Business
Celebrating Diversity, Creativity & Perspective:
10 Years of Pop-Kultur
Written by Janice Faith
Photos by Yvonne Hartmann, Dominique Brewing & Caterina Gili
Celebrating Diversity, Creativity & Perspective: 10 Years of Popkultur
Written by Janice Faith
Photos by Yvonne Hartmann, Dominique Brewing & Caterina Gili
For ten years, Pop-Kultur has brought musicians, artists and talents from all over the world to Berlin at the end of summer for a three-day festival with world-class music acts – and DADDY has been their media partner for three years. This year’s edition from August 28th-30th celebrated the festival’s 10th anniversary with international superstars such as Yemi Alade, Black Sherif and Blinky Bill, exhibitions, panel discussions and the artistic freedom and experimentation that have made the festival so popular.
When Pop-Kultur premiered in 2015, the team knew that they wanted to do things differently than other music events in Germany and created a festival that included everyone. Up-and-coming talents from Berlin performed alongside musicians often left outside the Eurocentric focus, commissioned works provided space for honest dialogue with the artists, and the music scene was critically examined through a multimedia program. Pop-Kultur sees itself as a space for diversity, where people with different experiences, identities, and backgrounds come together. This year’s “Focus on Africa” brought a lot of exciting acts and musical diversity to the festival. Ghanaian singer, rapper and fashion model Black Sherif kept the crowd moving, singing and cheering with his mesmerising energy and created an almost church-like euphoria. Yemi Alade, the Nigerian multi-award-winning singer, songwriter and actress who’s left an impact across the continent and its diaspora, performed in front of a cheering Berlin audience and probably created one of the most memorable moments in Pop-Kultur’s history.
For ten years, Pop-Kultur has brought musicians, artists and talents from all over the world to Berlin at the end of summer for a three-day festival with world-class music acts – and DADDY has been their media partner for three years. This year’s edition from August 28th-30th celebrated the festival’s 10th anniversary with international superstars such as Yemi Alade, Black Sherif and Blinky Bill, exhibitions, panel discussions and the artistic freedom and experimentation that have made the festival so popular.
When Pop-Kultur premiered in 2015, the team knew that they wanted to do things differently than other music events in Germany and created a festival that included everyone. Up-and-coming talents from Berlin performed alongside musicians often left outside the Eurocentric focus, commissioned works provided space for honest dialogue with the artists, and the music scene was critically examined through a multimedia program. Pop-Kultur sees itself as a space for diversity, where people with different experiences, identities, and backgrounds come together. This year’s “Focus on Africa” brought a lot of exciting acts and musical diversity to the festival. Ghanaian singer, rapper and fashion model Black Sherif kept the crowd moving, singing and cheering with his mesmerising energy and created an almost church-like euphoria. Yemi Alade, the Nigerian multi-award-winning singer, songwriter and actress who’s left an impact across the continent and its diaspora, performed in front of a cheering Berlin audience and probably created one of the most memorable moments in Pop-Kultur’s history.
Over 10,000 visitors swarmed across festival grounds each day with all their different music tastes taken care of by the wide range of artists invited by curators Yeşim Duman, Christian Morin, and Pamela Owusu-Brenyah. Feminist hip-hop collective bangerfabrique had people dancing wild and unapologetically while the German pop band Blumengarten stirred up old feelings, new feelings and had the crowd hug it out to their heartfelt songs. Considering the current political climate another important program point was the talk “Testcard-Rechtspop” on the presence of the radical right in pop culture. Equally as important was the panel “Festivals, Events and Disco” that talked about infrastructures for the queer community with performance artist Inna Shparber who contributed a deaf performance to the festival in 2023, photographer Xenia Dürr and Martin Vahemäe-Zierold, district worker for queerness and anti-discrimination.
Another unique Pop-Kultur attribute are the commissioned works that each celebrate their premiere at the festival since 2017. They take into account the lack of discursive spaces within pop music and that artists in precarious living situations don’t have enough opportunities for reflection and experimentation. The project allows artists to critically engage with topics of their choice without first having to think about economic viability. This year’s commissioned pieces included Otis Mensah’s “Tenderness and Cruelty”, an immersive live performance using aesthetic poetic devices and avant-garde cadence that delivered the audience to a sonic and visual dream-like state centred on the body and its experience of racialisation and gender. Otis Mensah is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist working across fields of music and literature, taking influence from the expressive freedom of jazz.
Another notable commission was by the artist collective parallelgesellschaft, which is a post-German literary collective from Berlin-Neukölln and is known for its Instagram takeovers by the city’s beloved artist-activists and for organising a monthly reading stage with changing themes and line-ups. For Pop-Kultur they collaborated with German drummer, percussionist and producer Philo Tsoungui to take the audience on a jam session road trip through language, sound and blending the poetic with the political.
One of the many highlights of this year’s lineup was Swiss-Tamil musician Pryia Ragu whose unique mix of pop harmonies, danceable nineties R&B vibes and traditional Tamil elements has catapulted her to international fame. As a child, Ragu was part of her father’s band which played traditional Tamil music and later she started co-producing her own music together with her brother. Her debut mixtape “damnshetamil” from 2021 became a hit thanks to songs like “Chicken Lemon Rice” and “Good Love 2.0”. Likewise performing on the first day of the festival was superduo Twin Flame which is made up of artists K.ZIA and Sedric Perry who have already made a name for themselves through their individual careers. Together they create a spiritual sound that combines influences from Afrobeats, Amapiano, Soul and R&B. With their enchanting voices weaving through the room they create a cocoon full of warmth, tenderness and ancestral connection.
Representing the intersection of music and politics was the talk Sounds of the Revolution by Bahar Roshanai and Mathias Koch which was simultaneously interpreted in German Sign Language. Since the murder of the young Kurdish-Iranian woman Jina Mahsa Amini in September 2022 the words jin, jiyan, azadi (woman, life, freedom) have represented a nationwide wave of protests that has not ebbed down to this day and that was preceded by many more upheavals such as the Iranian and the Islamic Revolution. All of these movements come with a soundtrack in which the two panellists discuss the history of Iran while also looking into the future. Since 2019 Pop-Kultur has ensured greater accessibility by installing Çaystube, a space in Kulturbrauerei's courtyard which is free and open to the public. It facilitates dialogue and interaction and presents a diverse cultural program on its stage every year, offering çay as a symbol of hospitality and shared experience for everyone. This year, Çaystube hosted artists such as bangerfabrique, Alice Dee, esRAP and drew in the audience with its karaoke sessions. The space also exhibited posters by the “Kunst bleibt viele” (Art stays many) campaign against racism.
The 11th edition of Pop-Kultur, which is coming up in 2025, will again take place in the last week of August and bring even more music, memories, and joyful moments to the city.
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