As part of this year’s Berlin Art Week, the inaugural Soft Power Festival stands out as one of the season’s most ambitious highlights. Initiated by Anahita Sadighi and co‑curated with María Inés Plaza Lazo, the three‑day event transforms the historic Haus der Visionäre into an open Gesamtkunstwerk of exhibitions, performances, concerts, DJ sets, talks, and shared meals.
Positioned within the official Berlin Art Week program, Soft Power asks how culture can generate influence beyond coercion and market logic, especially in a rapidly shifting political and technological landscape.
By weaving together around 40 artists, a 48‑hour dancefloor, live concerts embedded in the exhibition, and an extensive talks program, the festival offers a rare, city‑wide moment where art, music, and social dialogue unfold as one continuous experience.
Hans Krestel spoke to María Inés Plaza Lazo about the festival’s content, highlights, and spatial concept, followed by short bios on its makers and a note on the venue.
For someone hearing about Soft Power for the first time: how would you describe the festival in one or two sentences, and what feeling or experience do you hope visitors take away?
Soft Power is, of course, not the first exhibition or festival to take its title from this term. There is this year’s edition of Unsound Festival in Warsaw, there is the Kunstverein and residency in Berlin run by Linnéa Bake and Vera Herrmann, there are dance and theatre contexts in France, and there is Sanft Power by Slavs & Tatars, which visitors will encounter in Hall 1. I find this constellation quite interesting in itself: it is almost as though the terminology has become something we collectively need to reopen and examine.
What we are trying to do with the second edition of this festival, initiated by Anahita Sadighi, is to complement these different approaches through celebration, instead of being an academic symposium about the concept. Although I would also find joy in that, the proposition is to find out what happens when you take it out of the seminar room and put it into contact with artworks, bodies, food, performance, architecture and people spending time together.
Joseph Nye originally coined the term for thinking about forms of influence that operate beyond direct coercion. But the concept actually emerged within a particular post-Cold War, increasingly neoliberal understanding of power, and that language has proved remarkably easy for states, cities and institutions to absorb. Culture can become a way of branding a place, attracting investment, producing desirability and manufacturing legitimacy. Berlin is the non-plus-ultra example of this contradiction: the city benefits enormously from the cultural life produced here, while the material conditions that allow that culture to exist are becoming increasingly precarious, destroying that cultural life and keeping the surface.
So rather than trying to produce another proposal on soft power, we wanted to look underneath the term—and go back to the roots of social life. Before culture can project an image of a city, there have to be places where people can make culture. Before a condensed image of an idea can circulate internationally, there has to be a plurality of people listening, speaking, places to meet, time to spend, languages and meals to share. Influence doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It is produced through relationships and through infrastructures that are often invisible precisely because they are so ordinary.
This plurality is not necessarily a spectacular political act. But it is the condition through which a social world is continuously made and remade.
The artworks are important here because they allow us to approach these questions without having to resolve them theoretically. They don’t illustrate a thesis about soft power; they complicate it. They show how images, rituals, objects, voices, memories and bodies carry histories between places, and how those histories change as they move. In that sense, the exhibition is less interested in telling visitors what soft power is than in giving them different experiences of how cultural power operates.
And I hope the experience of the festival follows that logic. I don’t necessarily expect people to leave with a single political message, although there will certainly be many political questions and positions to encounter throughout Haus der Visionäre. I would prefer people arrive on Friday and leave on Sunday having experienced, even briefly, a temporary social world: having encountered someone they didn’t expect to meet, stayed somewhere longer than planned, heard a voice or an idea that remained with them, shared food, encountered an artwork that shifted their perspective, or simply discovered that an apparently ordinary act of gathering can have political weight.
Perhaps that is the most modest way of describing what we hope for: not that the festival tells people what to think, but that it creates enough time, space and relation for something to happen between them.
The festival is built around nine chapters, from “Attuning” to “Becoming.” Can you share one moment or program element that, for you, really captures the spirit of Soft Power?
I think the food program is a very good place to start, precisely because food can seem so ordinary. We eat every day, we sit around tables, we exchange recipes, we feed one another. But if you look closely, the table is also an extraordinary piece of cultural infrastructure. It holds memory, migration, labour, ecology, pleasure and hierarchy at the same time.
Caique Tizzi, together with Fortuna Forest, rustcakes, Ada’s Deli, Adam Fearon and the Berlin Gastro Solidarity Network, approaches the table from very different directions. Caique thinks about food as a medium for storytelling and new forms of togetherness; Fortuna Forest brings food into conversation with ecology, sound and performance; rustcakes works with baking, nostalgia and cultural memory; Ada’s Deli brings a very personal relationship to Italian food and family heritage; Adam Fearon’s painted plates look at tables across different periods, classes and design histories; and the Berlin Gastro Solidarity Network makes the connection between food, hospitality and solidarity very explicit.
The table itself becomes a Gesamtkunstwerk. It is not simply a place where food is served. What makes it meaningful are the people who gather around it. The meal becomes part of the program, but also part of the social fabric of the festival.
There is also a very direct political dimension to this. Akshita Garud looks at Indian food and the history of colonialism through taste, heat and smell. Recipes, fermentation techniques, spice combinations and forms of preservation became ways of carrying knowledge and identity across generations. And yet, when those flavors travelled internationally, they were often flattened for Western consumption. Something as seemingly innocent as making a curry milder therefore contains a much longer history of exploitation: whose taste is considered normal, whose culture is made palatable, and whose difference is treated as excessive.
This complicates the idea of soft power. Food can certainly become a vehicle for cultural influence—it travels very effectively across borders—but it is also a place where people resist being simplified. And that reminds us that culture is not only something institutions export or represent. It is something people preserve, transform and transmit in everyday life.
That is also why the nine chapters are not meant to be nine themes or nine explanations of the exhibition. The chapters are nine verbs: Attending, Gathering, Listening, Remembering, Imagining, Hosting, Ritualizing, Resonating, and Becoming. A verb describes something that happens. It shifts our attention from culture as an object to culture as a practice.
The exhibition brings together around 40 artists from art, craft, performance, and food. Which artist or work are you most excited to show, and why does it matter for the festival’s idea of “soft power”?
It is difficult for me to choose one, because the selection is deliberately relational. I don’t really think of the works as isolated positions, or of the exhibition as a ranking of individual practices. A work changes depending on what it is placed next to, what kind of body encounters it, and what conversations it enters. So I tend to think of the exhibition more as a constellation, where certain works begin to illuminate one another.
That said, Havîn Al-Sîndy’s Gûrçikê min is a work I keep returning to. I first encountered it at K21, in an exhibition curated by my partner Kolja Reichert around notions of ownership, from the German Peasants’ War to technofascism. I couldn’t resist asking Havîn to bring the work to Berlin. There was also a beautiful conversation between her and Anahita Sadighi around the significance of amphorae in the Levantine region—as vessels through which food, water, but also messages and knowledge travelled. Here, that history of carrying takes two very different material forms: Havîn’s raw clay kidneys, still breathing through motors, and Anahita’s fired and preserved clay vessels, which she activates through floral arrangements in the halls.
In Gûrçikê min, three clay organs breathe mechanically, connecting the body to migration and the routes of organ smuggling. What is so powerful to me is the way the work contracts something we normally encounter as an abstraction—migration statistics, borders, medical systems, trafficking, geopolitical violence—to the scale of the body.
The kidney becomes an archive. It belongs to an individual, but it also carries the histories of systems much larger than that individual: medicine, markets, borders, displacement. The body becomes a place where geopolitics is no longer distant or statistical, but intimate and material.
Another work I am particularly happy to bring into this context is Berni Searle’s Profile, which I first saw in the Unlimited section at Art Basel, curated by Ruba Katrib. I feel a certain disdain and joy within the conditions of the art-fair system, particularly with the way very large-scale works can become objects of prestige and financial value for an extremely small public. And precisely because of that, I wanted to take the work out of that economy of spectacle and place it somewhere where its questions could be encountered differently.
Searle’s work was an oasis in Basel. It deals with the politics of the body, visibility, history and representation, but it does not ask to be consumed as an illustration of those questions. It asks the viewer to occupy a particular position in relation to it. In a festival like this, the work can enter into contact with people who are not necessarily moving through an art market or a conventional museum exhibition.
And then I have to return to Slavs & Tatars, particularly to the figure of the Simurgh that runs through their recent body of work, and also, irresistibly, through the curatorial concept of this exhibition. The Simurgh is central to The Conference of the Birds, the twelfth-century Persian poem by Farid ud-Din Attar that also gives us the logic of passage underlying the nine chapters of the exhibition. A group of birds sets out in search of the Simurgh, only to discover, through the journey, that the figure they are seeking is inseparable from the collective itself. The Simurgh moves between language, religion, folklore, politics and popular culture, and I think that mobility is significant here.
So if Havîn brings us back to our organs, Berni makes us grasp visibility, Anahita invites us to the conditions under which art is encountered, and Slavs & Tatars give us the collective as a figure of transformation, I propose a visit to the festival at very different scales simultaneously. The works prevent Soft Power from becoming a single argument and allow it to remain something we can experience, rather than simply agree or disagree with.
Refuge Worldwide is also a program partner of the festival. Who will be featured in these conversations?
The radio program is important because it extends the exhibition into another kind of social space. Over 36 hours, Refuge Worldwide will broadcast conversations, music and live contributions, including Food as a Cultural Practice: Memory, Migration and the Politics of Nourishment with Akshita Garud and Caique Tizzi; the launch of Mariuccia Secol’s Unraveling book with Monika Branicka; Susana AbdulMajid’s performance The First Amphorae; a performance by Julius Pristauz and Nasanin Dahaghin titled Pogolina; a conversation around lilipad, the multilingual children’s book festival; a conversation with Simon Speiser and Katja Pilipenko titled Between Ecologies and Artificial Worlds: Reimagining Reality Through Art; and a conversation with Ushara, Anousha Payne and Kitty Doherty around Ushara’s performance Triangle Reshapes The O of my Mouth.
Alongside those programmoments, Refuge Worldwide residents and invited hosts—including Kava, Myriam & Jack Murray-Brown, Marta Forsberg, Obelix, soo, eioo, Calamidades Lola, Tata Nuo, Moehecan, Amuleto Manuela & David Riley, Henry Weekes, B.BBY, Dracaena, mokeyanju, DJ Chichi, Perera Elsewhere & Elvin, Leona, LIL JA and Viiaan—will inhabit the radio program.
I love that Anahita partnered with George Patrick and Richard Akingbehin and I love their community radio here because it pluralizes the idea of the exhibition audience. You don’t necessarily need to be physically in the building to participate.
That is another way of thinking about soft power: as creating conditions in which something can travel, be interpreted, transformed and carried by other people, without having yourself controlling the narrative.
This is the first time Haus der Visionäre is activated at this scale: two industrial halls, the Sonnenraum, and the outdoor area, around 4,200 m² in total. How did working with Gonzalez Haase AAS on the spatial concept change your thinking about circulation, gathering, and care in a festival format, and what do you hope lingers after people leave?
There is a particular trust between Anahita Sadighi, Pierre Jorge Gonzalez and Judith Haase, and the architecture emerges from their shared vision as much as from any formal concept. The same rare combination of professionalism and vocation extends to their respective teams. At this scale, nothing can be achieved individually; it depends on the care, precision and commitment of many people. Vanessa Tomm, Beatrice Sacco, Tigran, Mike D and Lucas Roessler have been essential in giving this shared vision its practical form.
What Gonzalez Haase AAS gave us was not simply a container for the exhibition, but a framework in which different forms of gathering could happen. With 4,200 square metres, you are almost dealing with a small city: there are different speeds, densities, thresholds, places to meet and places to disappear for a while. The question becomes less “where do we put the works?” and more “what kinds of relations does this space permit?”
That challenged my understanding of curatorial engagement, of course. But I think that is where architecture and curating become very close: both are ultimately concerned with creating conditions for encounters that cannot be completely predetermined.
There is also something quite peculiar about all of this, because Haus der Visionäre is, first of all, a playful name. I am perhaps the person who takes the word vision much too seriously. But precisely because of that, I think vision requires constant revision. A vision that remains unchanged becomes ideology; a vision that is willing to be revised can become a practice.
So perhaps the most important thing the architecture does is leave enough space for visions to change once people enter it.
BIOGRAPHIES
María Inés Plaza Lazo is an art historian, curator and publisher who is concerned with the relations between art and society, poverty and wealth. She co-founded in 2018 the street newspaper Arts of the Working Class, which is distributed on the streets of Berlin and in collaboration with other street newspapers of the world. Her practice brings together contemporary art, performance, craft, and gathering formats to explore how meaning travels across borders and how cultural influence can emerge from below rather than from institutional or economic power.Together with Anahita Sadighi, co‑curates the central exhibition of the Soft Power Festival, taking place September 11-13, 2026 in Berlin.
Anahita Sadighi is a Berlin‑based gallerist, curator, and initiator of Soft Power as a transdisciplinary festival and platform at the intersection of art, music, and social dialogue. Through her gallery and projects such as Soft Power—presented as a Special Project of Berlin Art Week and previously at Mexico Art Week—she develops formats that open spaces for encounter, resonance, and new forms of living together.
Haus der Visionäre is a cultural centre on the Arena grounds in Alt‑Treptow, directly on the Spree between Schlesisches Tor and Treptower Park. Housed in a former 1920s bus factory, the site comprises more than eight glass‑roofed halls and an approximately 1,200 m² courtyard; for Soft Power, two industrial halls, the Sonnenraum dancefloor, and the outdoor area are activated as a roughly 4,200 m² festival ground.
Soft Power Festival (1st edition)
11–13 September 2026
Haus der Visionäre
Eichenstraße 4A, 12435 Berlin
PRICES
1 day pass: 20 Euro, reduced 15 Euro
Full festival pass: 35 Euro, reduced 25 Euro
