Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026: SOCIÉTÉ and the Politics of Return

For Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026, SOCIÉTÉ presents a programme shaped by transformation, memory, and the shifting relationship between private gesture and public meaning. Across two solo exhibitions and expanded visibility through Bunker Berlin #5 at the Boros Collection, the gallery positions itself not merely as an exhibitor, but as a site where political and material histories are actively renegotiated.

At the centre is Volveré y seré millones by Wynnie Mynerva, whose exhibition title invokes the final words attributed to Túpac Katari. The phrase carries profound historical charge, transforming an individual death into a declaration of collective return. In Mynerva’s hands, this becomes a framework for examining relationality, resistance, and communal memory.

Rather than treating colonial violence as a closed historical event, the exhibition appears to position it as an ongoing structure, one that continues to shape contemporary identity and cultural inheritance. The invocation of Katari shifts the exhibition beyond commemoration. It becomes an insistence that histories of suppression are also histories of continuity.

If Mynerva’s exhibition is rooted in collective return, Chrysalizing by Edi Rama explores transformation through form itself.

Rama’s new bronze sculptures originate in drawing, but move decisively beyond it. Sketches are translated into 3D-printed structures, reworked by hand, and cast into bronze. This process introduces an evolution from immediacy to permanence, from notation to monument. The private line becomes public object.

What is particularly striking is the tension embedded within this transition. Drawing often implies provisionality, intimacy, and speed. Bronze, by contrast, carries associations of durability, authority, and historical memory. Rama’s sculptures inhabit the space between these conditions, preserving the spontaneity of thought while imposing physical weight.

Together, the exhibitions operate through different but complementary trajectories. Mynerva looks to return and multiplicity. Rama to transformation and materialisation. Both are concerned with how meaning survives, whether through collective memory or formal reinvention.

The inclusion of Conny Maier and Salim Green within Bunker Berlin #5 further extends SOCIÉTÉ’s presence across the city, reinforcing the gallery’s role within a wider Berlin ecosystem where institutional, private, and commercial spaces increasingly overlap.

Gallery Weekend Berlin has long functioned as more than a market event. It is a moment when Berlin’s galleries articulate broader cultural positions. In this context, SOCIÉTÉ’s programme feels particularly attuned to the political conditions of the present.

Across these exhibitions, return is never passive. Memory is not static. Form is not fixed.

Instead, each becomes a process through which histories are reactivated, reshaped, and made newly visible.