Berlin Atonal returns to Kraftwerk from August 27th to 31st with a renewed vision for radical programming across sound, performance, installation, and film. Following its powerful 2023 edition, which we covered in this article for its curatorial precision and ability to transform industrial space into an activated zone of artistic encounter, this year’s programme expands even further. A dense, durational experience, Atonal 2025 proposes a new way of being with music and art: not as spectators, but as participants inside a constantly shifting ecosystem of signals, bodies, memory, and pressure. You can get your ticket here.
The music lineup features a tightly curated mix of world premieres, commissioned works, and rare collaborations that blur genre and discipline. The opening night alone delivers Bendik Giske & Sam Barker’s long-awaited live debut, Carmen Villain’s immersive new set, and a high-voltage improvisation by Lee Ranaldo, Peder Mannerfelt, and Yonatan Gat. Also featured are NYX, a vocal ensemble reimagining choral ritual, and the first chapter of Billy Bultheel’s new durational performance, A Short History of Decay. Each night blends main stage concerts with late-night aftershows across OHM, Globus, and Tresor, with sets from DJ Pete, Calibre, TYGAPAW, Skee Mask, re:ni b2b Mia Koden, and more.
Beyond its musical offerings, Berlin Atonal extends its reach through Third Surface, a newly developed exhibition format situated inside Kraftwerk’s vast interior. Combining installation, performance, and moving image, Third Surface is structured more like a nocturnal social space than a traditional gallery. Furnished with a central stage, scattered seating, and intimate lighting, it becomes an active environment rather than a site of passive viewing. The works on display are not isolated; they bleed into the architecture and into each other, forming a loose yet charged choreography of forms, gestures, and questions.
Among them is Kristoffer Akselbo’s Barracuda, in which a man mists hydroponic plants while trapped inside a wooden fence; a slow, surreal loop of control and confinement. Nino Bulling’s Pressure weaves together textile, drawing, and narrative in a moving portrait of intimacy, illness, and friendship shaped by absence. Roberto Cuoghi intervenes with a trio of ambiguous slogans rendered as freestanding works: language as image, refusal, and echo. Steinar Haga Kristensen suspends a vast coffered painting above the exhibition space and installs ULTRAIDENTIFIKASJONSPAVILJON, a video-game-style simulation embedded within sculptural walls, part temple, part trap.
Tanja Al Kayyali transforms Palestinian embroidery into architectural scale, stretching traditional forms across spatial surfaces that are at once political and personal. Joanna Rajkowska’s Emergency Lights takes the form of an enormous rotating red light, a slow, disorienting warning in motion. Billy Bultheel’s The Fugue State unfolds across the week as a ritualised performance installation built around a towering acoustic structure, mixing mediaeval eschatology with contemporary resistance tactics and musical counterpoint.
Tot Onyx presents We Are Numbers, a live work where performers in tactical gear move silently through the space, exposing and unsettling the codes of surveillance, uniformity, and control. Mouneer Al Shaarani’s early silkscreen poster works, censored in 1970s Syria, are shown in full, visually sharp, ideologically precise, and still urgent. Ran Zhang’s Dark Romance combines digitally altered skin textures and urban graffiti into hybrid surfaces that reflect the porous boundaries between technology, affect, and city life.
Screenings take place nightly as part of Third Surface’s expanded moving image programme. Basma Al-Sharif’s O, Persecuted reclaims a militant film from 1974 as an act of visual restoration and resistance. Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film reconstructs an archive from footage looted by the Israeli military during the invasion of Beirut. Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau’s Direct Action documents life after the political win of the French ZAD movement, avoiding triumphalism in favour of lingering, lived complexity. Films by Nelson Makengo, Noor Abed, and Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner stretch documentary into ritual, counter-narrative, and myth.
On the top floor, PAN curates a listening environment titled ENTOPIA, where a different sonic work is played each night through a custom-built spatial audio system. Jeremy Shaw’s Phase Shifting Index, Anne Imhof’s WYWG, Mohamed Bourouissa’s LILA, Jenna Sutela’s Pond Brain, and Cyprien Gaillard’s Retinal Rivalry each offer a distinct emotional and sonic atmosphere. In contrast to the intensity of the main floor, ENTOPIA offers a space of slowed-down absorption, where sound becomes architecture, breath, and memory.
Berlin Atonal 2025 doesn’t rely on spectacle. Its power lies in accumulation, in contradiction and in the unresolved. It moves through noise, silence, movement, and stillness. It’s not about nostalgia nor futurism but about listening to what’s already here, just beneath the surface. What remains when structures collapse? What forms of gathering still matter? This is a festival that doesn’t look away.





