Current fellows at transmediale 2026

Akademie Schloss Solitude is happy to renew its cooperation with transmediale in Berlin, which this year is held under the title By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road: Compassing, Protocoling, Metaphoring. Taking part this year are two fellows and web residents who will present their projects as part of the festival and engage with key questions around technology, history, and worldviews.

Hiba Ali, digital artist and fellow 2025/2026, will present her lecture-performance Sounding the Ocean: Spiral Networks of Remembrance and Elation. The work leads audiences into a research-based video game environment that interweaves music, architecture, and speculative worldbuilding across the Swahili Seas. Gameplay sequences, along with sound and visual material, open up pathways into oceanic exchange, historical memory, and alternative technological imaginations between East Africa, the Gulf, and South Asia.

Shaheer Tarar, web resident 2025, will present two works that examine how computational infrastructures shape our worldviews. In the lecture-performance The Compression Zone, he engages with compression algorithms as drivers of contemporary world-making, bringing together autobiographical and archival perspectives with current digital image politics. As part of the Low-Tide program, Shaheer will also present a further development of a project created during the Solitude Web Residency 2025. Spiral Keti is a visual research interface that maps a Wikipedia rabbit hole and renders the web experienceable as a space of estrangement.

The projects and events by Hiba Ali and Shaheer Tarar are a cooperation between Akademie Schloss Solitude and transmediale 2026.

The 36th edition of transmediale is curated by Neema Githere (juror in the Digital sphere of practice 2024–2025) and Juan Pablo García Sossa (web resident 2021). Alumni Gabriella Torres-Ferrer (fellow 2020/2021) and Kathleen Bomani (fellow 2024) are also participating. Martyna Marciniak (fellow 2024) is the transmediale artist-in-residence for the 2026 Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research in cooperation with the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK).

When: January 28 to February 1, 2026
Where: silent green Kulturquartier, Gerichtstraße 35, Berlin-Wedding & CANK, Karl-Marx-Straße 95, Berlin-Neukölln