New venue for digital photography, video, scanography and AI-generated images: Former Stasi headquarters becomes art association Villa Heike e.V. (Berlin) | 26.03.–02.05.2026

Founded in 2019 and now restructured as a non-profit art association (Villa Heike e.V.), the institution is dedicated to the sustainable promotion of contemporary art and the cultivation of an open, critical cultural practice. The Villa Heike art association’s program focuses on artistic positions that examine the technical image as a creative method, a form of representation, and a site of political action.

Image above: Villa Heike Kunstverein @VillaHeike

The exhibition “Shifting Weathers,” featuring works by Susanne Kriemann, Jasmijn Visser (with Ingmar König), and Luiz Zanotello, will be on view at the Villa Heike Kunstverein in Berlin from March 26 to May 2, 2026. Using digital photography, video, scanography, and AI-generated images, the participating artists explore how weather and climate are visualized through technical imaging processes and what role these images play in our perception of ecological processes. The exhibition thus opens up new perspectives on the complex relationships between climate, image production, and perception.

Shifting Weathers is an exhibition at the Villa Heike Art Association that explores weather, climate, and imaging technologies. While climate is made visible to the public through technical images, measurements, and forecasts, it is simultaneously effective through slow processes that escape our immediate perception.

The exhibition project Shifting Weathers understands weather as an ongoing state that shapes perception, sensation, and temporality. Featuring works by Susanne Kriemann, Jasmijn Visser (with Ingmar König), and Luiz Zanotello, it focuses on the complex conditions underlying the media’s communication and interpretation of weather and climate. Above all, however, the exhibition demonstrates how artistic practices beyond images of disaster can open up new perspectives on the multifaceted nature of climate.

Shifting Weathers is curated by Sarie Nijboer under the direction of Michael Schäfer. The exhibition is accompanied by a one-day symposium on issues of image production, climate knowledge, and the politics of perception.

In her work “Datadust, skin of sand,” Susanne Kriemann examines landscapes as material archives of human legacy. She shows how microplastics have become a newly integrated component of ecological cycles. They are distributed and sedimented over time by weather and decomposition. Kriemann’s observations thus reveal climate as a determining factor in long-term processes of inscription.

Jasmijn Visser, in collaboration with game developer Ingmar König, is developing the interactive video game The Weather Has Been Canceled, which envisions a world without weather. In its fragmented, lyrical game world, where players can move freely, the complexity of climate change is reflected: not reducible to a single narrative, yet deeply rooted in cultural memory and collective grief.

In his installation Tempo e Tempo, Luiz Zanotello explores the interplay of time and weather using real-time images from freely accessible weather cameras worldwide. By training a machine with this visual data and making its processes visible on film, the work shifts our focus to underrepresented regions and differing temporalities. Weather observation is thus conceived as a political act of seeing.

Villa Heike is a studio and office building in the Alt-Hohenschönhausen district of Berlin. The building was constructed between 1910 and 1911 according to plans by architects Wilhelm Verhülsdonk and Richard Lott for the Berlin industrialist Richard Heike, founder and owner of a meat processing machinery factory. The architectural style is characterized by various influences: elements of Historicism can be found on the raised ground floor, in the stairwells, and in the living quarters of the former factory owner’s apartment. The imposing, 9.5-meter-high vestibule is designed with strong allusions to a Doric temple and is completely lined with stone plaster. Particularly on the raised ground floor, unusual architectural forms with hints of Art Deco and Art Nouveau can be found, made possible by the structural and design possibilities of reinforced concrete construction.

In 1945, the building was confiscated by the Soviet army. In the chaos of the post-war period, it first served as the headquarters of the Russian secret police, the NKVD, with prison cells in the basement, and was subsequently handed over to the Stasi. In the 1960s, the Stasi established its secret archive for Nazi files in Villa Heike and the factory buildings behind it, which remained there until its dissolution in 1990.

In 2015, after twenty years of vacancy and threatened by acute decay, the building was developed by Berlin architect Christof Schubert with the idea of ​​a studio and office building. A small group of creative professionals then acquired the property and began construction that same year. After almost four years of planning and construction, the building was inaugurated on February 16, 2019, with an art exhibition.

Today, Villa Heike primarily houses artists’ studios, an exhibition hall, workshops, and offices. The exhibition space serves as rentable area, but mainly as the home for the curated program of the newly founded, non-profit art association Villa Heike e.V. (established in 2025).

WHEN?

Opening: Saturday, 21. March 2026, 5 pm

Exhibition dates: Thursday, 26. March – Sunday, 02. May 2026

Symposium: Saturday, 11. April 2026, 12–6 pm

WHERE?

Villa Heike Kunstverein
Freienwalder Str. 17
13055 Berlin-Lichtenberg