Current & Upcoming

Over the course of five decades, Nancy Holt explored how we perceive our environment and how we attempt to understand our place on the surface of this planet. From March 2024, the Gropius Bau presents Circles of Light, the artist’s most comprehensive survey exhibition in Germany to date. It includes film, video, photography, sound works, concrete poetry, sculptures and expansive installations as well as drawings and documentation from over 25 years.

With How Love Moves, the Gropius Bau presents the first major institutional solo exhibition of Pallavi Paul. As an artist and film scholar, Paul engages the camera as her primary tool to interrogate how regimes of “truth” are produced and sustained in public life. Through her multimedia practice spanning film, installation, performance, drawing, photography and writing, she negotiates the documentary not only conjured as film or image – but as an ecology of materials, networks, global alliances and systems.

Berlin is known for its numerous “Spielplätze” for kids, but the project Radical Playgrounds, which is commissioned by Berliner Festspiele, is a place where play gets serious. From 27 April 2024 it arrives at Gropius Hain for eleven weeks like an itinerant, temporary funfair: both melancholic and light-hearted, sad and joyful, funny and serious.

Andrea Geyer’s Manifesto (Banners / Gropius Bau / Berlin) once again places the voices of the visitors at the centre. The installation will be on display in the atrium and at the entrance to the Gropius Bau from July 2024, exploring the question of what museums and exhibition spaces can offer as public places in Berlin’s current social and political landscape.

The Gropius Bau will kick off its new programme under Jenny Schlenzka with an exhibition by Rirkrit Tiravanija in early September 2024. Tiravanija’s work expands conventional conceptions of art, creating situations in which social interactions and sensual experiences can be negotiated. The artist has been living in Germany part-time since the early 1990s and has regularly developed work that addresses the country’s politics, cultural peculiarities and relationship to global migration patterns. DAS GLÜCK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG (Happiness is not always fun) brings these works together for the first time, showcasing the importance of Berlin and Germany to Tiravanija as sites of artistic production.

Initially conceived as a pilot project by Kerstin Brätsch, a freely accessible play space will open in September 2024 in the west wing of the ground floor, then grow over the next several years and expand into the outdoor area. Inspired by The Model (1968), an adventure playground installed by the artist Palle Nielsen at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, it will become a permanent installation for children, a place where more things are allowed than forbidden.