Hallen 07 takes over Wilhelm Hallen in Reinickendorf for the seventh time during Berlin Art Week 2026, bringing together galleries, collections, and institutions across more than 9,000 square metres. With over 50 artists involved, it is cavernous, expansive and flooded with light. There is a lot to see, and the scale gives the event a momentum that can’t be achieved in a conventional gallery setting.
There is something about Hallen that recalls the old Art Forum Berlin, the city’s major contemporary art fair from 1996 to 2010. Art Forum had a particular role in Berlin’s art scene: it brought together the city’s galleries with an international programme, while retaining something of the city’s loose, eclectic character. It was a proper art fair, but one that belonged to Berlin rather than simply being a travelling version of the international fair circuit. Hallen 07 has some of that same feeling. It brings together commercial galleries, collections and institutions on a scale that is ambitious without feeling detached from the city around it.
The closest modern day comparison to Hallen 07 is probably Art Basel’s Unlimited. Both make a virtue of scale, giving artists room for monumental sculpture, sprawling installations, large-scale video and works that simply would not fit comfortably into a booth. But where Unlimited has become a highly perfected extension of the Basel machine, Hallen 07 has a distinctly Berlin character. Its presentations sit alongside one another with a little more friction, and the experience feels less choreographed.
Entering the space, it’s impossible not to notice Kerim Seiler’s giant inflatable sculpture. Bright, soft and slightly ridiculous, it takes up an enormous amount of space while maintaining the visual authority of a pool toy. Seiler has long been interested in colour, geometry, and the relationship between sculpture and public space, and here the inflatable quality gives those concerns a deliberately playful edge.
The Mercedes-Benz Art Collection’s SEEING FORMS is particularly worth seeing for its inclusion of two smalls works from Absalon. Since his major retrospective at KW, there have been surprisingly few chances to see the late artist’s work, which is a shame given how phenomenal it was.
Absalon died in 1993, aged just 28, but in the few years he had, he produced a body of work that still feels timeless seminal. His stark architectural forms, models and sculptures are simple at first glance, but there is something obsessive and deeply human underneath them. Knowing how little time he had makes the work feel even more remarkable: he was only just getting started, and yet what he left behind is already so complete.
In Prompt Baby, Sarah Friend explores the relationship between AI image generation, consent and the deepfake. Since 2023, Friend has been experimenting with ways of circumventing the NSFW filters of diffusion networks, while fine-tuning them on images of herself. For each work, the collector submits a prompt beginning “A photo of Sarah Friend,” which Friend can accept, reject or modify before generating the image. The resulting process turns the mechanisms of the deepfake into a consensual collaboration, allowing the artist to retain control over how her image is used while deliberately testing the boundaries of what AI image systems will permit.
Another highlight is a series of tablescapes from Daniel Spoerri. In 1968, Spoerri opened a restaurant in Düsseldorf, followed shortly afterwards by the Eat Art Gallery, where food became both material and subject. It was here that his Tableaux Pièges — tables with the remains of meals fixed in place — became his signature works.
His idea was simple: an ordinary moment of eating, with all its mess and leftovers, becomes an artwork. The restaurant became a hotspot for the art world, and Spoerri’s tables went on to become a recurring presence in exhibitions around the world. Seeing them here brings that history back into the room, connecting Hallen 07 to a much older tradition of artists using everyday life, food and social spaces to challenge what an artwork can be.
Another highlight is Ivana de Vivanco’s Anatomies of Water, a five-part painting developed from her research into the Atacama Desert and the environmental and social consequences of lithium extraction. De Vivanco brings together people, animals, plants and a mythological snake in a surreal landscape where water becomes the central protagonist. Bodies leak milk, blood, sweat, tears and other fluids, connecting the human body to the wider water cycle and making the consequences of extracting and polluting water painfully tangible. The snake, drawn from different traditions in which it represents water, protection and renewal, becomes a kind of witness and warning system for an ecological disaster that is already unfolding. It is a lush, strange and politically charged vision of a landscape caught between its extraordinary natural richness and the demands of the so-called green transition.
Christine Jacobs’ Scape V is made from hand-felted wool sourced from her family’s sixth-generation Merino sheep farm in South Africa. Transforming a material so closely tied to her own history, Jacobs creates soft, cradling forms that suggest imagined landscapes and spaces of shelter. The work considers the relationship between land and those who inhabit it, with felting becoming both a meditative process and a way of thinking about belonging, loss and renewal. Presented as part of The Overview Effect, curated by Anna Carnick and presented by Bocci and Wilhelm Hallen at The Foundry, Scape V turns the landscape into something tactile, intimate and almost bodily.
Hallen 07
Wilhelm Hallen
Kopenhagener Straße 60-72
13407 Berlin
more info here
