The exhibition by Julius Pristauz combines physical and spatial experience with concrete social realities. It aims to encourage visitors to engage with the tangible and invisible dynamics and forces that surround them. In the exhibition, wind becomes a force that shapes, slows down movements, changes directions, challenges, drives progress or hinders it.

The museum presents well-known and lesser known aspects about Berlin’s Mitte district – from the historic past to the present day – in exhibition spaces organized according to different themes.

The exhibition freihand. Writing, School, Community presents work by students from Berlin’s Mitte district, created almost one hundred years apart: calligraphies by students in an art course at Herbert Hoover School, and twenty handwritten booklets that children at the 308th Municipal School at Leopoldplatz wrote, drew and bound themselves between 1926 and 1928. In both cases, the students decided what appeared on the page.

The artist Qusay Awad is invited to carry out an artistic research project to delve further into the annual theme Heimsuchungen/Hauntings. In view of the upcoming anniversary year 2027, the research project will aim to examine and reflect on the 10-year exhibition history in relation to the architecture and history of the Bärenzwinger. Throughout the year, interim updates of the research project will be presented and starting in October, the result of the project will be exhibited.

With Mae Nan Guk Juk: Diasporic Memories Formed in Clay, Korean-German artist Frank Jimin Hopp explores the memories of the first generation of South Korean labour migrants in Germany. Through interviews, video works and collaboratively created ceramic objects, the exhibition brings together stories of migration, care work, loss and new beginnings. It presents diasporic memory as a living archive, continuously shaped through storytelling, encounters and artistic practice. The title refers to the Four Gentlemen of East Asian art—plum blossom, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo—symbols of resilience, dignity and perseverance.

The solo exhibition by Nina Paszkowski, titled “Furore”, refers to the spectacle that has long shaped the Bärenzwinger: the principle of display and staging—whether through living animals, ideologically charged urban identity, or contemporary art. “Furore” describes a form of public attention that moves between fascination and unease. What attracts and excites can also turn into indignation or anger. Paszkowski approaches this anger through mythological figures whose name resonates in the exhibition title: the Furies. In Greek mythology, they appear as furious avengers who, through an act of mercy, undergo a process of becoming human and transform into the benevolent Eumenides.

is a site-specific installation by Nazanin Noori at the Klosterruine Berlin. It connects the historical space of the former religious building with questions of religious affiliation, power structures, public perception, and diverse conceptions of the divine. As a relic of a sacred site, the Klosterruine points to the political and social systems that have historically emerged from religious organisation. For centuries, the Berlin Franciscan monastery functioned as a space in which spiritual practices—both aesthetic and performative—were closely intertwined with urban order and political authority. At the same time, the ruin stands as a marker of repeated destruction and transformation.