From May 1 to 3, Gallery Weekend Berlin will return for its 22nd edition, bringing together no less than 50 galleries across 66 locations throughout the city. Shows, events, and performances from both established and emerging artists will showcase the many layers to the German capital, and help cement its role as an international center for contemporary art (this year alone boasts artists from more than 30 countries).

So what can you actually expect? At galleries like Sprüth Magers and Konrad Fischer, you’ll find big names like Martine Syms, Thomas Demand, and Daniel Buren, while a new sector, Perspectives, will feature artists including James Turrell. Meanwhile, group shows at the likes of Galerie Neu will provide a platform for some more emerging, subversive, and lesser-known artists, and the windows of the department store KaDeWe will play host to works by David Byrne, Simon Denny, Harry Nuriev, and more.

We’ve gathered more highlights to look out for below.

GÖKSU KUNAK, EBENSPERGER

Bodybuilders, a pole dancer, karate practitioners, a suspended performer, and more will transform the empty bunker at Ebensperger over the course of Göksu Kunak’s REMAINS. Taking inspiration from a similar time-based work,  Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1991 project Every Week There Is Something Different, the exhibition will be composed of actions, smells, and bodies, and the marks they leave behind over the course of the weekend (and throughout the following month), raising questions about what kinds of bodies or voices get to leave a trace.

WYNNIE MYNERVA, SOCIÉTÉ

Wynnie Mynerva’s paintings, photos, and films document the artist’s search for new ways of loving and being loved, drawing on historical, colonial, romantic and sexual imagery. As detailed in the run-up to the show, this also marks a “return home” to Andean modes of thinking, where love is not just an intimate or private feeling, but a constant exchange within a broader system of tangled relationships. Mynerva poses the question: “What is love, if not a relational force: the energy that holds together bodies, territories, ancestors, and cycles of time?”

MONTY RICHTHOFEN, DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM

Beginning at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Monty Richthofen’s HARD 2 4GET will spread across the city over the course of the weekend, treating it as both a medium and a collaborator (whether the city likes it or not). Urban spaces will be transformed by the artist’s ongoing experiments with language and performance, as a fleet of spray-painted vehicles move through traffic, drawing on ongoing research into unofficial inscriptions on military hardware. 

HANNA STIEGELER, SWEETWATER

Hanna Stiegeler’s Brutes des Nuits (or “beasts of the nights”) features large-scale depictions of the bed that the artist shares with her child. The bed itself is a place of tenderness, care, and labour, but there’s an extra dimension as well: the screenprinted canvases are based on images from a baby monitor, lo-res and pixellated, both distorted and true-to-life.

MARTINE SYMS, SPRÜTH MAGERS

With a career spanning film, art, and theatre, Martine Syms presents... none of those things at this year’s Gallery Weekend. Instead, she takes over the gallery’s street-facing exhibition space with Dominica Publishing, a temporary boutique. The pop-up store brings together artworks, merch, and publications, all available for purchase, and all playing with the idea of the shop, desire, and the performance of desire as artistic subjects.

BROOK HSU, KRAUPA-TUSKANY ZEIDLER

Built for the International Exposition in 1929, knocked down, and reconstructed decades later, the Barcelona Pavilion designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich is an architectural icon. It’s also the jumping-off point for new work by the New York-based painter Brook Hsu, whose second show with K-T Z features a series of filmy paintings, drawings, and photographs, folding the story of a building built to be demolished in with the story of a woman living through the loss of a child.

ANNE DUK HEE JORDAN, ALEXANDER LEVY

For Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, viewers are invited into a shifting ecosystem. Playful machine-like works sit alongside organic processes of growth and decay, exposing the tangled interconnections of the world we’re living in, and encouraging us to look beyond our blinkered human perspectives.

Gallery Weekend Berlin runs from May 1 to May 3.