About Us
PAKD Gallery Berlin is an artist-run gallery founded by an international collective of four artists. We believe artists are best placed to choose other artists, and that artists should keep most of what their work earns.
How artists join:
Our permanent roster is chosen by artists. Applications go through two rounds of anonymised peer review, and the roster itself votes: every artist who is selected joins the voting body. Contact details are handled separately from the vote, so reviewers judge the work, not the name. No selection process is perfectly neutral, but ours puts the decision in artists’ hands rather than the gallery’s.
What artists earn:
Roster artists set their own prices and keep 70% of every sale.
Who we work with:
Our artists come from every corner of the globe. Some built their practice here in Berlin; others arrived through exile or displacement. We make room for both, and each year we offer a small number of exhibitions free of charge to artists who cannot otherwise afford to show.
How the space works. Alongside the roster programme, PAKD hosts:
Supported exhibitions: free shows for artists without the means to rent a space
Space hire: artists outside the roster can rent the gallery for their own exhibitions
Partner projects: awards, festivals and events curated with outside partners, such as the Berlin Portrait Award.
Workshops and courses: Currently located in the gallery itself, a new workshop address and details will be coming soon!
Team
Peter Kasim
Peter Najad Kasim is a character animator and classically trained draughtsman and oil painter. Fascinated since childhood by how art can capture character and life, he has built a career in 2D and 3D animation, working as a character animator at studio on The Hobbit trilogy, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Disney’s The Jungle Book (2016) and Grand Theft Auto V.
Peter sees his animation and painting practices as closely connected. Working in charcoal and oil from direct observation, without digital tools, sharpens his eye for form and gesture, and offers a counterbalance to the complexity of production work.
He holds a BA in Illustration from the University of Westminster and a Postgraduate Diploma in Character Animation from Central Saint Martins. In 2018 he received the Next Generation Fund scholarship at London Fine Art Studios, whose training became the foundation of his technique, and he studied under portrait painter Alex Tzavaras.
Peter teaches drawing and painting through the Berlin Portrait Academy. As a co-founder of PAKD Gallery Berlin, he leads the gallery’s figurative and portrait programme, as well as being the main organizer of the Berlin Portrait Award.
Website: berlinportraitacademy.com · Instagram: @berlin.portrait.academy
Alex Anderson
Alex Anderson is an American artist whose work follows wind and landscape through the idea of nostos (νόστος), the Greek concept of homecoming. He explores the grief of returning, the hardship of the journey, and the bittersweet feeling of finally arriving, alongside the many meanings and uses of wind.
The work began on the Isle of Skye, where, as a student at The Glasgow School of Art (MLitt in Sculpture, 2020), he responded to the stones on the shores of tidal lochs. It has since moved to the high desert grasslands of the Sonoran Desert and the coastal dunes of northeastern Brazil, drawing on literature, phenomenology and his experience of fatherhood.
Anderson holds a B.A. in art history, with a minor in philosophy, from John Cabot University in Rome. From 2015 until its closure he was a contributing arts writer for KCMetropolis.org in Kansas City. He shares a studio and gallery space, 3West, in Kansas City’s West Bottoms.
He is a co-founder of PAKD Gallery Berlin, and is involved with much of its programming and strategy. For an artist preoccupied with journeys and arrival, building a gallery where artists from many countries choose one another, and keep most of what their work earns, is a natural extension of the practice.
Website: asanderson.art · Instagram: @alexsculpts
Kifan Alkarjousli
Kifan Alkarjousli is a Syrian painter and sculptor based in Berlin. Combining realism and symbolism, his work explores the fragility of memory and the quiet beauty of everyday life. Using Syrian symbols and imagery, his paintings and sculptures move between migration, identity, love and loss, reflecting on impermanence and the subtleties of human experience.
Born in Hazzah, Syria, Kifan is the third generation of artists in his family: his grandfather was a sculptor, and several of his aunts and uncles studied art. He earned a BFA from Damascus University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in Sweida in 2014. The Syrian Civil War forced him to leave that same year, and in 2018 he arrived in Berlin, where he began a master’s in Art Education at the Universität der Künste Berlin.
From 2021 to 2023, Kifan ran Werkkunststudio, a studio and gallery in Wedding, where he mentored emerging artists alongside his own practice. He continues to teach drawing and painting workshops across Berlin.
In 2024, he co-founded PAKD Gallery Berlin with three other artists, and today runs the gallery day to day. His experience of building an artistic life in a new country shapes the gallery’s openness to artists from many backgrounds and its commitment to cultural exchange.
Instagram: @kifanartwork
Dani Hasrouni
Dani Hasrouni is a Syrian visual artist based in Berlin whose work spans design, photography and calligraphy. A long-standing focus of his practice is documenting and preserving Syrian cultural heritage, particularly its modern forms.
He graduated in Visual Communications from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University in 2013, and was then invited by the dean to teach first-year students in the department as a substitute lecturer. Alongside his own work, he led creative workshops for Syrian refugee children and organised similar workshops with friends in Damascus and other cities, using art to help young people process the experience of war.
Since moving to Berlin in 2016, Dani has turned to street photography and the life of the city’s public spaces. He is working on a long-term documentary film about Berlin’s street musicians and the stories they carry.
Dani works at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, one of Berlin’s municipal galleries. As a co-founder of PAKD Gallery Berlin, he shapes the gallery’s visual identity through its website, social media and photography, and helps build a platform for artists, musicians and cultural practitioners.
Instagram: @danihasrouni · @berlin_today_