BERLIN.- Rebuilding a city is rarely as simple as replacing what has been destroyed. Behind damaged walls and shattered neighborhoods lie disrupted communities, erased histories, contested land and memories that cannot be reconstructed with concrete alone. A new exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin takes that difficult space as its subject.
Metaxy: Between Destruction and Reconstruction, on view from September 10 through December 6, 2026, brings together artists, architects and spatial practitioners to examine what happens between catastrophe and rebuilding—and why decisions made during that interval can determine what kind of future eventually takes shape.
The title comes from the ancient Greek word metaxy, meaning “between.” Here, the term describes a space in which societies confront the past while negotiating the future, and where questions of guilt, responsibility, memory and justice emerge before construction actually begins.
Rather than treating reconstruction as a technical problem, the exhibition argues that destruction extends far beyond buildings. War and climate disasters can dismantle social relationships, displace communities and sever historical connections. Simply rebuilding what once stood can therefore risk obscuring the very violence and loss that made reconstruction necessary.
Berlin itself provides the exhibition with an unusually resonant starting point. The Akademie der Künste building on Hanseatenweg stands in the Hansaviertel, an area dramatically transformed by wartime destruction and postwar reconstruction. Two-thirds of the district's residential buildings were destroyed in Allied air raids in 1943, and its rebuilding later became closely associated with the 1957 International Building Exhibition and ideas of a new postwar society.
The exhibition makes that history physically present. Walls from the residential buildings that once occupied the site have been reconstructed at full scale inside the gallery, overlapping with Werner Düttmann's Akademie building. The result is a kind of architectural palimpsest: traces of the former city are inserted into the postwar structure, creating what organizers describe as the exhibition's largest single work.
Within that framework, contributions from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, Israel, Yemen, Palestine, Poland, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and the United States approach reconstruction from very different historical and contemporary circumstances.
The exhibition is organized around the themes of Traces, Houses, Soils, Times and In-between Spaces, moving from questions of memory and domestic life to land, ecology and the long temporal aftermath of violence.
Among the works is Lebbeus Woods' 1993 Transformational City Plan with SCAR Construction, from his War and Architecture series, developed during the siege of Sarajevo. Woods rejected both seamless restoration and the tabula rasa, proposing instead architectural interventions conceived as scars, scabs or new tissue—forms that would allow the marks of violence to remain visible within a city's future development.
Marina Tabassum Architects approaches reconstruction through the pressures of climate change and displacement. The practice's Khudi Bari, developed in 2020, is a small structure made from bamboo, steel connectors and corrugated metal that can be assembled and dismantled within days. Designed for Bangladesh's shifting river-delta landscape, the house responds to a reality in which permanence itself can no longer be assumed.
In Poland, Archigrest and topoScape transform another kind of residue of war. Their park on Warsaw Uprising Hill occupies a mountain of rubble created from the ruins of wartime Warsaw. Rather than removing that material, the project turns it into both landscape and memorial, allowing war, reconstruction and ecological succession to coexist on the same site.
Other works look at domestic life and the less visible structures that rebuilding can affect. Julita Wójcik's Falowiec recreates one of Gdańsk's best-known socialist housing blocks as an eight-meter-long knitted sculpture, contrasting the logic of industrial mass housing with the intimacy of textile craft.
Architect Salma Samar Damluji's work concerns the reconstruction of the Shaykh-Yaʿqūb Shrine in al-Mukallā, Yemen, which was destroyed in 2015 during the country's civil war. After extensive mediation, Damluji worked with local builders to complete its reconstruction in 2020.
Afghan artist Feda Wardak, meanwhile, turns attention underground. His video From Earth We Come, to Earth We Return, and from Earth We Shall Rise Again examines Afghanistan's ancient karez water channels. Their destruction during decades of war has also contributed to the disappearance of knowledge required to construct and collectively maintain them, demonstrating how environmental damage can continue long after fighting ends.
For Metaxy, rebuilding is therefore not presented as a clean break between destruction and recovery. The exhibition insists on the importance of what lies between those moments: the traces left behind, the memories that remain contested and the choices that determine what will be preserved, restored, transformed or forgotten.
The project is organized by the Akademie der Künste in collaboration with ARCH+ as part of Berlin Art Week. A program of talks, performances, guided tours and walks through the Hansaviertel accompanies the exhibition, while ARCH+ has published a 240-page German-English issue devoted to its themes.
