Thursday 2 July 2009 | 19:00 hrsVenue: Martin-Gropius-Bau, cinema1909–2009 One Hundred Years Futuristic ManifestoGreetings: Gereon Sievernich, director Martin-Gropius-BauModeration: Angelo Bolaffi, director Italian Culture Institute BerlinLecture in GermanFree admission

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Gropius Bau, Cinema (Lower ground floor)

Zwischen Mythos, Praxis und Politik: Futurismus und andere Avantgarden

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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 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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In a nationwide competition, 60 ensembles applied for this year’s Theatertreffen der Jugend. The eight award winners selected by the jury have now been selected. In spring, their productions will be shown at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

Theatertreffen der Jugend

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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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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

More Berliner Festspiele

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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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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.

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The Gropius Bau is closed on Tuesdays.

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Ausstellungen 2009

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Futurism the Martin-Gropius-Bau in cooperation with the Italienisches Kulturinstitut Berlin and the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (Mart) is organizing an exhibition to pay tribute to Futurist forms of artistic expression in all their variety – from painting and sculpture to literature.
The exhibition consists mainly of loans from the Mart, which has a collection of over 4,000 Futurist works, including masterpieces by Carrà, Severini, Russolo and Balla, as well as an extensive archive of documents and books by the most important representatives of the avant-garde. The museum and study centre are supplemented by the Casa Museo Depero, Italy’s first Futurist Museum that was founded by Fortunato Depero himself and opened in cooperation with the city of Rovereto in 1959.
The Berlin exhibition is intended as a presentation and a tribute to the Art-Life project, to which Futurism gave theoretical form in its manifestos and systematically put into practice by means of a programme that envisaged the participation of all the arts in the construction of a new aesthetic of everyday life.
On 20 February 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) had published the Futurist Manifesto in the Paris daily Le Figaro, thus founding the avant-garde art movement known as Futurism. In his eleven-point programme Marinetti propagated a new culture embracing all areas of life. His theses were directed against traditional art and glorified speed, violence and war. The words of the young writer, born in Alexandria, Egypt, unleashed a revolution that struck the most sensitive chord of the yearning for radical renewal for which Italian art had been searching.
Only a few years earlier in Milan Marinetti had founded the periodical Poesia which became the organ of those young writers who demanded a radical change in Italian literature. Now, shuttling back and forth between Paris and Milan, he brought Futurism to the whole of Europe. He shared with numerous artists the revolutionary ideas contained in the theoretical manifestos, which from 1910 onwards also bore the signatures of Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla and later of Antonio Sant’Elia, Fortunato Depero, Enrico Prampolini, Ardengo Soffici and many others, including Tullio Crali, Renato Bertelli and Ernesto Thayath.
Marinetti, unquestionably the first great master of media communication strategies, was at war – like all the painters who were close to Futurism – with the past, with history, with remembrance. Under the slashing blows of his pamphlet and theoretical manifestos the “cult objects” of the past toppled one after another.
He condemned the art of the Renaissance as he did the Tango or the music of Wagner and Spaghetti, the romanticization of Venice or love in the moonlight. The name of the movement, which was his invention, was well suited to expressing the absolute faith in the new technologies, especially the automobile and the aeroplane.
Futurism enabled the Italian art of the early twentieth century to take its place among the main avant-garde currents which already existed in Europe – especially France and Germany. With its interest in revolutionizing all the arts, from painting to architecture, from poetry to literature, from design to drama, Futurism in Italy was in one sense an artistic movement, but it was also a new way of looking at the cultural life of a country which entered the twentieth century in a state of strong social and economic backwardness and profound divisions.
The Berlin exhibition begins with an introductory section dealing with the upheavals in painting caused by the historical core group of Futurists around Boccioni, Balla, Severini, Russolo, Soffici and Carrà.
The focus of the exhibition, however, will be on the innovations that ushered in a new and extraordinarily creative epoch of Futurism after Boccioni’s death in 1916, when painters like Severini, Balla, Depero, Prampolini, Crali, to name only the best-known, succeeded with the unfailing support and consent of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in lending new meaning to artistic acts.
They opened the way to an experimental approach to the languages of art, poetry, literature, interior design, fashion, industrial design, photography and set design, that formed the aesthetic basis for the second half of the twentieth century. The exhibition shows a selection of works which demonstrate most clearly the sense of an “extension” of the aesthetic dimension to life in general and the “blurring of the distinctions” between the various artistic disciplines.
This will give visitors the opportunity to learn something about those aspects of Futur-ism that are less well known but no less worthy of attention than the familiar manifestations of Futurism in painting.
Devoting an exhibition to Futurism in Berlin is of particular significance as this city played an important role in the Futurists’ dissemination of their revolutionary ideas in Germany thanks to the efforts of Herwarth Walden (1887–1941). In 1912 the Futurist Manifesto was published in Der Sturm, a periodical founded by Herwarth Walden and Alfred Döblin. Soon afterwards (12 April – 31 May 1912) the first Futurist exhibition in Germany was held in Walden’s eponymous gallery at Tiergartenstrasse 34 a. It had previously been on view in Paris at the Galerie Bernheim Jeune (5 – 27 February 1912) and in London at the Sackville Gallery (1 March – 4 April 1912) and showed in Berlin 35 pictures by the Futurists Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini. This was followed by further Futurist appearances in Walden’s periodical and gallery, as a selection of documents in the exhibition in the Martin-Gropius-Bau make clear.

Sprachen des Futurismus

Languages of Futurism

Veranstaltungen Sprachen des Futurismus

Exhibitions 2009

2009

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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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

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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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