Friday 17 October 2008 | 11:00 hrsOrganizerBerliner Festspiele in cooperation with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebœk and The Richard Avedon Foundation, New York

Gropius Bau

Gropius Bau 2023

Gropius Bau, Kino (Untergeschoss)

Gropius Bau, Cinema (Lower ground floor)

Richard Avedon – Fotografien 1946–2004. Eine Retrospektive

Richard Avedon – Photographs 1946–2004. A Retrospective

Pressekonferenz „Richard Avedon – Fotografien 1946–2004. Eine Retrospektive“

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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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The Gropius Bau is closed on Tuesdays.

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Gropius Bau 2025

Events

Exhibitions & Projects

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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 first volume of the series,&nbsp;On Making Less, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija compiles various ideas and approaches to this topic.

The Practice – What Moves Artists

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For the second edition of our new event series Sp&auml;tschicht, we’re teaming up with Volksb&uuml;hne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz to present a free live programme featuring a book launch and conversation with Vaginal Davis, a screening by the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP, a DJ set by Bobby Beethoven and concerts by Dylan Kerr and Cortisa Star.

Sp&auml;tschicht x Volksb&uuml;hne

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YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND

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Only until 19 January 2025 – we’ll be back for you in March! 🐛

BAUBAU

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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 ensembles from all over Germany applied for the Tanztreffen der Jugend. 8 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. &nbsp;

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

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A&nbsp;Play Space for Kids

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 the 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

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&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

Now at Gropius Bau

BAUBAUA&nbsp;Play Space for Kids

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For more than three decades, Rirkrit Tiravanija has been expanding the possibilities of what can happen in an exhibition space. As part of his practice, the artist creates situations that offer space to eat and drink, play and rest. They encourage chance encounters, relationships and their failure – in other words: life.&nbsp;The exhibition&nbsp;DAS GL&Uuml;CK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG&nbsp;(Happiness is not always fun)&nbsp;presents more than 80 of the artist’s works created between 1987 and 2024.

Rirkrit Tiravanija:&nbsp;DAS GL&Uuml;CK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG

Now at the Gropius Bau

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With Queer Ping Pong, Jimmy Robert’s Class, Team Ping Pong, Planningtorock, Meg10 and Wa22ermann

Sp&auml;tschicht x Pop-Kultur Festival

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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Becoming more accessible – with the help of Artificial Intelligence: the new AI-based app Gropius Bau Prisma allows you to translate exhibition texts into 36 languages, play them as audio, ask questions about the works on display and activate subtitles in various languages during events.

Gropius Bau Prisma

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 expansive oeuvre, punk meets glamour, queer activism meets Black counter-culture and resistance meets desire.&nbsp;Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Produkt&nbsp;features installations, paintings, video and film works, zines, writing, music and performances, offering an overview of Davis’ practice and artistic collaborations.

Vaginal DavisFabelhaftes Produkt

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 ONOMUSIC OF THE MIND

Current Exhibitions

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.

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.

Currently at Gropius Bau

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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.

Ab 4. September

Festivals & Programme Series

Ausstellungen 2008

This is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of the American star photographer Richard Avedon since his death in 2004. Many epoch-making and pioneering pictures are on show: the picture of the famous model Dovima, posing amidst sawdust and hay between elephants in an haute-couture creation, was revolutionary and ground-breaking in 1948; the 9.5 x 3 m. group portrait of “Andy Warhol and the members of the Factory” from 1969, where Avedon was able to bring out the individual personalities in the group; and the picture of Charles Chaplin, forming devil’s horns on his forehead and waving goodbye to McCarthyism’s USA with his gaze. Also included are Avedon’s characteristic dancing model shots with the most fêted photo models of the day, for example Twiggy and Veruschka.
Especially interesting for the venue in Berlin, in the year of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, Avedon’s series from New Year’s Evening 1989 will be shown in the exhibit. Avedon traveled to Berlin on the sole purpose of photographing this extraordinary historical situation and the reaction of the people.
For more than 50 years Richard Avedon was one of the biggest names in the fashion industry, with a star status that he maintained throughout the years, and he was the first to break down the barrier between so-called serious and non-serious photography. He made a name as early as the 1950s as the world’s leading fashion photographer and was employed by the American magazine Harpers Bazaar, later by Vogue, then in 1992 ended up as the weekly New Yorker’s first regular staff photographer.
In parallel with the fashion photography, Avedon also worked with dark, emotionally charged portraits, and along with the photographer Irving Penn transformed portrait photography in the twentieth century; but whereas Penn’s portraiture was considerate and attentive, Avedon’s was radical and intense.
Avedon created an endless succession of portraits of statesmen, artists, actors and actresses. And wherever one usually has a fixed image of a person, with his photographs he shatters the picture-postcard icon and shows a portrait that provides food for thought – it may be of legendary film stars like Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe or the great stars of the silent film – Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin – or of personalities ranging as wide as Karen Blixen, Truman Capote, Henry Kissinger, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Edward Kennedy, The Beatles and Francis Bacon.
<h3>The Exhibition</h3>
The retrospective exhibition features more than 250 photographs, demonstrating the scope of Avedon’s production, from the glamorous world of fashion through the more psychological portraits to reportage-oriented shots. The first photograph in the exhibition was taken in 1946, when Avedon went to Rome and Sicily just after World War II, and the last photograph in the exhibition is of the singer Björk, taken less than four months before Avedon’s sudden death.
In general, the presentation of the photographs in the exhibition is chronological, drawing selectively on picture series where Avedon concentrated on a particular range of themes, subjects or events – from travel pictures to almost registrative pictures of his dying father. Photographs from the “New York Life” reportage series from 1949 – a work commissioned by Life magazine, which Avedon at the time ended up not submitting to the magazine, and from which he first showed selections forty years later in his own book “An Autobiography” – can be seen in the exhibition.
The series points forward to other reportages shown in the exhibition as well as portrait series for which Avedon has later become famous, including “In the American West”, photos from 17 of the USA’s westernmost states in the period 1979–84, a work commissioned by The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Out of 752 portrait shots Avedon selected 124 black-and-white photographs of people who fall outside the normal social order. While it is usually politicians, celebrities and well-off people who are portrayed in the tradition of the representative portrait, the powerful have here been replaced with the powerless. Richard Avedon was awarded the Swedish Hasselblad Prize for photography in 1991.
The exhibit has been shown at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebœk, the International Centre for Photography, Milan, and the Jeu de Paume, Paris. Following the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the exhibit will be shown at FOAM Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam and at the SFMOMA, San Francisco.

Richard Avedon

Veranstaltungen Richard Avedon

Exhibitions 2008

2008

Programm

Programme

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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Today’s Events

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The international and interdisciplinary festival produced by the Berliner Festspiele

Performing Exiles

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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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furtherInformation

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