There are few cities that have spent as much time being declared finished as Berlin. Yet each time its cultural vitality has been called into question, it has reasserted itself. Not through institutional policies, but through the artists who continued to work within it. The past year has once again tested that resilience. Funding cuts, the closure of established spaces and a change in the city‘s cultural leadership have prompted renewed debate over Berlin‘s future as an artistic centre. It is a familiar conversation. What has always sustained the city has rarely been stability, but rather the accessibility of studios, the ease with which communities form, and a creative culture that has long treated uncertainty as fertile ground.

It is into this Berlin that Genius Loci arrives for its thirteenth edition, which is the first edition to be staged in the German capital.

Founded at SETAREH‘s Düsseldorf gallery in 2013, Genius Loci has explored the spirit of place through emerging artists for over a decade. Borrowing its title from the Roman notion of the protective spirit inhabiting a location, the series has travelled beyond its origins in Düsseldorf.  This year, the exhibition is curated by the Berlin artist Allistair Walter, marking his first curatorial project.

Allistair Walter‘s reading of Berlin is both precise and refreshingly unsentimental. The city, he writes, „serves less as the exhibition‘s subject than as its condition.“ Berlin as a set of forces instead of as a backdrop is a place that is „continually shaped by transition, negotiation, and reinvention,“ where artists have learned that „instabilitiy“ does not reproach „possability.“ It is precisely this disposition that has long defined Berlin‘s creative life. From the years following reunification, when artists occupied abandoned industrial buildings and transformed them into studios, to the present moment, the city‘s greatest resource has never been permanence but the freedom to invent within conditions of change. What can appear as uncertainty has, time and time again, become space for new forms of artistic practice.

Walter describes the gathering of thirteen artists for the thirteenth edition not as a symbolic gesture, but as the community that is found in a generation of artists who are at the same place, at the same time - and though circumstance has brought them together, commonality is not a coincidence. His selection emerged through a sense of like-mindedness, rather than through a pre-determined theme. It is an apt way for Genius Loci to begin its presence in Berlin: not by making a blanket statement about the city, but by joining the conversations that have always given it life.

For Genius Loci XIII, Allistair Walter writes:

“Genius Loci—the spirit of a place—is often understood as something inherent to a location. But perhaps the spirit of a place is never fixed. Perhaps it only comes into being through the people, works, and encounters that temporarily inhabit it.

“Rather than proposing a shared aesthetic or a unified theme, this exhibition follows a shared sensibility. The selected artists each approach questions of time, memory, materiality, and perception in different ways, yet many of the works exist in a state of suspension—between presence and absence, completion and becoming, certainty and ambiguity. They resist fixed meanings and instead construct atmospheres that remain deliberately open.

“Berlin serves less as the exhibition‘s subject than as its condition. A city continually shaped by transition, negotiation, and reinvention, it provides a fitting context for a generation of artists whose practices embrace instability not as crisis, but as possibility."

ABOUT GENIUS LOCI

The Genius Loci exhibition series by SETAREH, launched in 2013, serves as a vital annual springboard for contemporary art's freshest voices by channeling the "spirit of the place" from Düsseldorf's legendary art scene. Marking a historic milestone for the project, 2026 hosts the first iteration in Berlin, introducing a brand-new backdrop to the series' evolving concept. Curating a highly anticipated selection of emerging talents, the series maps out the collective consciousness of a new creative generation across diverse mediums like abstract painting, technoid sculpture, and video installation. The overarching curation remains gathering a group of artists whose works are confident, expressive and pertinent, as they balance individualism and modern reality.