Exhibition from 29 June 2026 to 27 September 2026 (on the upper floor)
Vernissage on Sunday, 28 June 2026, 6.00 pm

Featuring works by Tina Bara, Wolfgang E. Biedermann, Manfred Butzmann, Carlfriedrich Claus, Fritz Cremer, Wieland Förster, Ingrid Goltzsche-Schwarz, Renate Göritz, René Graetz, Karl-Heinz Jakob, Wilhelm Klotzek, Therese Koppe, Gregor-Torsten Kozik (Schade), Sylvie Kürsten, Toni Florence Mau, Michael Morgner, Alex Müller, Henrike Naumann, Charlotte Elfriede Pauly, David Polzin, Nuria Quevedo, Thomas Ranft, Dagmar Ranft-Schinke, Herbert Sandberg, Elizabeth Shaw, Erika Stürmer-Alex, Hans Vent, Karla Woisnitza and others.

Curated by Sylvie Kürsten and Susanne Weiß (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations)

Drawing on the collections of the Centre for Art Exhibitions of the GDR, the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations and the Museum of Utopia and Everyday Life / Beeskow Art Archive, and supplemented by works on loan from the artists, the exhibition at Biesdorf Palace offers an insight into worlds that bear witness to a remarkable diversity of artistic positions in the GDR. The selection reveals that, despite state control, artistic freedoms did emerge. Kosmos presents positions situated in the in-between and explores tactics of defiance. The focus lies on tracing networks that emerged in the shadow of official state cultural institutions in the Berlin area. The central image is a round table, as found in the work DDR Noir by post-reunification artist Henrike Naumann.

Kosmos: Agendas, Networks, Friendships is part of the exhibition series “Publik Machen (Make Public): On the Work and Impact of the GDR Centre for Art Exhibitions”. Across six chapters, Publik Machen examines the work of the GDR Centre for Art Exhibitions (ZfK), whose graphic art collection was transferred to the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) in 1991. The ZfK combined state cultural policy with international exchange. Today’s examination opens up new perspectives on the relationship between art and politics. The project is taking place in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Dresden and the ifa Gallery Berlin, Biesdorf Palace, the Kunstverein Ost – KVOST, the Prater Gallery and the Galerie im Turm. 

An exhibition project by the ifa – Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations in cooperation with the Wüstenrot Foundation. 

The exhibition is supported by the Capital Cultural Fund.

Exhibition from 29 June 2026 to 27 September 2026 (on the upper floor)
Vernissage on Sunday, 28 June 2026, 6.00 pm

The exhibition The Order of Chaos – Die Ordnung des Chaos brings together three projects by the German-American artist Stefan Roloff (born 1953 in Berlin). Stefan Roloff is a painter, video artist and pioneer of digital image processing in the fields of video art, music videos and photography. In 1984, at the invitation of the New York Institute of Technology and the musician Peter Gabriel, he worked on Images II, the first prototype of computer-controlled image processing. With The Face, he developed the precursor to the music video for Peter Gabriel’s song Sledgehammer. At the same time, he produced Big Fire, one of the first digital videos created by artists, featuring music by Andrew Cyrille. Stefan Roloff has created a large number of short films and documentaries, characterised by his consistently focused gaze beneath the surface. His documentary Die Rote Kapelle (The Red Orchestra), based on interviews with eyewitnesses, has been on display in the permanent exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington since 2015. His first novel, entitled Durchbrenner, is due to be published by Rowohlt Berlin in October 2026.

Roloff developed the concept behind the series Of Mice and Monuments (2023–25), on display at Schloss Biesdorf, in 1990 following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent destruction of statues from the socialist world. In this colourful series of inkjet prints, mice erect monuments to themselves, admire them, and then destroy them again.

Two installations also on view in the exhibition take the form of three-dimensional paintings: Burnt Mickey (2026) depicts subservient behaviour in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world. Saturn Eats His Children (2026) is a Hieronymus Bosch-like scene in iridescent colours, which allows the viewer to experience the eternal cycle of freedom and oppression as a dance on a powder keg.

Stefan Roloff lives and works in Berlin and New York.

Both exhibitions are supported by the Exhibition Fund for Municipal Galleries and the Exhibition Grant Fund of the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion

Permanent exhibition since May 26, 2025 in the Heino Schmieden Hall
Vernissage: Sunday, May 25, 2025 from 6:00 to 9:00 pm

Curated by Dr. Oleg Peters

To mark the 650th anniversary of the first documentary mention of Biesdorf and the 190th birthday of Heino Schmieden, Biesdorf Palace is exhibiting seven rediscovered drawings by the palace architect.

Heino Schmieden's buildings still characterize the urban face of Berlin today as important cultural monuments. 

The drawings by the former student were made 165 years ago, during a study trip through France lasting several months, financed by the prize money from the Schinkel competition. The travel sketches of sacred buildings are not only the earliest evidence of his artistic talent, they are also the architect's only surviving original pictorial works. They have only been presented once before, on the occasion of the memorial service for the exceptional architect who died in 1913 in the vestibule of the Kunstgewerbemuseum, now the Martin-Gropius-Bau.

The historian and curator of the exhibition, Dr. Oleg Peters, discovered the drawings during his many years of research into the life and work of Heino Schmieden with a great-grandson of the architect. Dieter Schmieden from Garmisch-Partenkirchen has now made these unique testimonies from Schmieden's pen available for the exhibition at Schloss Biesdorf.