On the occasion of its 80th anniversary, Haus am Waldsee reflects on itself as a constellation of conditions: as a place, a social construct, and a spatial structure that has shaped the artistic program on the shores of Lake Waldsee for eight decades. In its anniversary year 2026, the Haus will explore these interconnections between place, life, and art in a diverse program of exhibitions and events. At the same time, it is looking ahead and sees itself as an active participant in its own history, drawing new inspiration from it for the present and the future.
Image above: Rey Akdogan, Single slide from Carousel #9, 2016, Lichtfilter, verschiedenfarbige Verpackungsmaterialien, zusammengehalten durch Dia-Rahmen, 13 Min. Loop (80 Dias), Maße variabel. Courtesy die Künstlerin und Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
Upcoming: Gianna Surangkanjanajai
20.02. – 25.05.2026
Opening: Thu, 19.2.2026, 7 pm
Gianna Surangkanjanajai (born in Cologne in 1991, lives and works in New York) works primarily with sculpture, reflecting in her practice on situations in which form emerges from the conditions of its surroundings. Her works often incorporate geometric bodies, which appear less as fixed forms than as starting points and structures that shift or become porous in the course of material processes. Transparent volumes contain materials that react sensitively to light, temperature, and gravity. Here, sculpture eludes the certainty of objecthood and instead emerges as an arrangement that continually readjusts itself and opens up to external conditions. In moments when the works operate on the threshold between material and immaterial presence, this openness unfolds into an expanded field of possibilities.
This processual nature also shapes the title of the exhibition, which follows its chronological progression: Upcoming in the run-up, Open during the exhibition period, and Closed after the exhibition has ended. For Haus am Waldsee, Surangkanjanajai is developing a group of new works that interact with the rooms of the building, with its angles, passageways, and light axes.
Rey Akdogan
20.02. – 25.05.2026
Opening: Thu, 19.2.2026, 7 pm
Rey Akdogan (Heilbronn, Cologne, lives and works in New York) focuses on the standardization of materials and perception processes that shape our visual present. Her works take on cross-media and often space-related forms that move between projection, sculpture, and installation. Akdogan examines how atmospheres arise and how color, light, and material properties organize sensory experience and create affective spaces. The materials she uses—color filters, printed plastics, packaging fragments—come from industrial and scenographic contexts and serve to control gaze and attention in their conventional contexts. In Akdogan’s works, they break free from these fixed determinations and allow the operational logic of these systems to be experienced in a new way.
One focus of the exhibition at Haus am Waldsee is Akdogan’s Carousel works, which he has been creating since 2010: thin layers of color filters, Mylar, and transparent remnants are captured in 35 mm slides and rotate in the light of the projector. The resulting projections are not photographic images, but material overlays, excerpts, and fragments that modulate the uniformity of industrial surfaces. With each rotation, tones change: colors shift, lines and structures find new alignments, familiar textures dissolve into different rhythms. The familiar becomes enigmatic, yet remains tied to its material origins. This creates a field of transitions in which material and perception relate to each other in new ways.
For the first time, a large group of these carousels is being brought together at Haus am Waldsee, allowing their tempos and shifts to coalesce across the rooms into a polyphonic installation.
Seit…
20.02.26 – 17.01.27
Opening: 19.02.26, 7 pm
In 1946, still scarred by the bomb damage of World War II, the Zehlendorf Art Office was established in the former industrialist’s villa Haus Knobloch. This soon gave rise to Haus am Waldsee, which would go on to write an important chapter in exhibition history over the following decades. On its 80th anniversary in 2026, the Haus am Waldsee will look back on its early years—on its transformation from a private residence to an exhibition venue, on the breaks and continuities between the Nazi era and the postwar period, and on the traces these developments have left on the institution’s self-image.
Display architecture developed by Georgian curator and archivist Nina Akhvlediani (born in 1989) for the former garage (now the café) enables flexible forms of presentation for archival materials. In dialogue with contemporary artistic positions, new perspectives on the building open up, showing that archives are always also a mirror of the present.
Seit… is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is developed by artist Luciano Pecoits and will be on display from February 20 to May 25.
Wo ich wohne
14.06. – 27.09.2026
Opening: 13.06.26
Wo ich wohne looks at the history of the institution through the lens of the villa built in 1922 for the Jewish textile manufacturer Herrmann Knobloch, where Haus am Waldsee began just a few weeks after the end of World War II. The language of the building, in which both victims and perpetrators of National Socialism lived, is understood not only as a framework, but also as material. Against, with, and from within it, the works in the exhibition reveal connections between the private and the political. The violent events and social struggles of the past century echo in the architecture, the property, its location, and its use. They tell of an attempt at bourgeois demarcation that clings to a supposed normality, even when everything outside the windows is shaking.
The international group exhibition unfolds alongside a large-scale work by Richard Venlet and brings together historical and new works by Atiéna R. Kilfa, Nigin Beck, Robert Haas, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Renée Sintenis, and others.
Peter Wächtler
16.10.26 – 17.01.27
Opening: 15.10.26, 7 pm
In fall 2026, Haus am Waldsee will present the first comprehensive institutional solo exhibition of artist Peter Wächtler in Berlin. Wächtler (born in 1979 in Hanover, lives and works in Berlin) develops his works beyond fixed concepts or classifications. He writes, films, draws, paints, builds sculptures and film sets in order to transform familiar genres and narrative styles into a fragile balance of nostalgia, tragedy, and absurd humor. Over two decades, Wächtler has developed his own formal language that uses the supposed comfort of the past to intertwine contemporary contradictions between self-determination and self-abandonment. In addition to a new film production, site-specific works are being created for the exhibition that enter into a dialogue with the architecture of the building.
