Palästina zwischen Augen
Exhibition and public program
October 17, 2026 – January 3, 2027
Opening: October 16, 2026, 6 pm

Press preview: October 16, 2026, 12 pm
Access only with accreditation. Please contact: presse@ngbk.de

Since 1969, the nGbK has been a place where artists and curators regularly invite the public to discuss issues affecting local society. From this fall, a series of exhibitions and events focus on the democratic public sphere: who it allows to speak, what it makes visible, and how it is changing.

How to speak about the war in Gaza is a question that currently occupies an unparalleled place within public debate in Germany. The discussion is being conducted in politics, the media, and academia, and it also concerns cultural institutions. It touches on a culture of memory that emerged from Germany’s responsibility for the Shoah, and on the question of which experiences are granted space within this culture. Berlin is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian community. Their family histories and biographies are part of the city, but these stories are rarely told.

The exhibition Palästina zwischen Augen takes this observation as its cue. Rather than what we see, it asks how we see. It assumes that what we see depends not so much on the number of pictures as on the framing within which we view them. Seeing differently thus means questioning and expanding ingrained visual habits. This applies equally to pictures from Gaza and to the city where they are shown.

The artworks in the exhibition approach this question in different ways. Using film and video, installation, sound, photography, and drawing, they deal with landscape and everyday life, with memory and exile, with bearing witness, and with the conditions under which images emerge and disappear. They use public and family archives to trace German-Palestinian history, or to focus on the Palestinian diaspora in Germany. The exhibition includes works by Mohamed Abusal, Shiva Addanki, Basma al-Sharif, Sophie Ataya, Yuval Carasso, Pary El-Qalqili, Dirar Kalash, Talya Lubinsky, Jumana Manna, Stellar Meris, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, and Joshua Schwebel.

From the curatorial statement, nGbK work group Palästina zwischen Augen:
“This exhibition is an intervention into the aesthetic realm. It affirms our collective responsibility as cultural workers to question the social norms that limit the scope and direction of our gaze. Rather than concede to indifference, the exhibition is an invitation to turn our attention to the frameworks that enable it. With this exhibition, we insist on the necessity of a public space to reassemble as a collective sensorium.”

Sophie Goltz, managing director of the nGbK:
“Since its founding, the nGbK has been an art venue where members can choose their own subject matter and offer it up for public discussion. This exhibition follows this mission. It was selected by a vote of the nGbK membership at the 2025 annual general meeting and developed by a working group over a period of eighteen months. Within the nGbK, as elsewhere, discussions around Israel and Palestine are marked by a multitude of divergent voices. Art can create a space in which ambivalences are given shape, sat with, and reflected upon without overhasty resolution. For us, it is important that the security of Jewish lives and the acknowledgement of Palestinian experience should not be played off against each other. We invite people to come and see for themselves.”

 Artists: Mohamed Abusal, Shiva Addanki, Basma al-Sharif, Sophie Ataya, Yuval Carasso, Pary El-Qalqili, Dirar Kalash, Talya Lubinsky, Jumana Manna, Stellar Meris, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Joshua Schwebel

nGbK work group: Hannah Beilharz (until July 2026), Yuval Carasso, Talya Lubinsky, Joshua Schwebel, Gabriela Manda Seith

Information on the public program is available here.

An awareness team will be present at all events. The nGbK also has a complaints procedure.