Sundays 19 June and 31 July 2011 | 14:00School classes on request (weekdays)Information and registrationKulturprojekte BerlinTel&nbsp;&nbsp;+49 30 247 49-888E-mail <cms_link linktemplate="externalLink_st_domeditor_1" type="genericLink"> <templatecontent> <cms_value name="ref"> <lang id="§" set="1"> <text> museumsinformation@kulturprojekte-berlin.de </text> </lang> </cms_value> <cms_value name="text"> <lang id="§" set="1"> <text> museumsinformation@kulturprojekte-berlin.de </text> </lang> </cms_value> <cms_value name="comment"> <lang id="§" set="0"></lang> </cms_value> <cms_value name="linktemplate"> <lang id="§" set="1"> <sel> <value> externalLink_st_domeditor_1.EmailAdresse </value> </sel> </lang> </cms_value> <cms_value name="mediaref"> <lang id="§" set="0"></lang> </cms_value> <cms_value name="target"> <lang id="§" set="0"></lang> </cms_value> </templatecontent> </cms_link><cms_link linktemplate="externalLink_st_domeditor_1" type="genericLink"> <templatecontent> <cms_value name="ref"> <lang id="§" set="1"> <text> http://www.kulturprojekte-berlin.de </text> </lang> </cms_value> <cms_value name="text"> <lang id="§" set="1"> <text> www.kulturprojekte-berlin.de </text> </lang> </cms_value> <cms_value name="comment"> <lang id="§" set="0"></lang> </cms_value> <cms_value name="linktemplate"> <lang id="§" set="1"> <sel> <value> externalLink_st_domeditor_1.HotLink </value> </sel> </lang> </cms_value> <cms_value name="mediaref"> <lang id="§" set="1"></lang> </cms_value> <cms_value name="target"> <lang id="§" set="0"></lang> </cms_value> </templatecontent> </cms_link>

Gropius Bau

Gropius Bau 2023

Look’n’ smile: NAH, fern, oben und unten

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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 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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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

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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

More Berliner Festspiele

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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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Gropius Bau 2025

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As the creator of images like “Underwater Swimmer” (1917), “Chez Mondrian” (1926) or “Gabel” (1929) André Kertész has a firm place in 20th century photographic history. It is not only his formally outstanding compositions which won him great esteem, but the surreally inspired poetry with which he captures such apparently simple things and situations. His innovative photographic instinct inspired many of his colleagues: Brassaï learned from him and Henri Cartier-Bresson betrays his influence.
Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau is showing a grand retrospective of over 300 photographs by André Kertész, who was born in Hungary and lived in Budapest, Paris and New York.
The exhibition is organized by theme, following the main leitmotivs of his oeuvre, such as the recurrent observation of shadows, roofs and chimney tops, or the metaphorical portrayal of feelings like melancholy. In addition, it highlights groups of works that have hitherto been less familiar: early pictures shot during his military service in the First World War and the Polaroid shots he made during the last years in New York. Special attention is paid to Kertész’s influence on the emergence of press photography in Paris from 1928 onwards. Several editions of “VU,” “Art et Médecine”,“ Paris Magazine” and various editions of his feature on the Trappist Monastery in Soligny-la-Trappe will be on view in the exhibition.
André Kertész, who as Andor Kertész was born in Budapest into a middle-class Jewish family on 2&nbsp;July 1894, dreamed of being a photographer even as a child. At the age of 18 he bought his first camera, an ICA Box for use with 4.5 x 6 cm plates. The photo of a sleeping boy dates from this early phase. During his military service in the Austrian-Hungarian Army he documented in laconic images the everyday life of the soldiers: the long marches, the waiting in the trenches, the forlornness of the individual. Wounded in September 1915, he took the famous photo “Underwater Swimmer” while recuperating in Esztergom in 1917. The optically distorted body covered with light reflections seems to anticipate later works. A decade was to pass before the aesthetic effects of reflection were to become popular at the Bauhaus.
After the war Kertész, who worked at the stock exchange, spent his leisure photographing quotidian motifs, like his brother Jenö practising sport, but Budapest did not offer a suitable setting for his artistic ambitions. In 1925 he decided to go to Paris, thus joining the large group of Hungarian artists and photographers – like László Moholy-Nagy, Robert Capa, Germaine Krull and Brassaï – who, after the disintegration of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy and the crushing of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, left Hungary in the 1920s and emigrated either to Paris or Berlin.
In Paris Kertész soon made contacts among the artistic avant-garde of Montparnasse: Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Ossip Zadkine and Alexander Calder. In this period he did numerous photographic portraits in postcard format. Strolling through the great metropolis Kertész took photographs of Paris in the streets and parks, on the rooftops and on the banks of the Seine. He saw photography as a visual diary, as an instrument for describing life: “I interpret my feeling at a given moment. Not what I see, but what I feel.”
His close-up shots and bird’s-eye views, his eye for the geometrical structure of space, as well as for shade, reflections and silhouettes, soon brought him recognition. In 1927 the Galerie Au Sacre du Printemps put on the first major show of his work, and in 1929 he took part in the international exhibition “Film und Foto” in Stuttgart and Berlin. In 1928 Kertész began to work with a Leica, the first miniature camera. In the following years “VU” published more than 30 photo essays by him. In 1933 he produced the unusual series entitled “Distortions”, in which female figures distorted by mirrors lead a life of their own between caricature and eroticism.
He also published books such as “Enfants” (1933), “Paris vu par André Kertész” (1934), and “Nos amies les bêtes” (1936). That same year Kertész accepted an offer from the Keystone Agency and moved to New York, but he soon cancelled the contract and went freelance.
His time in the USA was initially marked by difficulties in making ends meet, and in 1949 he accepted a post (which he kept until 1962) for the magazine “House and Garden”. On a trip to Paris in 1963 he rediscovered a large number of his negatives, which inspired him to new artistic activity and brought him international recognition. In 1964 he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In his last creative phase, and particularly after he was no longer able to leave his apartment, he took photos of Washington Square from his window. In his book “From my Window” (1981) he published Polaroid shots of finely composed still lifes showing him still to be a master of light with the simplest of implements.
When André Kertész died on 28 September 1985, he left an archive of 100,000 negatives.

André Kertész

Veranstaltungen Ai Weiwei in New York

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Exhibitions 2011

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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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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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Musikfest Berlin 2025 brings together guest performances by the world’s best symphony orchestras and choirs from the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Italy, which are rarely heard in Berlin. The full programme is online and tickets are available now.

Upcoming