Tuesday 14 December 2010 | 19:00Venue: Martin-Gropius-Bau, CinemaThe Gropius and Moholy-Nagy “Meisterh&auml;user” in Dessau, which were destroyed in the war, are being rebuilt. After years of controversy over how these modernist buildings can return to their place of origin, a new design by the BFM architectural bureau in Berlin is providing an innocative contribution to the reconstruction debate.The presentations will be presented byDonatella Fioretti and Josè Gutierrez Marquez, BFM-Architekten BerlinPhilipp Oswalt, director of the Bauhaus Dessau FoundationWolfgang Th&ouml;ner, director of the Collection of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.Participants in the ensuing discussion will include:Michael Kaufmann, artistic director of the Kurt Weill FestivalJosè Gutierrez Marquez and Philipp Oswalt.The event will be hosted by Peter M&uuml;ller, an art historian and publicist from Berlin.On the occasion of the exhibition László Moholy-Nagy – Art of Light

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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! 🐛

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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.

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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.

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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

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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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László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) is one of the most important exponents of Modernism. Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau will be mounting an exhibition of his art as represented by over 200 works: paintings, photographs (black-and-white and colour), photograms, collages, films and graphics. The show will focus on the years in which Moholy-Nagy was developing his theory of art as an art of light. This covers the period from 1922 to the end of his life and beyond, in view of the influence he exerted after his death. Of particular significance are the selected photographic works and his activities as a theoretician and practitioner.
For Moholy-Nagy was always a theoretician and practitioner in equal measure, always wanting to be a holistic artist. He approached his work – painting, photography, commercial and industrial design, film, sculpture, scenography – from a wide variety of aspects and practised it as a radical, extreme experiment, by refusing to place his hugely differing works in any sort of aesthetic hierarchy. He also attached enormous importance to education, which is why, at the request of Walter Gropius, he worked in this field for the Bauhaus in Weimar (1923–1925) and Dessau (1925–1928). In Chicago, where he settled in 1937, he again assumed teaching duties and founded the “New Bauhaus”, which sought to realise the programmes of the German Bauhaus in the United States. Shortly afterwards he founded the Institute of Design in Chicago, where he was to remain active until his death in 1946. The institute was later incorporated in the Illinois Institute of Technology, which offers study courses to this day.
From Weimar to Chicago Moholy-Nagy retained his faith in his pedagogical ideal, which for him meant not only teaching, but the moral education of human beings. He believed in education as a means of developing all the abilities lying dormant in the students and as a means of paving the way to a “new, total human being”.
All of Moholy-Nagy’s theoretical contributions arose out of his artistic and pedagogical work. In his numerous writings he gradually presented his ideas, thus developing a complete artistic and pedagogical aesthetic. In his 1925 landmark essay “Painting, Photography, Film” he developed an aesthetic theory of light – light as a matrix of art and art as light. He applied his aesthetic theory of light not only to painting, photography and film, but also to theatrical and commercial design.
From that point on light became the foundation of Moholy-Nagy’s practical and theoretical work. For him art of whatever kind only acquired meaning when it reflected light. Painting was also reinterpreted on the basis of this criterion. Moholy-Nagy described his development as a painter as a shift away from “painting from transparency” to a painting that was free of any representational constraints and created the possibility of painting “not with colours, but with light”. This theory reached its full potential in photography and film. Etymologically, the word “photography” means “writing with light”. The artistic essence of film consists in the portrayal of “inter-related movements as revealed by light projections”. Although he was not in charge of the photography classes in the Bauhaus, it was there that he wrote Painting, Photography, Film, drawing upon his photographic experience. He invented the “photogram”, a purely light-based form of graphic representation, thus demonstrating an ability to create photographic images without a camera at the same time as the “Rayogram” was invented by Man Ray in Paris. He saw photography as a completely autonomous medium whose potential was still to be discovered. He criticized “pictoriality”, propagating an innovative, creative and productive photography. He regarded seriality as one of the main features of the practice of photography and opposed the “aura” of the one-off work in contrast to the infinite multifariousness of the photographic cliché, thus anticipating one of Walter Benjamin’s theses.
The distinction between production and reproduction is a basic theme of his art. A prominent aspect of every work is its ability to integrate the unknown. Works that only repeat or reproduce familiar relationships, are described as “reproductive”, while those that create or produce new relationships are “productive”. For Moholy-Nagy the ability of a work of art to create something new (a basic feature of Modernism) is a key criterion. He postulated for painting, photography and film a moral and aesthetic imperative – the New. Art had to confront new times and an industrial civilization. In the systematic implementation of this thesis 1926 turned out to be the year in which his pictorial output was greater than his works in other fields, but 1927 witnessed a positive flood of photographic, scenographic, kinetic and film productions. Painting was something he never abandoned. He decided to drop the representational painting inherited from the past and to devote himself to non-representational or “pure” painting instead. The emergence of photography gave painting the perfect opportunity to free itself from all figurative or representative imperatives. Artists did not have to decide in favour of one medium or another, but should use all media to capture and master an optical creation.

László Moholy-Nagy

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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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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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