Description

Third Surface is a hybrid exhibition embedded within Berlin Atonal 2025. Its format draws on the spirit of late-night venues from early Weimar Berlin - spaces where the trauma of war and the shadow of fascism collided with the desire to gather, speak, and stay awake. Such places, operating at the edges of legality and decorum, often became laboratories for political and artistic thought - staging grounds to rehearse new forms of life under conditions that weren’t fully determined. These historical antecedents find their contemporary echo in a darkly furnished installation: a field of small tables, clustered chairs with a stage at its centre. The setting foregrounds social interaction and improvisation. ( text continues below)

Artists

Basma Al-Sharif
Ben Russell & Guillaume Cailleau
Bill Kouligas & Niklas Bildstein Zaar
Billy Bultheel
Calibre
Chuquimamani-Condori
DJ Marcelle
Gavsborg, Kat 7, Tóke & groundsound
Joanna Rajkowska
John T. Gast
Kiera Fox
Kamal Aljafari
Kristoffer Akselbo
Lechuga Zafiro & Verraco
Mala
Moin
Mouneer Al Shaarani
Nelson Makengo
Nino Bulling
Noor Abed
Ran Zhang
Richard Sides
Roberto Cuoghi
Steinar Haga Kristensen
Tanja Al Kayyali
Torus
Tot Onyx
YHWH Nailgun

Press

Atonal 2025: The place is the space by Vanessa Pinzoni, Nasty Magazine

Can Berlin Atonal Be More Than a Rave? by Geroge MacBeth Art Review

Berlin Atonal is ‘keeping the subcultural burning and alive’by Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin DAZED

Blueprints Redrawn, Stamina Preserved by Matt Reed, Metal Magazine
Berlin Atonal “Third Surface” at Kraftwerk Berlin, Tresor and OHM MOUSSE Magazine

Berlin Atonal 2025 is the “Deutsche Vita lenta” festival by Martina Castronovi Parkett

Berlin Atonal, the first biennial rooted in music and sound, pushes the boundaries of what ‘art’ can mean by Sofia Hallstrom The Art Newspaper

berlin atonal 25 | third surface Schön Magazine

RE. BERLIN ATONAL 2025 Arts of the working class

Credits

Exhibition Curation: Adriano Rosselli
Music Curation: Carin Abdulá, Harry Glass, Laurens von Oswald
Lead Producer: Max Bogotyrow
Performance Producer: Sara Smet
Graphic Design: HIT Studio
Design Assistance: Danae Tsadima
Documentation: Frankie Casillo (FC), Helge Mundt (HM), Joanna Chwilkowska (JC), Isabel O’Toole, George Neberidze (GN), Sergey Skip (SS) Hiroo Tanaka (HT)

Third Surface is a hybrid exhibition embedded within Berlin Atonal 2025. Its format draws on the spirit of late-night venues from early Weimar Berlin - spaces where the trauma of war and the shadow of fascism collided with the desire to gather, speak, and stay awake. Such places, operating at the edges of legality and decorum, often became laboratories for political and artistic thought - staging grounds to rehearse new forms of life under conditions that weren’t fully determined. These historical antecedents find their contemporary echo in a darkly furnished installation: a field of small tables, clustered chairs with a stage at its centre. The setting foregrounds social interaction and improvisation.

A shifting programme of performance, sound, moving image, textiles, sculpture and works on paper unfolds within this setting. The works act less as statements than as prompts - subtle cues directing the murmur of voices and the tone of exchange. Third Surface operates as a speculative model: a controlled experiment in how nightlife might be reimagined beyond Eurocentric templates, outside the logic of hedonism, apart from the language of retreat. It turns to the night not for escape, but for encounter. If club culture once opened temporary portals into alternate realities, what now remains of that promise? What could be built from its ruins?

In recent decades, much of what was once politically urgent in nightlife has been dulled by repetition and commodification. The culture remains dressed in the language of resistance, yet this appearance conceals the fact that it is not, in itself, inherently radical. In its place has emerged a standardised template for club culture which oscillates between sensory overload and a kind of solitary euphoria. Why are we assembling only to expend and dissipate the pressures of the day and not to find genuine camaraderie and a shared vocabulary for the future? Most of the institutions of nightlife no longer fulfil their original promise to act as pressure valves and incubators for political thought, rather they are places to sleep underground and wake up the same. Third Surface proposes that nightlife can still serve as a site to redeem this promise; to be a measure of the distance between what exists and what might yet come to be.

At a time of escalating atomisation, in a world where complicity is ambient and mass suffering abstracted, Third Surface asks: what do we want from the night? Who do we want to speak to there? And how many of us are still listening?