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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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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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In spite of all the hostile oppression he has been facing in his own country, Ai Weiwei has decided to put on his largest one-man exhibition yet at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau. Across 3,000 square metres, 18 rooms and in the spectacular Lichthof he will display works and installations that were either designed specifically for the Martin-Gropius-Bau or have not yet been shown in Germany.
The name he has given to his exhibition is “Evidence”, a word that will be, a term well known beyond the English-speaking world from American crime series on TV to mean proof that will stand up in court. From his simple but spacious studio on the rural outskirts of Beijing, Ai Weiwei has created a deeply political exhibition for Berlin.
Ai Weiwei is an artist, architect and politician. Very few of his works do not contain hidden allusions to internal Chinese affairs or to the subject of “China and the West” in general. One must learn to spot the ironical historical and political references in his works, which he sends out into the world like messages in bottles.
Ai Weiwei is one of the most internationally renowned artists working today, this did not prevent the Chinese authorities from detaining him illegally for 81 days (81, 2014). He was kept in a cell in a secret prison where the light was switched on for 24 hours a day and he was always accompanied by two guards. He later reproduced the handcuffs with which had shackled him to a chair during his imprisonment from the precious material jade (Jade Handcuffs, 2013).
Random arrests and corruption happen to regular Chinese citizens on a daily basis. Ai Weiwei refuses to accept this status quo. He demands freedom of speech, a fair distribution of power, and multiparty democracy. The infinite variety of forms offered by conceptual art allows him to express his ideas in a country where freedom of expression does not exist.
He is also one of the most famous artists in China. In recent years, official Chinese propaganda has attempted to erase him from public consciousness. He is not allowed to exhibit in any museum in China. Ai Weiwei’s instant response to this tactic was to turn the Internet into his permanent exhibition space: his now banned blogposts are outstanding, as is his current presence on Instagram.
Although he is allowed to work in his studio, a dozen surveillance cameras have been placed before his door. His ironic response was to hang red lanterns on them and reproduce them in marble (Marble Surveillance Cameras, 2010). The actions of the regime have been incorporated into his conceptual art. Although he is allowed to travel within China, every step he takes is monitored by undercover agents. His passport has been confiscated to prevent him from travelling abroad.
Among the works and installations on display at the Martin-Gropius-Bau will be a golden copy of the zodiac sculptures (Golden Zodiac, 2011) cast in bronze (c. 1750) by Chinese craftsmen according to designs by the Europeans Castiglione and Benoist. They formed part of a kind of sun and water clock and were located in a garden commissioned by the Emperor which also featured buildings in the European style. In 1860, after the end of the Second Opium War, the entire garden was ransacked and torched by the rapacious British and French soldiers that had conquered Beijing in order to force China to take part in the opium trade. Some of these bronze zodiac figures found their way to Europe, and when they turned up in Paris in 2008 at an auction of Yves Saint-Laurent’s art collection they caused a sensation in the Chinese cultural sphere. Ai Weiwei does not accept the Chinese government’s stance, that these bronze figures are Chinese national treasures, declaring that, rather, they belong to the whole world.
Ai Weiwei recreates the disputed Pacific Diaoyu Islands (Diaoyu Islands, 2013) in marble taken from a quarry near Beijing for the exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Formed from the same marble used by China’s emperors for the Forbidden City as well as by the country’s present rulers for the Mao Mausoleum, his intention is to give an artistic form to a conflict that threatens today’s globalized world.
These instant transformations of current political affairs into art are characteristic of some of the artist’s most important installations. Thus, the twisted reinforcing steel rods recall the terrible earthquake in Sichuan (Forge, 2008-2012; Forge bed, 2008-2012) and the 80,000 lives it claimed and through this, the mismanagement and corruption that exacerbated the disaster. The same can be said of his major work “1,800 Cans of Powdered Milk”, which he exhibited in Hong Kong for the first time in 2013 – a commentary on the scandal that erupted world-wide after Chinese children were poisoned by contaminated milk powder resulting from lax inspections.
Ai Weiwei often uses ancient Chinese materials as well. He has occasionally said, that he wants to provoke an emotional reaction in the spectator by using contradictory elements – for instance, when he dips ancient ceramic vases from the Han Dynasty period (202 BC – 220 AC) in car paint in the same shades as are currently en vogue with the German luxury car owners in Beijing (Han Dynasty Vases with Auto Paint, 2013).
He adopts an equally playful approach both to Serialism, an ancient tradition that can be found in historical Buddhist temples, as well as to Minimalism, which was characteristic of the Song Dynasty period (960-1126). Transferring Chinese art’s traditional and familiar iconography to today‘s “universal language” of globally practiced conceptual art.
In 2008, Ai Weiwei was invited by the Shanghai City Council to construct a very large studio. But upon its completion, the authorities had it instantaneously demolished within a single day, since the artist had dared to criticize the government. But Ai Weiwei created a work of art from his studio’s wreckage entitled “Souvenir from Shanghai” (2012).
In the large Lichthof of the Gropiusbau, the artist has assembled 6,000 simple wooden stools (Stools, 2014) of the type that have been used in the Chinese countryside for hundreds of years, since the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The result is an aesthetically pleasing, pixel-like work. These stools, according to Ai Weiwei, are an expression of the centuries-old aesthetic of rural China.
Ai Weiwei is promoting a dialogue with western audiences about China. His revolutionary use of conceptual art began in 1993, after he left New York to return to China, a country which only allowed its artists to use certain forms of expression. After all, whoever controls the form also controls the content. Ai Weiwei resisted this control, creating his own discourse on free speech and freedom to publish. The artists he most admires include Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Giorgio Morandi.
But Ai also sees himself in the tradition of the Chan (Zen) philosopher Hui Neng (638-713), whom he regards as the radical champion of unlimited expression, a man who rebelled against the Confucian-Buddhist orthodoxy of his time. During the Cultural Revolution (c. 1969), the Red Guards destroyed Hui‘s temple in southern China. His worship however, has since been resumed.
A comprehensive catalogue provides extensive background information on the exhibition with articles by Uta Rahman-Steinert on Ai Weiwei’s treatment of tradition; Wulf Herzogenrath on the artist’s various approaches to his art; Klaus Ruitenbeek on the Chinese element in the work of Ai Weiwei and by Thomas W. Eller on the material rhetoric of aesthetic resistance.
The aforementioned works written italics will be amongst the objects on display. The richly illustrated catalogue that accompanies the exhibition will be published by Prestel Verlag at a special exhibition price of 25 euros.
To the exhibition with the ticket Sparpreis Kultur of the Deutsche Bahn 
 Have a comfortable journey to the exhibition "Ai Weiwei" and back within three days with the Sparpreis Kultur. The saver ticket starts at € 39 in second class and € 59 in first class. Four further people may join the same journey and save € 10 each. It is valid within Germany and also available for ICE connections. 
 Children under 15 travel for free if they are accompanied by their parents or grandparents. Please note that the tickets must be purchased at least 3 days in advance and are subject to availability. The Sparpreis Kultur is only available from 1st January, 2014, in combination with an entrance ticket to the exhibition at the DB travel centres and DB agencies within Germany. <a href="http://www.bahn.de/kultur" target="_blank" title="www.bahn.de/kultur">www.bahn.de/kultur</a>

Modernism is the original creation of enlightened human beings, it is the ultimate observation of the meaning of existence and the misery of reality; it keeps a wary eye on society and power; it never makes compromises and never cooperates. Ai Weiwei 1997 (quoted from “Ai Weiwei - Der verbotene Blog”, Galiani: Berlin, 2011)
Despite all the incredible hostility shown him in his own country Ai Weiwei decided to put on his largest one-man exhibition yet in Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau. On 3,000 square metres in 18 rooms and the spectacular Lichthof he will be displaying works and installations which were either designed for the Martin-Gropius-Bau or have not yet been shown in Germany.
The name he has given to his exhibition is “Evidence”, a term well known beyond the English-speaking world from American TV crime series in the meaning of proof that will stand up in court. It is a political exhibition that Ai Weiwei has designed for Berlin in his simple and spacious studio in the rural outskirts of Beijing.

Ai Weiwei – Evidence

Ausstellungen

Exhibitions 2014

2014

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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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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

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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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Upcoming