Berlin Atonal “Third Surface” at Kraftwerk Berlin, Tresor and OHM

Berlin Atonal makes its highly anticipated return to Kraftwerk Berlin, Tresor and OHM at the end of August this year, presenting a five-day programme of new commissions, premieres, installations, and club nights. The festival’s mission is to mobilise artistic risk in order to initiate new modes of listening, gathering, and sense-making.

BECOMING A BIENNIAL
This edition also marks the first festival after Berlin Atonal’s official inclusion into the International Biennial Association—a recognition of its status as one of the world’s most significant platforms for the presentation of experimental, interdisciplinary, non-commercial art and music. This new alignment underscores Berlin Atonal’s ambition to become the leading music-first biennial for contemporary sonic and interdisciplinary art. 

MUSIC PROGRAM
The bulk of Berlin Atonal’s music program occurs on the cavernous main stage which presents total-format performances from across the spectrum of contemporary music. The main stage encloses 70.000m3 of volume and becomes for these five days the biggest haze, sound and people-filled experiment of its kind.

A selection of works that will be presented:

A new trio uniting incendiary noise legend Merzbow; Igor Cavalera of Sepultura and illbient luminary Eraldo Bernocchi

The major new live work S.L.O.T.H. from performance-enhanced culture jammers Amnesia Scanner with French-born, New York-based artist and hacker Freeka.tet;

A new sculptural and improvised performance from Djrum, the alias of British producer and musician Felix Manuel, known for his emotionally candid and sonically complex work spanning jazz, ambient, techno and modern classical. This new performance for Berlin Atonal 25 unfolds as a beatless exploration of sound and space, constructed with custom-built machines and instruments.

A searing new audio-visual performance entitled REIGN from Kenyan artist Lord Spikeheart and visual collaborator NMR, drawing on the history and aftershocks of the Mau Mau Rebellion against British colonial rule. Spikeheart—a central figure in the African metal scene—fuses industrial, death metal, grindcore and traditional rhythms into a charged sonic language that meets NMR’s politically committed visual storytelling in a work of cathartic force.

A newly conceived trio combining Sonic Youth’s legendary co-founder Lee Ranaldo with Yonatan Gat and Peder Mannerfeld for an unpredictable and improvised first live show;

The new project from the pre-eminent voice of the now-generation of industrial music, Puce Mary, who joins Manchester subversive Rainy Miller for a new collaboration GRIEND;
A new chapter in Billy Bultheel’s ongoing performance cycle A Short History of Decay, a project that treats collapse as both a sonic and political condition. The Fugue State unfolds through a hybrid of concert, sculpture and text, centred on a towering pulpit-like installation engraved with fragments from the medieval Apocalypse Tapestry and Berlin street graffiti. 

A searching multimedia and multi-instrumental performance from the Barcelona-based Jokkoo Collective under the name Organic Intelligence navigating the outer edges of African diasporic rhythms, electronic experimentation, and socio-political critique;

The first outing of a new collaboration between shapeshifting saxophonist Bendik Giske and electronic producer Barker, occupying the tensile space between colossal electronic architecture and the fragile materiality of human breath.;

A powerful new live project from emptyset entitled dissever, unleashing loud, psychedelic sonics within a fully immersive environment shaped by total room design and lighting from MFO.

The premiere of a major new audio-visual show called Escape Lounge developed by Milanese artist Heith with visual artist Bianca Peruzzi. Their hallucinogenic blend of acoustic instruments, human voices, and digital technology unfolds an uncharted path through experimental pop, introspective indie-folk, and Mediterranean psychedelica
A rare collaboration between two masters of abstraction: South Korean cellist Okkyung Lee and British electronic composer Mark Fell. Their performance pits Lee’s fiercely physical, improvised cello technique against Fell’s precisely programmed, computer-generated systems, generating a volatile interplay of musical vocabularies and technological logics that unfolds as a series of negotiated collisions across time.

ART PROGRAM
Third Surface is the name given to the newest formal experiment from Berlin Atonal, following its successful Metabolic Rift and Universal Metabolism exhibitions. It functions as a hybrid exhibition embedded within Berlin Atonal 25. Its format draws on the spirit of late-night venues from Weimar Berlin—spaces where the trauma of war and the shadow of fascism collided with the desire to gather, speak, and stay awake. 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, namely, beyond Eurocentric templates, outside the logic of hedonism, apart from the language of retreat.

It features:
A new sculptural performance by Danish artist Kristoffer Akselbo, whose work exposes the banal, contradictory and often absurd rituals of everyday life by collapsing boundaries between public space and artistic intervention. Barracuda, presented within the Third Surface programme, transforms an overlooked corner into a surreal hydroponic tableau: a solitary figure tends his glowing garden beneath UV lights, enclosed by a wooden fence and flanked by a rudimentary hut. The installation unfolds as a quietly unsettling monument to self-containment, private delusion and the fragility of individualism.
A contribution from Roberto Cuoghi, one of Italy’s most singular and enigmatic contemporary artists, whose practice spans painting, sculpture, animation and sound. Driven by perpetual experimentation and a deep suspicion of fixed forms, Cuoghi’s work resists stable identity through acts of self-transformation, material invention and rigorous unlearning. For Berlin Atonal 2025, he presents three image designs based on variations of familiar slogans—revisited with irony and disenchantment – rendered deliberately mutable, their truth made to accommodate every possible interpretation.

A new installation by Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska, known for her incisive interventions into public space and collective memory, including the iconic Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue, a 15-metre artificial palm tree in central Warsaw. For Third Surface, Rajkowska presents Emergency Light—a trance-like, dream-inflected environment in which a colossal emergency beacon looms among us, as if placed by a patient, observing monster. The work conjures a world in slow collapse, inviting reflection on our suspended state within an already unfolding catastrophe.

A new tripartite installation from Norwegian artist Steinar Haga Kristensen, whose expansive practice spans painting, sculpture, performance and architectural intervention to interrogate the unstable dynamics of image, authorship and recognition. Rooted in “self-archeological” processes, his work stages collisions between baroque excess and modernist restraint. For Third Surface, he presents a monumental ceiling-mounted painting, two large-scale tempera works forming the outer walls of a freestanding structure, and a video game work titled ULTRAIDENTIFIKASJONSPAVILJON installed within. The piece addresses both interior and exterior perception—marking a threshold beyond which the speculative architecture of Third Surface begins.
Among those creating the live music for the space are:
DJ E, the alias of Chuquimamani-Condori, a Pakajaqueño Aymara artist whose work fuses traditional drumming and ceremonial music with vivid synthesis, distorted folk motifs and dense noise. Known for emotionally raw, sonically overloaded sets, they collapse the boundaries between tradition and futurity, chaos and communion—summoning a sound world where ancestral memory and experimental intensity converge in a ritual of ecstatic dissonance.
Moin, the trio of Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews (of Raime) with percussionist Valentina Magaletti, reimagine the traditional band format through a lens of grunge, shoegaze and post-rock, refracted by unconventional production methods and a mood that slips between the familiar and the uncanny. For Berlin Atonal 2025, they present a live show that fuses raw, guitar-led immediacy with deep electronic undercurrents—an alchemical set that rethinks what a band-based performance can be: purposeful, direct, and charged with inquiry.

John T. Gast presents the world premiere of Petrols, an intimate and emotionally charged live project that departs from the contours of his Gossiwor material to explore looser, more improvisational terrain. Centred on acoustic textures fed through a bespoke array of pitch, loop and distortion effects, Petrols unfolds as a dense sonic lattice marked by dread, dissolution and fleeting moments of fragile peace. Attuned to the uncertainties of the present, the work builds and unbuilds itself in real time—a raw encounter with vulnerability, weight and reflection.
And YHWH Nailgun, the American quartet of Zack Borzone (vocals), Jack Tobias (synth), Sam Pickard (drums), and Saguiv Rosenstock (guitar), whose live shows have rapidly gained cult status. Formed during lockdown in Philadelphia as an experimental collaboration between Borzone and Pickard, the group took shape in New York, developing a tightly woven writing process and a visceral, emotionally charged sound. Their Berlin Atonal debut channels the full force of this singular live energy—intense, cathartic, and unmistakably their own.

LISTENING ROOM
Simultaneous to the main stage program, PAN presents a listening room in the Kraftwerk control room with selections from ENTOPIA, their offshoot series dedicated to expanding the function and form of the soundtrack. Rather than treating sound as a secondary supplement to image, the series frames it as a central, structuring element. Conceived as a framework for musical works emerging from the fields of visual art, performance, film and fashion, the series profiles world-conjuring musical works in-and-for-themselves.

Berlin Atonal 25 dedicates each of its five evenings to a work from the series. The soundtrack to Cyprien Gaillard’s Retinal Rivalry is a disorienting sequence of auditory perspectives from organ recordings to flickering time-manipulated layers that drift between documentary residue and psychotropic abstraction. Jenna Sutela’s Pond Brain constructs an bioacoustic alien language that rearticulates an assembly code of microbial flow. Anne Imhof’s brooding and bodily WYWG distils a sense of pressure, dread and distance. Mohamed Bourouissa’s poetic and labyrinthine LILA channels social ritual, improvisation and collective healing, with the voice of Le Diouck acting as a interventive apparition. Finally, Jeremy Shaw’s Phase Shifting Index proposes a psychophysical feedback loop for the purpose of inducing an ecstatic vision of re-evolution.

CLUB PROGRAM
As usual the festival activates the three club floors Tresor, Globus and OHM for an expansive programme of DJ sets that stretch across genre, geography and generations. Boundary-pushing selectors like Lil Mofo, livwutang, STILL and TNTC push up against legendary scene-defining figures such as Rrose, Pinch and Calibre across five nights that map a vast sonic terrain. Special back-to-back sessions—Vlada with Skee Mask, re:ni with Mia Koden, Moritz von Oswald b2b Azu Tiwaline and a rare triple b2b from Anthony Linell, DJ Red and Neel – offer moments of collective propulsion, while sets from Baby Sy, Erik Jabari, Marylou, Nawaz, Significant Other, Daisy Ray, EMA, Emily Jeanne, Katatonic Silentio, Martyn, MBODJ, Gyrofield, Triš and NVST activate the dancefloors as a sites intensity and convergence.

ART PROGRAM

Kristoffer Akselbo
Barracuda, 2025

Kristoffer Akselbo is a Danish artist known for creating sculptural performances that expose the banal, absurd and contradictory elements of everyday life. His work often collapses the distinction between public spaces and the space of the artwork itself. His new project Barracuda is installed in a corner of the Third Surface space. A lone man, seemingly unaware of his surroundings, tends a small hydroponic garden beneath UV grow lights, spraying his plants with a silver perfume mist. The scene is enclosed by a simple wooden fence and anchored by a small hut—a shelter and a monument to the man’s own solipsistic sense of individuality. 

Nino Bulling
Pressure, 2025

Nino Bulling works across comics, textiles, and publishing formats, usually using graphic narrative as a site for thinking through political violence, sex, and gender. For Third Surface, Bulling turns to Pasolini’s Le ceneri di Gramsci to examine the textures of a time “which is now dawning.” Their new work filters this poetic sediment through the emotional language of pressure: if you keep on pressing where does it go? How do you think of sex, friendship and the future when death leaks out over everything.

Roberto Cuoghi

Roberto Cuoghi is one of the most enigmatic and singular Italian artists of his generation. Working across painting, sculpture, animation and sound, his practice is driven by a refusal of the familiar—always contesting received forms, stable identities and inherited knowledge. Perpetual experimentation, rule-breaking and processual transformation form the core of his approach, often involving intensive self-study, material invention and prolonged acts of becoming. For Third Surface he contributes three image designs based on variations of slogans that Cuoghi revisits with disenchantment, to make them declinable in every sense precisely because their truth allows them to suit all interpretations.

Steinar Haga Kristensen
PARASOSIALTVEKKELSESAPPARAT, 2025
PANSOSIALUTVIKLINGSSENTRAL, 2025
Sentralapparat, 2025
ULTRAIDENTIFIKASJONSPAVILJON, 2025

Steinar Haga Kristensen works across painting, sculpture, relief, performance, and exhibition architecture to probe the unstable relationship between image, authorship, and recognition. Drawing from a long-standing engagement with “self-archeological” strategies, his practice fuses baroque theatricality with the formal austerity of modernism. For Third Surface, Haga Kristensen contributes three pieces: a monumental painting suspended like a coffered ceiling hangs above the audience upstairs; two large-scale tempera works form the outer walls of a freestanding room placed centrally on Kraftwerk’s ground floor. These paintings address both the interior and exterior—inside the enclosed space the third work, his video game piece ULTRAIDENTIFIKASJONSPAVILJON is installed, while externally the room creates the edge beyond which the Third Surface unfolds.

Tanja Al Kayyali

Tanja Al Kayyali studied at the University of the Arts in Damascus before relocating to Berlin, where she continued her training in printmaking under Robert Lucander and Mark Sadler. Her practice—often artisanal in scale and rooted in drawing and collaboration—has been shaped by her Palestinian heritage as well as her work as an illustrator in the Arabic-speaking world and her years as a translator and cultural mediator in refugee camps near her birthplace in Serbia. For Third Surface, she presents an outgrown version of her hand-crafted visual language- traditional Palestinian embroidery technique of Tatreez—turning it into a format that confronts the architectural scale of the installation system, translating the tactile sensibility of her previous work into a spatially expanded, visually composite form.

Bill Kouligas
Co-designed with Niklas Bildstein Zaar
Limbus, 2025

Limbus is a spatial intervention developed by Bill Kouligas in collaboration with Niklas Bildstein Zaar and Berlin architecture studio sub. The piece reimagines recorded sound as a transducer-based experience—an embodied audio environment structured around Kouligas’ newly composed sound work that activates nightly. Moving through different emotional states, it offers a conceptual anatomy of nocturnal time, flickering between memory and projection. It is a sensory chronicle recast as spatial and temporal fiction.

Billy Bultheel
A Short History of Decay, 2025

A Short History of Decay is an ongoing performance project by Billy Bultheel that explores collapse as both a sonic and political condition. Structured across multiple chapters, the project unfolds through a hybrid of concert, sculpture, and text, centred around a monumental pulpit-like tower installation. The Fugue State presents newly composed music for flute, bass, and harpsichord, as well as fragments of speech inspired by Emil Cioran and Henri Michaux, to trace a line of survival and enchantment amidst ruins. Carved objects, reclaimed wood, and protest graffiti inscribe contemporary upheaval into ancient ritual space. Bultheel’s latest chapter seeks a way forward; not by resolution, but by reckoning with collapse and the polyphonic memory it leaves behind. A central acoustic tower—engraved with fragments of the medieval Apocalypse Tapestry and contemporary protest graffiti from Berlin’s streets—serves as both score and altar.

Joanna Rajkowska
Emergency Lights, 2016-2025

Joanna Rajkowska is a Polish artist whose work engages with historical memory, political trauma and the collective experience of place. Her best-known work, Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue, saw the placement of a 15-metre artificial palm tree in central Warsaw—a strange and open-ended gesture that triggered enduring public debate and has since become a permanent feature of the city’s landscape. Her work for Third Surface entitled Emergency Light creates a hallucinatory setting in which we humans are puppets in the world of a monster. It has placed a giant emergency light among us to make us aware that our world is on a downward spiral and in free fall. It slows the pace of reality, trying to draw our attention to the already unfolding catastrophe. Although the monster is patient, this trancey, dreamy work is a warning that the situation may be irreversible.

Mouneer Al Shaarani
Military Repression and Authoritarianism Around the World Collection, 1977

Mouneer Al Shaarani is a Syrian calligrapher and typographer whose work integrates formal invention with political urgency. Born in 1952 in Homs, he was raised in a household that resisted authoritarian structures, including those within the family itself. “A factor that influenced my entire life,” he remarks. His early political consciousness was shaped not only by his parents but also by events around him. “I remember that during my stay at Hums as a child, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser visited the city, and the people literally carried him in his car above their shoulders. That was the trigger to my early political curiosity and awareness.”

Al Shaarani came of age intellectually as Syria aligned itself with the Soviet Union, an alliance that filtered into cultural and artistic life. “I had already been politically active since high school. I have shifted interest from religion to become a member of the Baath party, then left Baath to a party geared more towards Marxism.” By 1976, he had joined the radical Communist Action League, just as the Lebanese civil war intensified and Syrian forces entered Lebanon under the banner of the Arab Deterrent Force. The moment coincided with his final year at university.

Originally intending to design a new Arabic typeface for his graduation project, Al Shaarani shifted course amid the political turbulence of 1976. Instead, he produced a poster campaign against military dominance and regional oppression – an act of defiance that drew warnings from his professors. “Do you wish to get us imprisoned?” one asked. “Don’t worry, Sir,” he replied, “they will detain me!”

The resulting posters combined archival photojournalism, staged imagery, silkscreen printing, and hand-scripted text in a custom Naskh-derived typeface. Despite institutional resistance and the threat of reprisal, Al Shaarani graduated top of his class, though his grade was reduced due to the project’s political content.

Third Surface reproduces Al Shaarani’s graduate designs as part of its poster project.

Tot Onyx
We Are Numbers, 2025

Tot Onyx is the solo project of Tommi Tokyo, a Tokyo-born, Berlin-based sound artist and performer known for her visceral engagement with metal objects, bodily presence, and acts of refusal. For Third Surface, she presents a special commission developed in collaboration with visual artist Mattia Bertolo. The work unfolds as a series of performative actions staged throughout the Kraftwerk building, enacted by performers in replica police uniforms. Titled after the badge-number system used by Berlin’s riot police, the piece reflects on a disturbing irony apparent today: while victims of state-sponsored genocide are reduced to numbers, the people charged with suppressing popular opposition to these crimes willingly adopt numerical identifiers.  Referencing carceral logics, collective silence, and the aesthetics of control, the work challenges the audience to reconsider what has been normalised – in Berlin and beyond—under the guise of public order.

Ran Zhang
Dark Romance, 2025

Ran Zhang is an artist based between Rotterdam and Berlin. Her work draws on the textures of industrial childhood and contemporary urban life to explore the emotive tension between image-making and knowledge. For Third Surface’s poster project, she presents a series of digitally manipulated micrographs of chicken skin, into which fragments of political graffiti from Berlin-Neukölln are discreetly embedded. Micrography acts not just as observation, but as an agent of revelatory violence and subsequent erasure. The resulting textures fuse biological vulnerability and suppressed political and emotive urgency.
Screening Program
Each night a different filmmaker’s work is shown on Berlin Atonal’s custom Projektionsfläche. This program The Projektionsfläche program is co-curated by DEMO MOVING IMAGE and supported by the Italian Council. As fascist ideologies, militaristic rhetoric, and genocidal policies resurface across Europe, casting the shadow of a new dark age, anticolonial struggles and practices of self-determination are also shaping alternative ways of organising and living together. Third Surface’s programme brings together experimental films that develop strategies of visibility within this shifting landscape and collective narratives to challenge conditions of dispossession, offering alternative imaginaries to relate to repressive power structures and activating processes of liberation.

Basma Al-Sharif
O, Persecuted (2014, 11”)

O, Persecuted is a filmic performance by Basma Alsharif that emerges from the restoration of Kassem Hawal’s 1974 Palestinian militant film Our Small Houses. Rather than treating restoration as a technical task, Al-Sharif frames it as an embodied, cinematic act—one that involves physical labour, the passage of time, and the movement of history.

Ben Russell & Guillaume Cailleau
Direct Action (2024, 221”)

In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022-2023, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement – culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.

Following the principles of an immersive filmmaking and in the footsteps of some of Akerman’s work, DIRECT ACTION is a unique and hypnotic portrayal of a community which is not circumscribed to its violent interactions with the State: thanks to their meticulous observation, the directors document a highly singular political movement where it is still possible to conceive a better tomorrow.

Kamal Aljafari
A Fidai Film (2024, 78”)

Kamal Aljafari is the most prolific and innovative Palestinian filmmaker working today. His work has been shown at film festivals such as the Berlinale, Locarno, Viennale and Rotterdam. and museums such as the MoMA and Tate Modern. This film is based on the events of summer 1982 when the Israeli army invaded Beirut and looted the entire archive of the Palestinian Research Center—a repository of historical documents, photographs, and film material relating to Palestine. A Fidai Film takes this act of erasure as its starting point, assembling a cinematic counter-archive from the very images now held in Israeli collections. Kamal Aljafari reclaims and recontextualises these fragments to explore the visual memory of the looting, constructing a haunting meditation on displacement, resistance, and the politics of appropriation.

Noor Abed
A Night We Held Between (2024, 30”)
our songs were ready for all wars to come (2021, 20”)

In A Night We Held Between, Noor Abed builds a layered sonic and visual structure around Song for the Fighters, found in the sonic archive of the Popular Art Center Palestine. Filmed across ancient sites—caves, underground passages, and wild valleys—the work conjures history as an ongoing, collective act of imagination. The land itself becomes a central character, revealing a hidden terrain beneath the surface of the visible.

our songs were ready for all wars to come choreographs a series of scenes based on historised Palestinian folktales, particularly those centred on water wells and themes of disappearance. The film seeks out an emancipatory potential in folklore—using it as a tool to reclaim stories, spaces and forms of community erased by colonial and neoliberal violence.

Nelson Makengo
Rising Up At Night (2024, 95”)

Kinshasa is in darkness. Plans to build the largest power plant in the Congo plunge 17 million people into darkness and insecurity. In Rising Up At Night, Nelson Makengo captures a city suspended between blackout and illumination—its residents waiting, improvising, enduring. The film offers a subtle, non-linear portrait of this nocturnal condition, where hope, disappointment and religious faith converge in the shadows. Through Makengo’s lens, Kinshasa’s nights become sites of both struggle and transcendence, revealing a city illuminated not by electricity but by the resilience of its people.

at Kraftwerk Berlin, Tresor and OHM
until August 31, 2024

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