May 30, 2025
As Poland assumes the rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Polish Art Week / 6th Avant Art Festival Berlin arrives at a moment charged with political symbolism, asking what role art can play in shaping European discourse. Under this banner, the interdisciplinary event assumes a double role: engaging in cultural diplomacy while infusing the city with the vivid impressions of Poland’s art scene and its entanglements with the global contemporary. From June 16th to 23rd, over 35 concerts, exhibitions, performances, installations and talks will unfold across more than a dozen Berlin venues, ranging from independent galleries and club spaces to train routes and public courtyards. The festival will open a critical framework for asking how Polish contemporary and avant-garde art functions within the conditions of a transnational present amid sustained geopolitical crises and omnipresent discourses around heritage.
L.A.S. Collective // Courtesy of Polish Art Week
This year’s program is marked by formal and conceptual hybridity. On June 15th, an inaugural performance by the experimental L.A.S collective will unfold on the ‘Train to Culture,’ a train ride between Wrocław and Berlin. Through Avant Art’s international scope, the festival draws in sonic artists from Europe, Africa and Asia, figures such as Michał Barański, Qba Janicki and Kali Malone, whose work reconfigures formal traditions into dense, durational pieces that unsettle genre boundaries. The visual art component moves between critical address and situated poetics. It is anchored by four major exhibitions, including ‘Our Touch is the Touch of Feminists,’ featuring works by Ewa Partum and Mehtap Baydu at the Polish Institute in Berlin; ‘Hardcore & Soul,’ a young, artist-curated group show; ‘healing vibes,’ which foregrounds care and softness as critical method at Nadan gallery; and Katarzyna Kozyra’s performance-turned-video installation ‘Dream of Linnaeus’ Daughter.’
Dule Tree // Courtesy of Polish Art Week
Nour Sokhon // Photo by Florian Rosier
Over the course of Polish Art Week, visitors are invited to engage cultural identity as a workable structure: to unfold it, complicate it and return it reconfigured. Its 2025 edition might be read as a kaleidoscope of artistic heritage, revealing how fracture and revision can become tools for inner- and cross-cultural dialogue. In doing so, Polish Art Week offers a space to critically reflect on how culture and the systems, symbols and narratives that cohere around it operates within a rapidly evolving Europe, where questions of belonging and solidarity are constantly renegotiated. Those who attend are encouraged to step into the layered noise of the festival and to join a spectrum of voices and textures that refract these complexities into something momentarily whole and distinctly contemporary.
Exhibition Info
Polish Art Week Berlin
Festival: June 16-23, 2025
polishartweek.com
Various Venues
