As a Pop-Kultur Festival regular, I enjoy the festival especially for its pathos of connection. Opening its doors from August 24 – 30, it offers a wide array of talks, concerts, listening events, showcases and film screenings, with venues sprinkled across the city. Pop-Kultur’s strong focus on Berlin based artistry, from local musicians to international synergies stimulating the city, gives great opportunity to (re)connect with new and familiar faces and perspectives, encouraging moments of conversation and cooperation. 

Lack of Critical Stance  

This year’s packed festival schedule displays an increasing commitment to create international networks, through initiatives like the “Co-Creation Residency”. The program invites selected artists from four cities to a residency in Berlin funded by the Musicboard Berlin. In 2026, Pop-Kultur welcomes artists from Accra, Kampala and Detroit. However, the Co-Creation Residency is also one of the aspects to face rightfully a lot of critique. We at OFFKEY are disappointed to see the on-going collaboration with Israeli institutions. The cooperation with Israel aids the normalization of the state’s abhorrent treatment of  Palestinian life, its apartheid system and the genocide in Gaza. Of course, musical cooperation can surpass nation-state boundaries and may aid in addressing historic conflicts and wounds. But if done so without critical engagement and clear positioning, it indicates acceptance, boosting the standing of the “grand parties” involved. So, even when the application regulations literally cite that interested musicians need to “reflect critically on their own social positioning from a power-critical and anti-discriminatory perspective”, the moral responsibility and accountability is delegated to individuals, instead of holding the systematic framework accountable.

We as cultural workers and creatives have a collective responsibility to foster critical discourse, that does not echo state narratives. While festivals like Pop-Kultur can create meaningful spaces for exchange, solidarity and collaboration, they also raise questions about who is invited into these spaces, which structures are being reinforced, and how we, as participants, choose to engage with them. For us at OFFKEY, recommendation therefore also means reflection: celebrating the artists and encounters that move us while remaining critical of the institutional frameworks that make them possible. With that in mind, here are some of the artists and events we are especially looking forward to this year.

Sorvina

Photo by @shannon.kone

New-York-born, Berlin-based artist Sorvina is paving her way through the city’s ever evolving music scene. Weaving Black musical traditions with a profound, witty lyricism, Sorvina transforms her stories into introspective offerings about the existential highs and lows of life. Her live performances are as joyful as they are thought provoking, a feat the multi-disciplinary artist traces back to her first musical socialization of Black gospel music. “It’s nothing you can do half-way. You have to sing, you have to express, with all the belief and all the expressiveness you have inside of you”. A competence Sorvina honed through years of international touring and performing.

Sorvina performed two songs at the Pop-Kultur press conference and even in this minimal setting, just her on mic and Meron accompanying her on keys, in his own right a stirring Berlin-based R&B singer-songwriter, the two of them achieved to open up a space for intimate pondering and moments of reflection. She confesses that it just gives her “such great fulfillment to be a vessel for, or to facilitate that collective acknowledgment of ‘I’m here, You’re here. I see you, You see me, let’s do this together!’”  For her coming show on Friday, Sorvina hinted at something special waiting for us: 

“With [this] show, I want to really lean into that idea of performance as collective singing, as collective expression, as a direct antidote to loneliness, despair and the things that sometimes we tend to confront on a day to day basis in this current and modern world.”

Ray Lozano

Ray Lozano |Photo by Urs Mader

When asked to describe her sound in five words, the Cologne-based singer and producer Ray Lozano once answered with “silkiness, honesty, polaroids, mellowness, melodic.” These descriptors were to only deepen and develop in her creative journey, but even when she first caught my attention with “Velvet Blue”, a bittersweet track about asymmetrical love dynamics from her debut Pairing Mode (2023), the path was clear. Finding inspiration in soul, hip-hop and jazz, Lozano wields her sensible pen and empathetic ear with great courage and compassion. The German-Filipina artist builds intricate soundscapes of smooth neo-soul and R&B, her stories capturing the profoundness of the big and small moments – and the ones in between – in gentle honesty, not least on her second album SILK&SORROW. On her next project #4a79b1, out November 13, listeners join Lozano on an exploration of the name giving blue hues tinting our emotional journeys. Ray Lozano will open Pop-Kultur this year on Wednesday, performing with a full band line-up to mark the occasion.

VAVUNETTHA

VAVUNETTHA declares the German pop music sphere’s glass ceiling to be breakable – and rightfully so! The German-Tamil singer, rapper, and self-producing artist has been releasing music since 2021 and stirred the German pop scene right up with her forward-thinking “seasoned pop”, which garnered her a Female Producer Prize in 2025 for the songwriting category.

VAVUNETTHA | Photo by Lukas Held

Performing on Saturday, the artist’s pop variation is a more mature, slightly rough-edged melodic genre take that sees her boldly mixing musical elements from German rap, hip-hop, soul, and indie, while also, increasingly, incorporating influences of traditional Tamil music. Vulnerable with a human understanding of how social injustices affect us on an individual level, VAVUNETTHA’s music gives representation to migrant experiences, especially. Growing up among Tamil diaspora culture and everyday life in Germany, her narratives stem from questions of identity and solidarity, creating “a form of escapism that does not suppress reality” – celebrating community resilience and cohesion on the way.

Concerts and Talks

Following last year’s sudden funding cuts , the Pop-Kultur team decided to re-focus the program. After securing different funding, the resulting strategy featured an increase in focus on the Pop-Kultur Talks. Last year’s success now allows for an extended festival duration (August 24-30) and a separate program track for the roughly 20 talks. Here are some OFFKEY picks:

  • Empowerment vs. Reproduction? Queer-feminist rap, hyperpop, and the debates surrounding explicit pop culture: When provocation becomes politics, who gets to be explicit — and who gets punished for it? This conversation dives into queer-feminist rap, hyperpop, sexual self-determination, and the double standards of explicit pop. Mariybu, Nebou N’diaye, Julia Gröschel
  • Behind the Voice: Producer Talk & Listening Session with EVÎN (free entry):An intimate listening session and producer talk with EVÎN and Pamela Owusu-Brenyah about developing a distinctive, genre-fluid sound, her journey from Berlin to international productions, and the realities of being a woman/FLINTA producer.
  • From Roots to Radio: Can Pop Culture Preserve Musical Heritage?: What if tradition doesn’t need protecting from change, but needs it to stay alive? This conversation dives into the ways artists remix inherited sounds, stories, and memories through pop, electronics, and digital culture — turning heritage into something fluid, contemporary, and self-defined. A conversation about cultural memory, identity, self-determination, and the radical act of telling your own story through sound. Boris Paillard, Elsa M’Bala, Tmnit Ghide
  • Beyond the Screen: panel »Beyond the Screen« explores the creative relationship between film and music, asking what happens when music is not simply added as a soundtrack, but becomes the starting point for cinematic storytelling, ANNY, Emmanuel Amoako-Jansen, Mulay, Lena Obara

The Pop-Kultur Festival  takes place from August 24 -30. Follow Pop-Kultur on Instagram to keep up to date.