Thursday 26 September 2007 | 10:30 hrsOrganizerBerliner FestspieleAn exhibition of Bibliothèque Nationale de Francein cooperation with the Martin-Gropius-Bau

Gropius Bau

Gropius Bau 2023

Eugène Atget – Fotografien

Eugène Atget – Photographs

Pressekonferenz zur Ausstellung „Eugène Atget – Fotografien“

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Reflexe und Reflexionen

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Located in the centre of Berlin, the Gropius Bau is a lively place for encounters with art and each other. As an internationally renowned exhibition centre, it offers space for major exhibitions and performances by contemporary artists.

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There are currently no exhibitions on view at Gropius Bau.

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Gropius Bau 2026

Events

Exhibitions & Projects

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Our newsletters keep you updated on current and upcoming exhibitions and events. Learn more about our kids programme and plan your next visit.

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We’re Looking Forward to Welcoming You Again in March!

Gropius Bau is currently closed for exhibition preparations. Our restaurant Beba and our bookstore will reopen on 4 March, before we kick off our spring programme, featuring a performance by <a href="${link:{uuid:{16d14ae2-9463-45b4-91de-95a846c0f377},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2026/veranstaltungen/leila-hekmat}}}">Leila Hekmat</a>, the <a href="${link:{uuid:{fd3f9e70-97e8-46fb-b639-fc701f8d4039},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/baubau/veranstaltungen/baubau-play-day-pop-up-26}}}">big pop-up</a> of our play space BAUBAU and the opening of our <a href="${link:{uuid:{baa82be9-6411-41e5-806b-4889004c8459},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2026/ausstellungen/peter-hujar-liz-deschenes}}}">Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes</a> exhibition. Find more details in our <a href="${link:{uuid:{62c3018b-bb40-46ce-8019-646ec5cd2e4a},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/besuch/informationen}}}">Information &amp; Tickets</a> section.

See You Soon

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Extended until 30 August 2026!

Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic

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With Andrew Durbin, Biliana Voutchkova, Gary Schneider, Queer Analog Darkroom and Selin Davasse – free admission

Sp&auml;tschicht x C/O Berlin

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The Musikfest Berlin brings together leading international orchestras, renowned conductors and outstanding soloists in a diverse concert programme – ranging from opera productions to contemporary works. Advance tickets are available.

Musikfest Berlin

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The Great Disorder

The third edition of Reflexes &amp; Reflections, curated by Saba Nur Cheema and Meron Mendel, marks the 75th&nbsp;anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele and explores the impact of current geopolitical upheavals on open societies.

Reflexe &amp; Reflexionen

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In 2026 the Berliner Festspiele celebrate their 75th&nbsp;anniversary. A selection of events programmed throughout the entire year engage take the anniversary as their theme or mark the occasion with works at various locations across the city.&nbsp;

75 Years of the Berliner Festspiele

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The fourth edition of the Performing Arts Season focuses on myths and rituals – with works by international artists such as Marina Abramović, Marie Chouinard and Dumb Type. Advance ticket sales start on 18 June.

Performing Arts Season

More Berliner Festspiele

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103 ensembles from all 16&nbsp;federal states have submitted their productionsfor the 47th&nbsp;Theatertreffen der Jugend 2026. The focus is on the invited productions and exchange among young performers and their directors.&nbsp;

Theatertreffen der Jugend

The third edition of Reflexes &amp; Reflections, curated by Saba Nur Cheema and Meron Mendel, marks the 75th&nbsp;anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele and explores the impact of current geopolitical upheavals on open societies. Advance ticket sales begin on 10&nbsp;June.

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The Practice – What Moves Artists

The Practice – What Moves Artists&nbsp;is a book series by Gropius Bau that invites artists to showcase a practice that they pursue, that has influenced them or that has been with them for a long time. In the third volume of the series On the Erotic, performance artist Marina Abramović talks about female sexuality after menopause, the eroticism of the masses and her love for the planet.

Marina Abramović: On the Erotic

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A Vibrant Place for Enganging with Art and Each Other

Located in the centre of Berlin, Gropius Bau is a lively place to encounter art and each other. The internationally renowned institution is part of the Berliner Festspiele and stages large-scale exhibitions and performances by contemporary artists, offering new perspectives on our present.

About Gropius Bau

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The Practice – What Moves Artists&nbsp;is a book series by Gropius Bau that invites artists to showcase a practice that they pursue, that has influenced them or that has been with them for a long time. In the second volume of the series, artist, performer and author Vaginal Davis looks back on the saucy underground scenes of Los Angeles and Berlin together with former bandmates.&nbsp;On Dangerous Ground recounts past gigs, spectacular live performances and well-kept secrets.

Vaginal Davis: On Dangerous Ground

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Widely regarded as one of the most original and influential artists of the 20th century, Diane Arbus’ bold black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. With&nbsp;Diane Arbus: Konstellationen, Gropius Bau presents the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date.

Diane Arbus: Konstellationen

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Ligia Lewis is a central figure in redefining performance within the context of the visual arts. Her solo exhibition&nbsp;I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR… at Gropius Bau&nbsp;brings&nbsp;together new and existing works that explore themes of race, gender, violence and resistance.

Ligia Lewis:I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR...

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With BAUBAU, the artist Kerstin Br&auml;tsch designed an&nbsp;admission-free play space for kids, where more is allowed than forbidden. On Gropius Bau’s ground floor, colourful wallpapers, structures, objects and open-ended material called “loose parts” configure flexible spaces that are shaped by children’s activities.

BAUBAU:A&nbsp;Play Space for Kids

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What is and has been the role of play in public space? Gabriela Burkhalter’s&nbsp;Playing in the City&nbsp;presentation traces the history of playgrounds since their emergence in 1900 to today. The free presentation is open to all and can be seen in two rooms next to BAUBAU’s entrance.

Playing in the City:A Short History from 1900 to the Present

Currently at Gropius Bau

Widely regarded as one of the most original and influential artists of the 20th century, Diane Arbus’ bold black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. With Diane Arbus: Konstellationen, Gropius Bau presents the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date. Featuring 454 prints, many of them shown here for the first time, Konstellationen offers new perspectives on Arbus’ iconic images and the wide range of her portraiture.

Ligia Lewis is a central figure in redefining performance within the context of the visual arts. In her multifaceted practice, she combines performance, live installation and film. From autumn 2025, Gropius Bau presents I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…, the artist and choreographer’s most comprehensive solo exhibition to date. It brings together new and existing works that explore themes of race, gender, violence and resistance.

Ligia Lewis: I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…

Current Exhibitions

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Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision

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Playing, laughing, making noise, letting off steam, doing nothing – all in an exhibition venue! With BAUBAU, the artist Kerstin Br&auml;tsch designed an&nbsp;admission-free play space for kids, where more is allowed than forbidden. On Gropius Bau’s ground floor, colourful wallpapers, structures, objects and open-ended material called “loose parts” configure flexible spaces that are shaped by children’s activities. They set the tone and decide what happens in this place.

BAUBAU

Spielen in der Stadt

A Short History from 1900 to the Present

What has been the role of play in public space, both historically and in the present? Complementing BAUBAU, our free play space for kids, Gabriela Burkhalter’s Playing in the City presentation traces the history of playgrounds since their emergence in 1900 to today. The free presentation is open to all and can be seen in two rooms next to the play space’s entrance.

Playing in the City

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Marina Abramović, one of the most influential contemporary artists, presents Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition at Gropius Bau, marking her first major solo show in Berlin since the 1990s. The exhibition brings together historical and new works by the performance artist, tracing her ongoing engagement with ritual, eroticism, death and the body as a site of political resistance.

Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition

Currently and Upcoming

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With Andrew Durbin, Biliana Voutchkova, Gary Schneider, Queer Analog Darkroom and Selin Davasse

On the occasion of <a href="${link:{uuid:{baa82be9-6411-41e5-806b-4889004c8459},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2026/ausstellungen/peter-hujar-liz-deschenes}}}">Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision</a>, Sp&auml;tschicht x C/O Berlin turns its focus on 26 March to photography within the shifting terrains of urban space, visibility, and resistance. Look forward to performances, a workshop, a screening and a reading. Admission is free.

We are looking forward to welcoming you back in mid-March with the reopening of our play space, <a href="${link:{uuid:{df42e57d-a14a-4b44-a5e4-9d3e7dcab5a6},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/baubau}}}">BAUBAU</a> (on 22 March), and two exhibitions, <a href="${link:{uuid:{55d64239-53fe-4b12-8567-a63191c6cae4},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2025/ausstellungen/vaginal-davis}}}">Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Produkt</a> (from 21 March) and <a href="${link:{uuid:{9618c701-bd05-432e-b688-5943e1f7fc57},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2025/ausstellungen/yoko-ono}}}">YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND</a> (from 11 April). For details on opening hours and tickets, please visit our <a href="${link:{uuid:{62c3018b-bb40-46ce-8019-646ec5cd2e4a},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/besuch/informationen}}}">Information &amp; Tickets</a> page. We look forward to seeing you soon!

See you in March!

Persistence of Vision

Working in New York City between the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and the onset of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Peter Hujar captured a pivotal cultural moment in piercing black-and-white photographs. In the exhibition Persistence of Vision, Hujar’s photographs are interspersed with contemporary works by New York City-based artist Liz Deschenes, opening up an intergenerational dialogue on photography.&nbsp;

Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes

A&nbsp;Play Space for Kids

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Dabei sein und nicht schweigen

For more than five decades, Gabriele St&ouml;tzer has been grappling with questions of justice, gender and self-determination. Her own body often plays a central role in her work – not as an object, but as a site of resistance and feminist self-assertion. Opening at Gropius Bau in June 2026, Dabei sein und nicht schweigen (Showing up and Not Remaining Silent) will be the artist’s largest institutional solo exhibition to date.&nbsp;

Gabriele St&ouml;tzer &nbsp;

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Located in the centre of Berlin, the Gropius Bau is a lively place to encounter art and each other. The internationally renowned institution stages large-scale exhibitions and performances by contemporary artists.

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Festivals & Programme Series

On the 150th anniversary of the birth of the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) a grand retrospective of his works will open at the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin on 28 September 2007. The exhibition was mounted by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. A selection of 350 works from Atget’s extensive oeuvre will be on display.
Between 1897 and 1927 Atget, like no other photographer, captured the old Paris in his pictures. His shots show the city in its various facets: narrow lanes and courtyards in the historic city centre with its old buildings, of which some were soon to be demolished, magnificent palaces from the period before the French Revolution, bridges and quays on the banks of the Seine, and shops with their window displays. He photographed stairwells and architectural details on the façades and took pictures of the interiors of apartments. His interest also extended to the environs of Paris.
He produced timeless views of the parks of Versailles, Saint-Cloud and Sceaux. In addition to architecture and the urban environment he also photographed street-hawkers, small tradesmen, rag collectors and prostitutes as well as fairs and popular amusements in the various districts. The outlying districts and peripheral areas, in which the poor and homeless sought shelter, also furnished him with pictorial motifs.
Atget, who had begun his career as an actor and tried his luck as a painter without success, did not begin to work as a photographer until 1888. He originally offered his pictures, which he called “documents pour artistes”, as originals for artists and craftsmen to work from. From 1898 onwards he increasingly devoted himself to the systematic documentation of the buildings that bore witness to the period before 1789. The photographs were bought by institutions like the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale, and museums. His activity came at a time when there was a general awareness that Modernism was ushering in a new era. Hence the efforts of various institutions to have a visual record of the old Paris as it was before it underwent its architectural transformation.
Atget’s pictures are distinguished from those of his colleagues, who kept to a strictly documentary approach, by their wealth of motifs and originality of design. He chose his own subjects, often employing strong light contrasts, shadows and overlapping forms, which lend his pictures plasticity. He used a heavy plate camera, a tripod and mirror-image negatives with an 18x24-centimetre format. His equipment – which he took with him everywhere – weighed about 20 kilograms.
In the mid-1920s Atget was discovered by the artists of the young avant-garde. Man Ray, a fellow resident of Montparnasse, bought about forty photographs and included four of them in his 1926 publication La Révolution surréaliste. Man Ray’s young assistant, the photographer Berenice Abbott, visited Atget on several occasions and bought prints from him. After his death in 1927 she acquired about 1,500 negatives and 10,000 of the prints remaining in the studio and took them to the U.S. where, together with the gallery owner Julien Levy, she devoted herself for forty years to the task of making this unique oeuvre known. It is thanks to her that Atget’s photographs exercised a considerable influence on American photographers, such as Walker Evans or Lee Friedlander.
In 1968 Berenice Abbott sold her collection to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which in the period between 1981 and 1985 published four catalogues compiled by John Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg. In France people like Robert Desnos and Pierre Mac Orlan had tried in the late 1920s and early 1930s to make Atget’s oeuvre known to a wider public. In his 1931 history of photography Walter Benjamin praised Atget as a precursor of surrealist photography, thus paving the way for his recognition in Germany.
The exhibition in the Martin-Gropius-Bau comprises seven chapters. A particular highlight may be seen in the albums compiled by Atget himself on various themes, such as Parisian apartments, shop windows, and fortifications. Most of the photographs come from the holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and other public and private collections in France and abroad (Musée Carnavalet, Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, Museum of Modern Art of New York, Collection Première Heure, Collection Thérond and others).

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Ausstellungen 2007

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The Berliner Festspiele organise a range of festivals and art exhibitions, concerts, dance and theatre performances, readings, lectures, debates and much more throughout the year. These events are presented at a range of locations across Berlin but are concentrated primarily at their own two venues: the Gropius Bau and the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

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Ganzj&auml;hrig realisieren die Berliner Festspiele eine Vielzahl von Festivals, Ausstellungen und Einzelveranstaltungen in ihren zwei H&auml;usern – dem Haus der Berliner Festspiele in der Schaperstra&szlig;e und dem Gropius Bau nahe des Potsdamer Platzes – sowie an anderen Orten der Stadt.

Newsletter

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In 2026 the Berliner Festspiele celebrate their 75th anniversary. A selection of events programmed throughout the entire year engage take the anniversary as their theme or mark the occasion with works at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the Gropius Bau, the Philharmonie, on Berlin’s Ringbahn and at other locations in the city. Outstanding international that liberal societies and their cultural institutions face in a new, multipolar world order. artists such as Marina Abramović, Gabriele St&ouml;tzer and Akira Takayama will set the agenda both thematically and aesthetically. Entitled “Die gro&szlig;e Unordnung” (The Great Disorder), the four-day focus Reflexes &amp; Reflections will also enquire about the challenges.

75 Years of the Berliner Festspiele

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The massacre, hostage-taking and rocket attacks by Hamas have shaken us deeply. The grue-some attack on Israel on 7&nbsp;October left us stunned and initially lost for words.

The Berliner Festspiele on Current Events in Israel, Gaza and Germany

With this letter of intent, we, the signing cultural organizations, express our intention to welcome, host and stage Ukrainian theatre artists in our venues, to make Ukrainian dramatic work visible to the European community.

Support of the Ukrainian Cultural Scene

Key Visual Musikfest Berlin 2026

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The complete programme is online; ticket sales are on.

Major Orchestras and Vocal Ensembles as Guests in Berlin

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A total of 62 ensembles from 16&nbsp;federal states applied with their works for the 13th&nbsp;Tanztreffen der Jugend. This year, the productions on the shotlist represent the full spectrum of production contexts within young dance-making. The nominated works include those from schools, independent theatre companies, municipal and state theatres, as well as dance schools and dance centres.

Tanztreffen der Jugend