Berlin's KW Institute for Contemporary Art has set out its programme for 2027, pairing three spring solo exhibitions with the 14th Berlin Biennale and an autumn season built around memory, labour and resistance. The shows open on February 12 — work by Abbas Akhavan, Anna Boghiguian and Tiffany Sia, each running until May 2 — after a press preview on February 11.

Akhavan, whose work moves between the private and the public, the domesticated and the wild, presents his first institutional solo show in Berlin. Departing from KW's site and history, his works hover between appearing and disappearing, following cycles of growth, decay and renewal in flowers and water.

Boghiguian, whose five-decade practice draws on literature, mythology, economics and psychoanalysis, shows paintings and hand-cut paper figures made during a residency at KW. Legendary and historical characters, mythical creatures and dinosaurs share the works, tracing fragments of evolution in a contemporary story of collapse.

Sia's exhibition recomposes her co-commissioned debut feature as a score of surtitles and asynchronous video. Filmed on Taiwan's Kinmen Islands, the footage asks how history is memorialised and how psychological battles persist, bringing Kinmen and Berlin together to question where, and for whom, the Cold War ended.

From June 5 to September 12, KW will be one of the main venues for the 14th Berlin Biennale, curated by Vasyl Cherepanyn under the title Central Europe Eastern Time. The biennale reads Berlin from the east and looks at Europe through regions long pushed to the margins of its story, taking up class, labour, citizenship and institutional control where present conditions are lived and contested.

The autumn season, October 15, 2027 to January 16, 2028, brings Vlassis Caniaris's Red Carnations, in which found-material figures bear witness to fascist occupation, civil war and dictatorship, confronting fascism as a present danger. Colectivo Los Ingravidos, winner of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research, presents Cosmos: A Theater of Spirit, a multichannel video installation built around the group's idea of trance cinema. Bridget Polk's first institutional solo, In der Schwebe, sees her in residence balancing rocks into stacks that rise and collapse.