FESTIVAL OF FUTURE NOWS 2025
Group show featuring Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck
Oct 31st – Nov 2nd, 2025
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
The Festival of Future Nows will take place in the upper hall, on the terrace, and in areas of the museum that are accessible without a ticket. Except for the collection presentation and special exhibitions, access to these is only possible with a valid museum ticket. In case of limited capacity, admission will be granted on a first-come, first-served basis. Participation is without registration unless otherwise stated.
The Neue Nationalgalerie is pleased to host the return of the Festival of Future Nows in the museum’s iconic Mies van der Rohe building. Ten years after its debut, the festival once again transforms both the interior and exterior of the museum into a dynamic field of artistic encounters, experiments, and visions for the future.
The Festival of Future Nows 2025 brings together around 100 international artistic positions – ranging from emerging voices to established practitioners. In a densely packed program, performative, experimental, and participatory works open up diverse and unexpected encounters throughout the museum’s indoor and outdoor spaces. Performances, happenings, sound and audio works, choreographies, dance, workshops, and both subtle and large-scale interventions invite active engagement.
Visitors are invited to enter into an open dialogue with artists and fellow guests. Through works that inspire participation, reflection, and shared experience, a space emerges for addressing urgent social and ecological issues, fostering collective agency, and imagining new forms of coexistence. At the heart of the festival is the exchange of ideas and an exploration of the role art can play in this process – ultimately aiming to foster cooperation and articulate visions for and of the future.
The first Festival of Future Nows was held in 2014 to mark the conclusion of the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments), an experimental education and research project, led by Olafur Eliasson at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2009 to 2014. Co-directed by Eric Ellingsen and Christina Werner, the Institute explored new approaches to artistic education and research, shaping a generation of artists through an interdisciplinary and experimental practice.
The festival’s inaugural edition took place at Neue Nationalgalerie, prior to the building’s extensive renovation. A second edition Festival of Future Nows → ∞ 2017 followed at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. Now, the third edition returns to its original location. Building on its founding vision, the festival presents art as a space for collective thinking, acting, and imagination—exploring how art can raise questions about the future and stimulate imagination for new ways of being.
A row of uniformed police officers stand motionless on the Neue Nationalgalerie’s steps. Their unexpected presence raises questions: Is this about surveillance, protection, censorship? The situation triggers a variety of emotions and reactions. On closer inspection, one officer’s head dips slightly – another’s shoulder slumps. Only gradually does it become clear that not all of the officers are people. This piece addresses the fraught relationship between the state’s monopoly on violence and the separation of powers, showing that the use of robotics and artificial intelligence in the context of society and politics must be constantly renegotiated.
Installation view, Julian Charrière, Calls for Action, 2025, Festival of Future Nows, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany, 2025
Calls for Action marks a bold new direction by French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière, who in a series of participatory interventions bridges the world of contemporary art with large-scale forest conservation. Consisting of two-way livestreams between cultural institutions and endangered natural landscapes, Calls for Action stages an encounter beyond mere spectatorship where through the act of listening and speaking into the forest, we can also speak out on its behalf.
