Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

An exhibition in Martin-Gropius-Bau goes some way toward penetrating the myth of the man who helped design Beijing’s National Stadium and publicly criticised China’s ruling Communist party in the same breath.

In her exhibition Okay at Galerie Helga Maria Bischoff, American Joanne Grüne-Yanoff takes meaning-saturated animal-derived materials and constructs a playful series of beautiful objects around them.

Interview: Tomás Saraceno. Cloud Cities at Hamburger Bahnhof is Saraceno’s ongoing investigation of a possible future, or futures. The exhibition is monumental and personal at the same time.

With two solo exhibitions and one group show, you’ll be seeing a lot of Thomas Scheibitz in Berlin this fall. We asked Scheibitz about his process and his recent work.

Head to the Martin-Gropius-Bau and you will see why Katsushika Hokusai is rated among the world’s most important artists.The exhibition of the master’s work ends Oct 24. Go!

In a city saturated with its own history of political terror, the 10th anniversary of September 11 saw major Berlin art spaces C/O and KW revisiting images of terror to explore our cultivated mistrust of an image-mediated reality.

Sep 19-23 is Social Media Week all over the world. What has Berlin contributed to our constant digital update-ification of the world? Artconnect Berlin!

As art fair week hits Berlin with four fairs in five days, the scenester of the bunch is always going to be PREVIEW BERLIN (Sep 9-11), the “emerging” art fair, now in its seventh year. Annabel Brady-Brown gives you a walkthrough.

Festival overload continues! In the wake of the Art Forum fiasco, Berlin’s other art fairs scramble to pick up the pieces, pull in the dough and help redefine the city’s cultural (and commercial) moment.

In the beginning of May, Christophe Knoch started the Mica Moca Project Berlin, an experimental, multi-platform cultural programme in the kind of ramschackle digs that Berliners love so much, in an old safe factory.

Five years on, the Heidestraße Gallery Mile has become a high point of the Berlin art scene. Although big names have come and gone the independent compound continues to thrive.

Interview: Amir Fattal. The Israeli-born visual artist brought art to Tape Club four years ago. In January he brought it to Funkhaus. We talked with Fattal about his vision for Berlin’s art scene.

Fashion is an industry that assigns ‘genius’ status to its style gods, and the cult of Helmut Newton proves that this tendency extends to fashion photography. The latest Newton sermon comes in the form of Helmut Newton Polaroids.

Interview: curator of the Helmut Newton Foundation, Dr. Matthias Harder. Helmut Newton Polaroids offers a rare glimpse into the creative process of one of the most influential fashion photographers of the 20th century.

Maik and Joep met 14 years ago in the (literally) underground club Berlin-Tokyo. In June 2001, they transformed Dutch artist Koen Delaere Maik’s 90sqm club space at Ostkreuz into an art exhibit, and Autocenter was born.

Interview: Majla Zeneli. In 2009 she found herself living in Moabit. Four months later she opened a studio for Mezzotint printing and now she’s bringing artists to her gallery and making Moabit a major part of Berlin’s art scene.

Berlin’s very own English-language, art-centric social network is set to launch in the middle of next month. Has the time of stumbling the dark internet alleyways between Craigslist and Kleinanzeigen finally come to an end?

Leaving France for life among the dirty, squat-punk streets of Friedrichshain, Anef lives the Berlin dream.

In October 2010, Berlin’s mayor announced a project to showcase the city’s artistic production. Five young curators explored Berlin’s art world and developed a program. The end result is the exhibition based in Berlin.

In April Galerie Kai Dikhas opened, becoming the first permanent address for contemporary Roma and Sinti art in Germany, and perhaps the world. The exhibition ends June 19. Don’t miss it!

Whether you’re nostalgic for long Sunday afternoons spent at grandma’s or just want a cheap, fun way to get some new jewellery, Perlerei can help. It’s the place to go for beads, clasps, strings and all the other baubles.

Interview: Mike Steiner. Before the modern-day artist enclave explosion in the former East, Steiner opened an artist hotel in the West, followed by his Studiogalerie where avant-gardists played with video.

The first show at Blain|Southern, the new gallery from Haunch of Venison founders Harry Blain and Graham Southern, comes in the form of Turning the Seventh Corner by Tim Noble and Sue Webster.

Interview: Sue Webster. Turning the Seventh Corner features influential artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster and inaugerates the former Haunch of Venison head honchos’ new gallery: Blain|Southern.

Interview: Esther Schipper. What’s behind the decision to relocate from Mitte to Schöneberg Ufer? Is it the end of an era or a new beginning? For Schipper, it’s all history.

The seventh edition of Gallery Weekend consumes the Berlin art world this weekend, boasting more galleries than ever showing off the best they have to offer.

MoMA comes to Berlin, presenting over 300 works on paper in pencil, watercolor, charcoal, acrylic, body fluids, soot, oil paint, plant extracts, ink and spray paint.

Jochen Kienzle’s show is centred on photographer Josef Kramhöller, cast as a Kafkaesque avatar of himself.

Pictoplasma Festival is coming: Mitte gets hi-jacked for a week for an unmissable celebration of illustration, animation, sculpture, music and loads more.

INTERVIEW: Rebecca Saunders. One of the composers to watch in Berlin’s vibrant contemporary music scene, Saunders blends dense clusters of sound for her musical and architectural collage, chroma.

Interview: actress Margarita Broich. The photographic work of Broich is the focus of When the Curtain Falls, opening March 18. Broich’s photographs capture actors in the moments just after performing.

When it comes to the art world women seem to deploy more influence than power, as taste-shapers at home and key players on the international field. Part of our BERLIN’S TOP CHICKS package from THE BERLINER FRAU issue.

Come inside the graffiti covered walls of Berlin’s most famous Kunsthaus (or tourist trap) with four of Tacheles’ long-term residents.

LATEST NEWS! On Apr 16 there will be a demonstration by Tacheles e.V. in front of Tacheles at 15:00 called Die Mauer Muss Weg against a new wall erected in Berlin, this one only in Mitte.

Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s The Art of Flying is an attempt to explore perhaps the most common subject of a wistful afternoon’s childhood fantasy: the dream of flight.

A publication by women and for women, or at least by and for women who are queer-leftist-artist-feminists. The latest issue has playful food-fetishists, interviews, and new takes on menstruation.

The Bob Mizer EXILE show, and re-opening exhibition, is a research project as much as an art exhibition, the first attempt to comprehensively identify the artistic vision Mizer captured beneath the California sun.

Gerhard Kassner’s Berlinale Portraits 2003-2010, on display and updated daily at the Hotel Bogota, reveals larger than life personalities sans the façade – the result of only brief encounters.

The Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at C/O Berlin displays images of drooping penises, erect flowers, children and leatherboys but in classical form as only Mapplethorpe knew how.

Interview: Stephen Kovats. The transmediale artistic director is packing up his laptop following this year’s fest after five years at the helm. Digital suicide and WikiLeaks are on the radar for his last year.

Masks, strange noises, dancers and crazed interior designers. An eclectic clique collaborate for Neurospasta, Dis-play’s showcase of digital artists from the Canary Islands.

Taking in establishment figures and emerging artists alike, the third edition of Berlin-Paris sets out to have it all ways. But is the ego stroking necessary?

Interview: Klaus Staeck. An anti-establishment man working in the context of the art establishment, Staeck is using his influence to pay homage to his old friend, Sigmar Polke. We spoke Staeck about the man and his art.

Street art recognition comes to the proper streets this year, everyone loves treating Damien Hirst like the Ed Hardy of art and people go crazy for Kahlo. And that’s only some of the best.

A chat with… Björn Dahlem. Dahlem’s exhibition, Die Theorie des Himmels III – Focus Imaginarius, explores the fertile gaps in the rational terms of reason. He explains his role as creator and where religion fits in for him.

HoV was the docking station for London-school major-league commercial artists… until it closed with the Yoko Ono show last month. What happened?

“I find it exciting to make two entities clash.” Berlin-based, Dutch-born artist Willem De Rooij discusses his latest exhibition, a project that took four years to realize.

Goldin’s exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie is a foray into decadent 1980s that so many of us mourn without ever having tasted. The 80 selected photographs are now on display.

Pony Pedro’s new gallery space seeks to give silk-screen printing a more prominent role in the city’s art scene, giving Berliners a chance to view the medium somewhere warm and accessible to commercial buyers.

As the Berlin Year of Science comes to an end, the immense Weltwissen exhibition attempts to track 300 years of scientific progress and asks, “Where are we now?”

Eleven sculptures unearthed while digging out the new U5 station in front of the Rotes Rathaus tell the story of thousands of pieces of ‘degenerate art’, purged by the Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s. They’re now on display at the Neues Museum.

A meeting with gods? Through Reindeer urine? Carsten Höller’s grand exhibition posing as a science project, stimulates all human senses – for those lucky enough to afford it.

Try to contain your jealousy, girls – Soto hits all the right notes, bringing together men’s wear from a worldly mix of fashion brands. From now on, Berlin boys have no excuse not to sharpen up their act.

Goldrausch’s program for female artists goes beyond traditional art education, opening Berlin’s art scene to women from all over the world.

Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime suggests that the man who ruined a certain type of moustache was not some charismatic monster but a manmade villain – the product of immense popular support.

Models can be much more than design tools – they can be political statements, nostalgic mementoes or just plain art. Dan Borden talks about the REALSTADT exhibition taking place at the new Kraftwerk Mitte venue.

Lebensborn – an insidious Nazi scheme to preserve Aryan blood by aiding or forcing desired couplings. Kriegskinder is the photographic work of Einar Bangsund and Fantom e.V.: showing these Lebensbornkinder as they are today.

Deutsche Guggenheim’s Color Fields exhibition brightens the Berlin winter. But does it say anything?

Akademie der Künste’s South American excursion feels like idealized commercialism, but the works are beautiful.

Did Dimitri Hegemann just save Berlin’s art scene? Was its structure crumbling? Kraftwerk Mitte opens its doors with Realstadt, an architectural exhibition of German cities over the past 50 years.

Interview: Billy Childish on being Childish. The English artist, punk rocker and prolific novelist explains that “any decent artist either lives outside England or is a weirdo”.

A chat with… THOMAS STRUTH. The versatile, famed German photographer goes to the far sides of the planet to bring something to his newest exhibition in Berlin.

Berlin has been compared to New York in the 1970s and 1980s, but do we really want Mitte to become the SoHo of the 2000s? MMX’s last show questions the identity of the art scene.

The world’s first soil-less state touches earth for the first time at the First NSK Citizen’s Congress at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

The six-week European Month of Photography festival pastes Berlin’s topography into a city-wide ‘scrapbook’. From its hub at Berlinische Galerie, exhibitions radiate out into 100 venues of various kinds.

Reassembling the fashion industry production line, Berning and Di Battista give a look at the industry through art – but inside out.

© Gwenneth Boelens: Remnant, Klemm’s, Berlin.“The atmosphere at Art Forum is relaxed but concentrated. Professional people do not seem to be in such a rush, the way they maybe are at other fairs. A lot of things happen around the fair, too: you have the opportunity to bring people to the galleries, and to organize…

© Carl Smith“Because Kunstsalon allows unrepresented artists to participate, it has a certain vibrancy and home-grown feel to it that attracts a lot of people who are interested in art but are not necessarily part of the ‘art scene’. For an artist like myself (I have works ranging in price from €50-€5000), being there in…

October is art month all over. At Berlin’s six art fairs international collectors collide with the young art producers. Here’s our guide to what’s what.

© Károly Keserü, Patrick Heide Gallery“Preview brings together an exciting mix of young galleries with consistently strong programming. It is also a size that is easier to digest and to enjoy than the larger fairs. Preview is also a fair that is always up for ‘thinking outside the box’.” Patrick Heide, Patrick Heide Gallery, London.…

© Anna & Bernhard Blume, Buchmann Galerie“ABC has an interesting format that is somehow more precise than an art fair; you can also buy the works, which makes it interesting for us. It is also connected to the Gallery Weekend, which we also do and like very much.” Erik Herkrath, Buchmann Galerie, Berlin. Exhibiting work…

When October 7 (18-23:00), October 8-9 (13-23:00), October 10 (13-18:00)Where Station-Berlin, Halle 5, Luckenwalder Straße 4-6, Kreuzberg, U-Bhf Gleisdreieck, Tel 0157 7388 1151How much €8Background In 2009, Marco Schwalbe – street-artist and owner of Berlin-Munich mural gallery Intoxicated Demons – launched Stroke, the first art fair devoted to urban art.In a nutshell Painting, advertising graphics,…

The directors of the art fair that really captures what Berlin is about, Preview Berlin, sat down with us for a chat about how they keep it so fresh!

Now in year five, Preview Berlin will be holding its ‘cutting edge’ ground Tempelhof’s Hangar 2… with a new conceptual space and first-time exhibitors from postcommunist art scenes.

INTERVIEW: Yoko Ono’s solo show opened last month at Haunch of Venison with a polysemous title, Das Gift (the poison), and a bullet hole in shattered glass.

ON NOW! Arab or Jewish? Israeli photographer/video artist Dor Guez’s ID card says “Jewish”, but his family history is not as straightforward. With his solo exhibition Al Lydd, he paints a counter-narrative of Palestinian culture.

IN PICTURES! In the 1920s, a generation of women took charge of the freedoms offered between two world wars. Breslauer’s photographs mastered the emergent style, “Neues Sehen”.

After a short and chaotic life, Berlin’s Temporäre Kunsthalle died of natural causes on August 31. We assess the TKH’s ephemeral existence… and its legacy.

OUR PICK: MMX is going art-mad this month, with 44 artists/performers. It’s a sort of revolving door policy: one artist leaves each week, but only after curating a replacement show.

IN PICTURES! A child of Palestinian refugees who fled to Lebanon in the wake of the 1948 war, Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis winner Mona Hatoum’s most striking work riffs on scattered identity.

“I‘ll come back to the Museum of American Art when I find out where it is,” wrote one visitor in MoAA’s guest book. Geographically, it’s at No. 91 Frankfurter Allee, but getting in isn’t so straightforward…

Sadly Ján Mančuška died in Prague at the age of 39 after struggling with illness for a long time. Sam Williams had a chat with him last summer regarding his 2010 Berlin exhibition.

OUR PICK: Olafur Eliasson’s show comprises a city-wide web of installations: at Martin-Gropius-Bau, there are rooms of coloured “fog”, a hall of mirrors and an electrical storm performed by a dancing hosepipe.

OUR PICK: A lot has changed since 1947, when the world’s foremost photo agency was founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson. C|O sums up 60 years of photojournalism’s biggest names.

DON’T MISS: Performance artist Brisley has always sought out the hidden or discarded – the homeless, food, excrement. He’s winding down his first German show in 20 years.

LAST CHANCE! The spine-tingling, prize-winning images in Willy-Brandt-Haus’ exhibition do more than illustrate news stories: they turn photojournalism into fine art.

Art’s most radical experiment comes to Berlin: bid (with services!) on unnamed, uncaptioned, unauthored and unpriced works… that may or may not be by somebody famous.

From Jan Christensen’s alcoholic balancing act to Richard Wilson’s 1000°C steel box – not to mention the Biennale – there’s plenty in town to get art enthusiasts hot and bothered.

Ninety-eight-year-old French artist Louise Bourgeois died in New York on May 31, as some of her work was being shown at Berlin’s Double Sexus exhibition – billed as the “last exhibition led by the artist herself”.

LAST CHANCE! British multimedia artist Mathew Hale came to Berlin before the hype hit – 10 years ago – with his partner, the visual artist Tacita Dean. A local show proves his art is still as unfathomable as ever.

NOW SHOWING: As she hopped from New York to London to Amsterdam, from Minimalism to Radical Figuration, painter Jo Baer has always searched for new ways to “‘do the right thing’”. Now she’s on to “fusion art”…

OUR PICK: The Ismaili Muslims’ spiritual leader is displaying 200 pieces from his private collection – one of the world’s oldest and most valuable collections of Islamic art – for the first time ever.

No self-respecting comic retrospective – let alone a Jewish one – could do without the work of Art Spielgelman, author of “Maus”: the Jewish Museum’s includes a few original prints. But isn’t Spiegelman more than a ‘Jewish artist’?

Just like 18th century group portraits (the original ‘conversation pieces’), Johnen Galerie’s show engages a diverse collection of artists in a series of dynamic exchanges.

On Linienstraße in Mitte, once a hive of cutting-edge artistic activity, trendy galleries have displaced the squats and affordable housing. But slick rooms don’t guarantee better art: that’s why MMX is so refreshing.

At the Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies van der Rohe’s sober, minimalistic entrance hall has been transformed by an ornate carpet and a golden chandelier – the epitome of what the Bauhaus crew couldn’t stand.

Born in Berlin in 1936, Vera Mercer was a trained dancer before she moved on to photography, Paris and the Nouveau Réalistes. Now, Mercer creates extraordinary still lifes of food – and she is returning to the city of her birth for a retrospective.

Mixing traditional media like charcoal and oils with spray paint, scraps of porn found on the street and South African tabloid headlines, Emil Holmer’s Dead Letters paintings are a series of neon horror stories.

From Marx to the Modernists and beyond, utopia was something to strive for – a goal that could be incorporated into everyday life. Here in Berlin (some would say a utopia in its own right), Deutsche Guggenheim has taken up the subject.

When he was little, Bertrand Gadenne always knew he wanted to be an artist. As an adult, he has moved from medium to medium – from painting to slides and, later, videos.

The Belgian artist/filmmaker Nicolas Provost grew up under the influence of Serge Gainsbourg, his cousin (a local rock star) and French cinema. His work glides from nostalgic found footage to cutting edge experimental filmmaking.

In his complex, engaging and very often funny works, the Berlin-based 2006 Turner Prize nominee Phil Collins (not to be confused with the former member of the band Genesis) balances heightened social engagement with playfulness.

Honor Harger started her career as an artist and curator on the airwaves in her native New Zealand, with the experimental broadcasting project Radioqualia.

The Chilean artist Lucia Rojas Egaña works in many capacities: as a documentary-maker, video artist, creative collaborator and collector of trash. She is based in Barcelona and recently completed a residency at Kreuzberg’s GlogauAIR.

By taking photos and transforming them into models made from cardboard and paper, the German artist Thomas Demand translates two-dimensional objects into three-dimensional ones. Then he brings the models back to their original state by photographing them.