Four galleries and four artists team up on collaborative project Suite Berlin

Berlin Art Week is hosting a new exhibition and events format in a bid to drive engagement within the city’s diverse contemporary art scene. Titled Suite Berlin, the initiative is spearheaded by four major commercial galleries that will collaborate in the same residential building. Four international artists will present their works in a central exhibition forming the backbone of an accompanying programme of talks, receptions, dinners and screenings, creating a kind of art festival within an art festival.

Scheduled for the duration of this year’s edition of Berlin Art Week (11-15 September), Suite Berlin will take place in a modern townhouse in the Mitte district, near the museum island in the city centre. The participants are: Zohra Opoku, the German Ghanaian artist and photographer (presented by Mariane Ibrahim gallery); Sonia Gomes, the Brazilian textile artist (Mendes Wood DM); Qiu Xiaofei, the Chinese painter and sculptor (Pace Gallery); and VALIE EXPORT, the Austrian performance and moving-image artist (Thaddaeus Ropac).

Resource pooling

Some of each artist’s exhibited works will be made available for purchase. The four galleries are pooling their resources to cover the vast majority of the costs, along with a small contribution from Berlin Art Week’s corporate sponsors.

Although Suite Berlin will observe a guest list policy, the organisers stress that anyone who reaches out to them will be welcome at the project free of charge. The exhibitions and events will be spread over two of the house’s four floors (the owners will continue occupying the other two), as well as a balcony and a garage. The lineup of speakers includes Karen Boros, a Berlin-based collector, and Irina Hiebert Grun, a curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie. Each participating artist will also be paired with a local curator or critic who will help guide them through Berlin’s art scene.

The initiative promises to be a standout feature of this year’s edition of Berlin Art Week, a city-wide festival that aims to activate the entire local art ecosystem through open studios, workshops, gallery events, public installations, musical performances at museums and more. Suite Berlin—part of the festival’s guest programme geared towards art professionals—seeks to harness the spirit of cooperation that is central to the larger festival. “Our aim is to… foster collaboration and promote exchange in a place where people can meet and come together,” Mona Stehle, Berlin Art Week’s artistic director, tells The Art Newspaper.

Laura Attanasio, who leads Pace’s Berlin office, says that although the city’s contemporary art market is smaller than its counterparts in Paris or New York, it is growing, due in large part to its “very focused” collector base. She adds that Suite Berlin provides a unique opportunity to introduce artists based elsewhere into the local market. Pace represents Qiu, who is known for his evocatively coloured paintings and has exhibited widely in China and the US but has had few shows in Europe to date. The eight small giclée prints by Qiu that will be displayed in Berlin will be marketed at the “lower end” of his price range, Attanasio says.

Cross-pollinating the local and the global

According to Mariane Ibrahim, Opoku’s Chicago-headquartered dealer, the initiative will also allow the participating artists to shape local discourse. The artist’s display at Suite Berlin will feature previously unseen works from The Myths of Eternal Life, her four-chapter cycle of embroidered screenprint-on-textile works inspired by the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Opoku, who was born in the former East Germany to a German mother and a Ghanaian father, moved to Accra in 2011. “Germany does not have as much connection with the diaspora as the UK and France, but we have the floor to explore those themes,” Ibrahim says.

After being diagnosed with cancer in 2019, Opoku worked on The Myths of Eternal Life while receiving treatment in Berlin. The artist’s personal journey will resonate with local audiences, Ibrahim predicts: “Her history and her narrative make this a homecoming for Zohra.”

Suite Berlin’s organisers believe that interactions between the four participating artists will lead to valuable new insights. “She really looks up to Gomes, having spent time in Brazil,” Ibrahim says of Opoku. “I am expecting a very rich conversation in which they will learn from one another.” If Suite Berlin can fulfill its goal of initiating meaningful cross-pollination, it could become a new fixture of the city’s art ecosystem soon enough.