Friday 28 September 2007 | 18:30 In EnglishAs part of the exhibition “Eugène Atget – Retrospective”

Gropius Bau

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Gropius Bau, Kino (Untergeschoss)

Gropius Bau, Cinema (Lower ground floor)

The vision of Paris through the Atget’s photographs

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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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The Gropius Bau is closed on Tuesdays.

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Gropius Bau 2025

Events

Exhibitions & Projects

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YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND

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Tanz im August, presented by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, is a festival of contemporary dance in Berlin. With three productions, it will once again be a guest at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele this year. The pre-sale of some programme highlights has already started.

Tanz im August

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Eight selected concert highlights of Musikfest Berlin 2025 have already been published and are on sale. These include guest performances by the world’s best symphony orchestras and choirs from the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Italy, which are rarely heard in Berlin.

Musikfest Berlin

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The international literature festival berlin, or ilb for short, is considered one of the most important literary festivals in the world. The programme for the 25th&nbsp;ilb will take place from 11 to 20&nbsp;September 2025. The Young Programme will run from 15 to 24&nbsp;September 2025. The main venue is the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, with additional locations for the Young Programme including Theater an der Parkaue and the Gelbe Villa.

25th international literature festival berlin

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This year, 53&nbsp;ensembles from all over Germany applied for the Tanztreffen der Jugend. 8&nbsp;young ensembles between contemporary and urban dance were chosen by the jury for the final selection. They will show their work at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele in autumn.

Tanztreffen der Jugend

More Berliner Festspiele

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Performing Exiles is an international and interdisciplinary festival produced by the Berliner Festspiele, that seeks to make diasporic lives in the city of Berlin visible and explore the contemporary meaning of exile. A preview of the programme has already been published. &nbsp;

Performing Exiles

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The Performing Arts Season once again brings renowned international dance, theatre and performance productions to the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and the Gropius Bau. In this edition, the series focuses primarily on various concepts of identity.

Performing Arts Season

Since the 1950s, Yoko Ono has been ahead of her time, leaving her mark on visual arts, music and activism. To honour her groundbreaking work, Gropius Bau presents the comprehensive solo exhibition&nbsp;YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND. Spanning the first floor and the atrium of Gropius Bau, the show brings together over 200 works from seven decades, revealing her radical approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment.

YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND

Key Visual Neu

Marking twenty years since artist, writer and performer Vaginal Davis made Berlin her home, Gropius Bau presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition of her work in Germany. In her oeuvre, punk meets glamour, queer activism meets Black counter-culture and resistance meets desire.&nbsp;Fabelhaftes Produkt&nbsp;offers&nbsp;an overview of Davis’ practice and artistic collaborations.

Vaginal DavisFabelhaftes Produkt

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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.

BAUBAU

Spielen in der Stadt

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&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 the play space’s entrance.

Playing in the City

Currently at Gropius Bau

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With Vaginal Davis, CHEAP, Dylan Kerr, Bobby Beethoven and Cortisa Star

Sp&auml;tschicht x Volksb&uuml;hne

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The Practice – What Moves Artists

The Practice – What Moves Artists&nbsp;is a new 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

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. Its diverse events focus on exchange and discussion, bringing together local and global perspectives.&nbsp;

About the Gropius Bau

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!

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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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37th&nbsp;International Festival Berlin

Tanz im August

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The international literature festival berlin, or ilb for short, is considered one of the most important literary festivals in the world.

25th international literature festival berlin

Leichte Sprache

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You can listen to some of our events this year digitally in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library after the live concerts.&nbsp;In addition, On Demand offers from past years are available.

Musikfest Berlin in the Media Library

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The international Jazzfest Research Lab&nbsp;welcomes academics and students to take a critical look at the festival’s archive, its programmes, creators, musicians and – last but not least – its myths. In two seminars during the summer semester of 2024, students from the Berlin University of the Arts and the University of Hildesheim have explored the festival’s history from various perspectives. In this film, the participants give a first look at how they dealt with their research subject.

Introducing: Jazzfest Research Lab

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To mark its 60th anniversary, Jazzfest Berlin is celebrating the cultural diversity of the neighbouring district of Moabit in collaboration with around 35 official partners and initiatives and with over 350 participants of all ages.&nbsp;In June 2024, interviews were conducted with 20 partners who presented their perspectives, wishes and ideas for the Jazzfest Community Lab Moabit. You can get a first impression with this film.

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Curated by&nbsp;Meron Mendel and Saba-Nur Cheema&nbsp;

From 13 to 16 June 2024, the interdisciplinary themed days “Reflexes &amp; Reflections” on the Israel-Palestine conflict and its consequences for society in Germany took place at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. You can now find video and audio recordings of the discourse events in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library!

Reflexes &amp; Reflections. 7 October, the war in Gaza and the debate in Germany

In the Media Library

Key Visual Musikfest Berlin 2025

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Major Orchestras and Vocal Ensembles as Guests in Berlin

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The 10 Remarkable Productions 2024

On 26 January, the Theatertreffen’s jury of critics announced their selection of 10 remarkable productions for the 2024 Theatertreffen at a press conference. Our congratulations go to the nominated production teams and all participants! The programme will be published on 5 April.

Theatertreffen 2024

“Radical Playgrounds”, an art parcours at the Gropius Bau, is spending eleven weeks exploring the differences between the concepts of play as competition and free play. Visitors are invited to walk and climb on the various installations and sculptures, to activate them and to shape the project collectively.

Summer School 2025

As part of Performing Exiles there will be a Summer School from 16 to 28&nbsp;June 2025. This will offer workshops, seminars and mentoring. The participants will see the performances and guest productions in the festival programme and visit artistic initiatives and cultural institutions in Berlin that operate across a wide range of disciplines and contexts. A public presentation of the participants’ current work and research at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele will complete the programme.

Open Call

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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

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In August 2025, the festival Tanz im August will be a guest at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele with three productions. All productions are already on pre-sale.

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53&nbsp;ensembles from 13&nbsp;federal states have submitted their works for the 12th&nbsp;Tanztreffen der Jugend.&nbsp;The selection has been made.

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The works presented in the Performing Arts Season 2025/26 go beyond simple portrayals of identity, embracing its precarity and fluid, multifaceted and often contradictory nature. Through an exploration of connections and differences, they underscore not what divides us, but what unites us, both individually and collectively.&nbsp;The programme is online and Tickets are on sale now.

Upcoming

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<h3>Theatertreffen</h3><h4>2 to 20 May 2024</h4>The 10&nbsp;remarkable productions, selected by a jury of critics, were announced in a press conference on 26&nbsp;January 2024, 11:00. The programme will be published on 5&nbsp;April, advance ticket sales will start on 19&nbsp;April at 14:00

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The Berlinale as a guest at Haus der Berliner Festspiele

75th Berlin International Film Festival