Berlin, we’ve got your weekend plans sorted! Celebrate the Neue Nationalgalerie’s reopening with a Mies-van-der-Rohe-flavoured programme at venues across the city.

In April, the scaffolding covering Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie finally came down as six years of renovation wrapped on the modernist shrine, the last of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s (1886–1969) projects to be completed in his lifetime. Its reopening, slated for 2020 but finally taking place this weekend. In parallel, INDEX Berlin presents SUNDAY OPEN featuring Mies in Mind, a slate of shows connected – some deliberately, and some more interpretively after-the-fact – with the Bauhaus legend’s legacy. Clever tie-ins are sprinkled across galleries throughout the city, alongside a series of live events and activations over the weekend.

Mies’ touch is subtly present in Erwin Kneihsl’s (*1952) “Sun” at Guido W. Baudach. It’s a droll misnomer, given that the artist has wrapped the gallery’s front windows, holding most – but not all – of the daylight at bay. The space is illuminated by rice paper lightboxes, little white cubes casting a diffuse glow into the bigger white cube that surrounds them. Their steel frames are joined in smooth junctures, focused fusion at the point where light meets ambient air, like tiny emulations of the Neue Nationalgalerie’s cantilevered skeleton. On the walls, an assortment of high-contrast photographs hang in grid-like formations, while their content, smooth rocks and bonsai trees with meandering boughs, softens their rigid, almost militaristic presentation. Further photos are scattered on the floor, piled leaf-like. Despite the blocked windows, the outdoors infiltrate the in-, the porosity of a Bauhaus building achieved by other means.

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There’s an intensity to Mies’ architecture, a sense of immobility undercut by the spacious gaps of transparency and light. Heimo Zobernig’s (*1958) ongoing protagonist, the mannequin, makes an appearance at Galerie Nagel Draxler; a duet of Untitled figures (2012 and 2014) are posed at the front window, positioned mid-strut. Masculine and feminine but otherwise anonymous, they refer to that other traditional duality. Facing onto the street, they imply fluidity between interior and exterior, a blurred dichotomy between “looking out” and “looking in” that Zobernig played with in his Austrian Pavilion for the 2015 Venice Biennale. There, as in this show, Mies is a reference-point: his design for the German entry to the Barcelona International Exposition of 1929 featured a lone sculpture, Georg Kolbe’s Morning (1925), a female nude with arms stretched skywards. Another mannequin, Untitled (2016), stands, well, statuesque, its balletic pose echoing the lithe expressivity of Kolbe’s sculpture. Painted cardboard plinths, a mainstay in Zobernig’s output since the 1980s, are peppered throughout the gallery, their solidity implying forms yet-to-be-carved, as if more human figures might spring forth, perfectly chiseled, should they spontaneously decide to shed some excess negative space.

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This polarity – heft and lightness, empty and full — recurs across Mies in Mind. Rosa Barba (*1972) (whose solo exhibition will also christen the Neue Nationalgalerie, alongside an Alexander Calder show in the main hall) captures a similar tension at Esther Schipper in moving-image work Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage (2021), where washed out landscapes from across Cyprus, unpeopled and faded, alternate between playful – a sidewalk overrun with lounging cats – and slightly sinister, aerial shots of the disused Nicosia airport overlaid with militaristic synth sounds. The god’s eye view conjures an unsettling sense of control, in contrast to the sun-bleached color palette and gentle 16mm grain.

In the gallery’s main space, Barba’s work in film extends off the silver screen. Her philosophy, which has as much in common with Mies’ ethos as it does Soviet film theory, sees a wider range of media as fundamentally cinematic: the breaks, the spaces between images, are where meaning emerges. A table is strewn with publications, an accordion folder and pair of white gloves nearby inviting viewers to (gingerly) handle. This archive of Barba’s Printed Cinema (2004–), supplementary materials originally published in parallel with each of her exhibitions, is one such experiment in translating moving image into a different context. Turning a page becomes a way of splicing between frames, embodying the essentially modernist principle that the “work” resides in a dialectic between presence and absence.

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Over at Mehdi Chouakri, white gloves get a different treatment. Jonathan Monk’s (*1969) Moore Failure (2021) greets visitors at the entrance with a soiled pair, a contorted overlay on a photograph of the British sculpture Henry Moore. Mounted on a plaster asteroid that juts from the wall, it’s a coda to the tongue-in-cheek show, which gives Moore’s most famous Figures new life as objects of consumption. The gallery’s petite outpost is invaded by a crop of colourblocked coffee tables, teal and baby pink and rave-neon slabs on rigid metal bases. Monk made these Henry Moore Section Tables (2021) on the occasion of his daughter’s application to art school, reminiscing on his own (failed) aspirations to enter Chelsea College of Art in the 1980s, when he accidentally did a spatial intervention – under-appreciated at the time, as his rejection from the school would have it – on Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 1, propping his portfolio of large-format works up against the bronze in the university’s courtyard.

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Here, Monk remade Moore’s sculpture (which resonates, in turn, with Zobernig’s male and female mannequins) and scanned the rigid foam blocks left over from the bronze casting process. He then routed them through a computer, sliced them in ten, and printed them with a CNC milling machine, colouring each cast positive according to the shade of one single pixel in the photographs of the original bronze. Propping the bronzes on legs, he transformed them into a shoppable commodity, sullying the sculpture by inviting association with purchasing and mass-production. At the same time, this shoppability – foregrounded slightly more frankly here than elsewhere, where, lest we forget, the work is for sale just the same – makes the tables feel personal, alluding to their possible lives in private homes. Not to be a nag, but if you’re lucky enough to buy one, please use a coaster when you set your drink down on it.

ADINA GLICKSTEIN is Spike's digital editor and the proud owner of a knock-off Mies cantilever chair.