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Gropius Bau

Gropius Bau 2023

Führungen zur Ausstellung „Tanz der Ahnen“

Guided tours through the exhibition “Dance of the Ancestors”

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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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There are currently no exhibitions on view at Gropius Bau.

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Gropius Bau 2026

Events

Exhibitions & Projects

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Our newsletters keep you updated on current and upcoming exhibitions and events. Learn more about our kids programme and plan your next visit.

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We’re Looking Forward to Welcoming You Again in March!

Gropius Bau is currently closed for exhibition preparations. Our restaurant Beba and our bookstore will reopen on 4 March, before we kick off our spring programme, featuring a performance by <a href="${link:{uuid:{16d14ae2-9463-45b4-91de-95a846c0f377},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2026/veranstaltungen/leila-hekmat}}}">Leila Hekmat</a>, the <a href="${link:{uuid:{fd3f9e70-97e8-46fb-b639-fc701f8d4039},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/baubau/veranstaltungen/baubau-play-day-pop-up-26}}}">big pop-up</a> of our play space BAUBAU and the opening of our <a href="${link:{uuid:{baa82be9-6411-41e5-806b-4889004c8459},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2026/ausstellungen/peter-hujar-liz-deschenes}}}">Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes</a> exhibition. Find more details in our <a href="${link:{uuid:{62c3018b-bb40-46ce-8019-646ec5cd2e4a},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/besuch/informationen}}}">Information &amp; Tickets</a> section.

See You Soon

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Advance sales are now live: tickets for ten selected concert highlights of the Musikfest Berlin, which in 2026 will also mark the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele, are now available. The programme includes Gy&ouml;rgy Ligeti’s grotesquely humorous anti-opera Le Grand Macabre and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

Musikfest Berlin

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MaerzMusik invites you to concerts, performances, installations and discourse formats at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and several other venues in Berlin. The programme is published; advance ticket sales are on.

MaerzMusik

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On 13 January, the Theatertreffen’s jury of critics announced their selection of the 10 most remarkable productions for the 2026 Theatertreffen at a press conference. Our congratulations go to the nominated production teams and all participants!

Theatertreffen

More Berliner Festspiele

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Leila Hekmat: Roses Rising – The Movement

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The Practice – What Moves Artists

The Practice – What Moves Artists&nbsp;is a 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 second volume of the series, artist, performer and author Vaginal Davis looks back on the saucy underground scenes of Los Angeles and Berlin together with former bandmates.&nbsp;On Dangerous Ground recounts past gigs, spectacular live performances and well-kept secrets.

Vaginal Davis: On Dangerous Ground

A Vibrant Place for Enganging with Art and Each Other

Located in the centre of Berlin, Gropius Bau is an internationally renowned institution that stages large-scale exhibitions and performances by contemporary artists. Its diverse events focus on exchange and discussion, bringing together local and global perspectives.

About Gropius Bau

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Widely regarded as one of the most original and influential artists of the 20th century, Diane Arbus’ bold black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. With&nbsp;Diane Arbus: Konstellationen, Gropius Bau presents the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date.

Diane Arbus: Konstellationen

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Ligia Lewis is a central figure in redefining performance within the context of the visual arts. Her solo exhibition&nbsp;I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR… at Gropius Bau&nbsp;brings&nbsp;together new and existing works that explore themes of race, gender, violence and resistance.

Ligia Lewis:I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR...

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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.

BAUBAU:A&nbsp;Play Space for Kids

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What is and has been the role of play in public space? 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 BAUBAU’s entrance.

Playing in the City:A Short History from 1900 to the Present

Currently at Gropius Bau

Widely regarded as one of the most original and influential artists of the 20th century, Diane Arbus’ bold black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. With Diane Arbus: Konstellationen, Gropius Bau presents the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date. Featuring 454 prints, many of them shown here for the first time, Konstellationen offers new perspectives on Arbus’ iconic images and the wide range of her portraiture.

Ligia Lewis is a central figure in redefining performance within the context of the visual arts. In her multifaceted practice, she combines performance, live installation and film. From autumn 2025, Gropius Bau presents I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…, the artist and choreographer’s most comprehensive solo exhibition to date. It brings together new and existing works that explore themes of race, gender, violence and resistance.

Ligia Lewis: I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…

Current Exhibitions

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Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition

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. They set the tone and decide what happens in this place.

BAUBAU

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Working in New York City between the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and the onset of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Peter Hujar captured a pivotal cultural moment in piercing black-and-white photographs. In the exhibition Persistence of Vision, Hujar’s photographs are interspersed with contemporary works by New York City-based artist Liz Deschenes, opening up an intergenerational dialogue on photography.&nbsp;

Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision

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One of the most influential performance artists of all time, Marina Abramović presents Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition at Gropius Bau in spring 2026. The show traces her ongoing engagement with ritual, eroticism, death and the body as a site of political resistance. Drawing on the folklore of Abramović’s native Balkans, the exhibition weaves together filmic and sculptural installations with live performance.

Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition

Upcoming

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With Bishop Black, Hugo Tepest, Perel, River Roux, Ulrike Ottinger

On 8 January, we’re kicking off the new year with another edition of our event series Sp&auml;tschicht, which we’re organising in collaboration with Schwules Museum. This edition centers the body as a place of negotiation, militantly rejecting society’s norms.

Sp&auml;tschicht x Schwules Museum

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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How does the bourgeois longing for revolt take shape, when the faith in progress and reason is unsettled? Berlin-based artist and director Leila Hekmat explores this question in her newly commissioned performance Roses Rising – The Movement, premiering in the Gropius Bau’s atrium. Moving between concert and ballet, the piece transforms the space into a landscape hovering between bunker, rehearsal room and dreamscape and invites the audience to witness a dinner party unravel into a happening.

Leila Hekmat: Roses Rising – The Movement &nbsp;

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.

Upcoming 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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Festivals & Programme Series

Ausstellungen 2015

For the first time artworks from Oceania were the subjects of an exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. They came from an area on the middle and lower reaches of the river Sepik in Papua-New Guinea. About 220 artworks from twelve lenders &ndash; some of Europe&rsquo;s most prominent museums were involved &ndash; were on view. As early as the beginning of the 20th century the aesthetics of the art of the Sepik region fascinated European scholars and artists, Berlin and Basel were centres of Sepik scholarship.

The Sepik plain is a large area of water and marshland. The banks of the Sepik, which extends for almost 1,200 kilometres, are inhabited by small tribal groups who speak over a hundred different languages. On the middle and lower reaches of the Sepik alone over ninety different languages are spoken, so one cannot think of the region as a relatively homogeneous settlement area. No sooner had the Sepik been discovered and named (in 1886) Kaiserin Augusta River by the German colonialists (who also drew on the same nomenclature for the Bismarck Sea into which it flowed), than the highly elaborate material culture aroused the attention of collectors and museologists all over the world.

The deeds of the ancestors created the human world. The changes they wrought are manifested in the environment and cultural relics. The ancestors, it is supposed, created the broad river basin of the Sepik, on whose embankments stand the dwellings and the houses of the men. Of key significance are the dance floors in front of the men&rsquo;s houses; that is where the ancestor figures perform, recalling the great deeds of yore. The dancers embody these ancestors with their rich jewellery and brightly coloured masks and become one with them.

In walking through a village one finds that the rooms are arranged to reflect the social order: there is a clear division between the world of women and that of men, between the public sphere, where everyone is allowed to move about freely, and the sphere which is reserved for male initiates. Within the village the women are mainly assigned to the dwelling houses. The objects are visible. The men, on the other hand, chiefly congregate in the big men&rsquo;s houses and on the dance floors. The objects are hidden and secret and are only on display when rites are performed.

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In the forefront of the selection of ethnological art shown here, is the motif of the human figure, which is common to all cultures: the male or female founder-ancestors of settlements, human communities, and their natural environment. In Sepik societies this ancestor figure is not shown directly. It always unravels itself gradually in complex patterns. The course of the exhibition will enabled visitors to understand the various forms in which these ancestor figures manifested themselves, beginning with the more public ones which became progressively more secret.

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The works are fascinating for their extremely rich decoration on small and large objects and the blending of creative genres which in Europe are kept strictly separate (painting, sculpture): A combination of sculptures in human form and surface decoration; of ornaments on palm leaf stalks and ceremonial buildings; of ceramics in the shape of model figures, used for storing or preparing food.

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On display will be a large outrigger boat and a dug-out canoe, richly decorated door posts for men&rsquo;s houses, huge slit drums, mighty ancestor figures, and splendidly ornamented masked figures. The river basin is a mosaic of linguistic groups. The ninety-odd languages partially explain the variety of created objects. Together with the elaborate rites there is a remarkable abundance of objects, whose formal design is frequently astonishing, fascinating and exotic.

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For a long time the Sepik was overlooked by European, American and Australian explorers and travellers. It was only towards the end of the 19th century that its mouth was discovered and the river navigated by a German ship (the Ottilie). Years were to pass, however, before scientific expeditions were organized. Leading German institutions launched voyages of exploration, from Hamburg in 1909 and from Berlin in 1912-13. The then K&ouml;nigliches Museum f&uuml;r V&ouml;lkerkunde (Royal Museum of Ethnology) in Berlin mounted a full-blown interdisciplinary expedition, some of whose results can only now be published. One of the protagonists of these expeditions had just discovered the sources of the Sepik River, when the First World War broke out in 1914 and soon spread to the South Seas. Australia conquered and took over control of the colony of &ldquo;German New Guinea&rdquo; in 1899-1914.

The present exhibition, put on a hundred years after the last Berlin expedition, went a long way towards bringing this great Berlin enterprise to public attention, for it was only with this expedition that the Sepik area became one of the most significant regions for ethnographical and scientific research in the South Seas.

As early as 1911 a Berlin Museum employee recognized the extraordinary aesthetic value of the carvings from the Sepik. As a result numerous collectors from all over the world have exchanged and acquired these works in the course of adventurous journeys up the river and its numerous tributaries. Soon these masks, figures and paintings came to be found in those art galleries which in the 1920s in Europe and later also in America offered the art of the &ldquo;Primitives&rdquo; side by side with the art of the Modernists. The carvings from the Sepik thus became part of the visual repertoire available to the artists of Modernism at the beginning of the 20th century. They were also, however, the occasion of much other research which was to be carried out in the course of that century with the aim of obtaining more information about the significance and iconography of the objects. The exhibition showed a synthesis of this field of art, which also details the scientific expeditions of the last fifty years.

Although ethnological explorers were quick to speak of a &ldquo;Sepik art&rdquo;, the art world was more reserved, preferring to formulate theories of &ldquo;Primitivism&rdquo; &ndash; until well into the 1980s. The major exhibition on &ldquo;&lsquo;Primitivism&rsquo; in 20th Century Art &ndash; Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern&rdquo; (1984) put on by the Museum of Modern Art in New York is a reminder of this lengthy discussion. Today it is perfectly normal to view such artworks &ndash; previously held, like those of the Sepik region, to be &ldquo;primitivistic&rdquo;&ndash; for their aesthetic qualities. An opportunity to do so was provided by the present exhibition.

Tanz der Ahnen

Dance of the Ancestors

Veranstaltungen

Programme

Exhibitions 2015

2015

Programm

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.

Berliner Festspiele

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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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National Youth Ballet John Neumeier

The Invisibles

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In 2026 the Berliner Festspiele celebrate their 75th anniversary. A selection of events programmed throughout the entire year engage take the anniversary as their theme or mark the occasion with works at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the Gropius Bau, the Philharmonie, on Berlin’s Ringbahn and at other locations in the city. Outstanding international that liberal societies and their cultural institutions face in a new, multipolar world order. artists such as Marina Abramović, Gabriele St&ouml;tzer and Akira Takayama will set the agenda both thematically and aesthetically. Entitled “Die gro&szlig;e Unordnung” (The Great Disorder), the four-day focus Reflexes &amp; Reflections will also enquire about the challenges.

75 Years of the Berliner Festspiele

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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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The Theatertreffen’s jury of critics announced their selection of the 10 most remarkable productions for the 2026 Theatertreffen. The programme will be published on 2&nbsp;April, advance ticket sale will begin on 18 April, 10:00.

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Tickets for ten selected concert highlights of the Musikfest Berlin, which in 2026 will also mark the 75th&nbsp;anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele, are already available. The programme includes Gy&ouml;rgy Ligeti’s grotesquely humorous anti-opera Le Grand Macabre and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

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A dance collage by John Neumeier which explores aspects of German expressive dance through music, texts and songs and commemorates the victims of Nazi rule. Guest performance of the National Youth Ballet John Neumeier.