyla, 2024, 2:45 min
Leyla dances alone, improvised, for nearly three minutes — a body carrying crippling oppression it has borne for two decades. There is no dialogue. Only the surge each of us recognizes from somewhere: the relief that floods in when a power finally falls. Leyla is that moment — not the years of struggle, but the glimpse of a release after, before it’s gone again.