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Gropius Bau

Gropius Bau 2017

Lunchführungen zur Ausstellung „Juergen Teller. Enjoy Your Life!“

Guided lunch tours through the exhibition “Juergen Teller. Enjoy Your Life!”

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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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Download now

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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Juergen Teller is one of the world&rsquo;s most sought-after contemporary photographers. His works, many of which take the form of extensive series, are published in books, magazines and exhibitions.

Deliberately distancing himself from the relentless glamour of fashion and people photography, Juergen Teller forged his own distinctive path. In his shoots for well-known fashion designers, he placed supermodels, pop stars and other celebrities in unexpected and often disturbing contexts. His series Kanye, Juergen &amp; Kim, Ch&acirc;teau d&rsquo;Ambleville of 2015 is a case in point. Encouraging his sitters to show their individuality and capturing them in seemingly private, intimate moments, away from the glare of public attention, he detaches the images from established visual codes and demystifies the stars in front of his lens. Then again, his skilful compositions make &lsquo;stars&rsquo; of inanimate objects and invest them with metaphoric meaning. The opulent book Eating at Hotel Il Pellicano. Juergen Teller, Antonio Guida, Will Self features photographs of extravagantly elegant food by the celebrated Michelin-starred chef Antonio Guida against the backdrop of the chic Tuscan Hotel.

Teller applies the same creative principles to his non-commercial work. The resulting images &ndash; now more than ever &ndash; are baffling, unpredictable, clich&eacute;defying, intimate, seemingly transgressive and in-your-face, but never compromising, because they are informed by great empathy and sensitivity. &lsquo;In the end, the only thing that really interests me is the interaction between two people. One of them is me, the photographer. And when these encounters touch me, then that is a good thing.&rsquo; His shootings with Charlotte Rampling have acquired legendary status. They are based on a shared sense of playfulness and absolute trust, which also inspired Charlotte Rampling, a Fox, and a Plate (Teller), the latest images of her shot in Teller&rsquo;s new studio in London.

Bundeskunsthalle&rsquo;s director Rein Wolfs states: &lsquo;Juergen Teller&rsquo;s photography is seductive and direct, aesthetic and real, often beautiful, sometimes deliberately ugly, but always a powerful statement about the impact of the contemporary.&rsquo;

Some groups of works &ndash; for example Irene im Wald, 2012 or Bilder und Texte, 2011 (a combination of photographs and texts by Teller) &ndash; are very autobiographical in character. As subjective documentations, they bear witness to his engagement with his youth and his origins. They are direct, candid, occasionally humorous and always touching. His family and his mother Irene play an important role. They provide the solid foundation that gives him the freedom to operate, and at the interface of commercial and non-commercial photography, they are the links and constants that hold the two &lsquo;worlds&rsquo; together. Teller&rsquo;s curiosity and playfulness, and above all the insouciant ease with which he brings together objects and motifs that seem to have nothing in common, is apparent in much of his work, for instance in pictures of models at his home or of Aunt Gisela and Catherine Deneuve smoking a cigarette together on a Paris doorstep.

Works like Siegerflieger &ndash; a kind of photographic diary of the German national football team winning the World Cup in Brazil in 2014 &ndash; and My Man Crush, Pep Guardiola &ndash; shot from the fan perspective during a trip to China in 2015 &ndash; testify to Teller&rsquo;s feeling for the moment and his skill in undermining the posited line between private and public. Another important part of his oeuvre are carefully staged yet unsparingly candid images of himself, among them the series The Clinic of 2015. He reveals much of himself, offers glimpses of his most private moments, captures his children, wife and mother and presents himself naked, standing on his father&rsquo;s grave or astride a donkey&rsquo;s back.

Juergen Teller demands a lot from his sitters. He expects them to embrace a raw and unvarnished authenticity. By the same token, his steady focus on the motif, candid and curious, open and unblinkered, calls for tolerance and curiosity on the part of the viewer. And he gives as good as he gets. He uses the set, the props his camera and, above all, the sitters as a film director might and frequently acts as the protagonist of his own images, delegating the operation of the shutter release to someone else. &lsquo;In the wider sense, everything is a kind of self-portrait. It&rsquo;s just the way you see things and how certain things rouse your curiosity and get you all excited.&rsquo; In so doing, he integrates a change of perspective in form of the viewer&rsquo;s gaze into his visual conceptualisation. He invites us to share in his playful game and makes us his allies.

The series Plates/Teller, begun in 2016, seems to bring together and concentrate all of Teller&rsquo;s themes and compositions. The protagonists&rsquo; games with a plate &ndash; the German word for plate is Teller, and so the plate acts as a synonym and stand-in for the photographer &ndash; are captured in compositions that are as tender as they are exuberant, direct and honest, full of humour and strangely touching. Many of his complex narratives only unfold upon a closer look, even if they are presented on the proverbial platter. As &lsquo;storyteller&rsquo;, Teller reflects on photography as a mirror of society and examines its media impact.

The huge appeal of his photographs and of his magnificent combinations of motifs lies in the directness with which they speak to the viewer. Without frills, unsparing, candid, humorous, tongue in cheek and occasionally transgressive, Teller&rsquo;s photographs have an inescapable intensity and strike us with bold immediacy.

The exhibition was previously shown at the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn and the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague.

Born into a family of instrument makers, he had to abandon his apprenticeship as a bowmaker for health reasons. He chose to study photography at the Staatslehranstalt f&uuml;r Photographie in Munich instead and moved to London in 1986. There, he began to work for trendy music, zeitgeist and fashion magazines and came to fame in 1991, when he accompanied the band Nirvana on its Nevermind tour and published his sensitive pictures of the band&rsquo;s shy frontman Kurt Cobain. Since then his pictures have straddled the interface of art and commercial photography. His stylistic device of choice is the portrait. Working in the areas of music, fashion and celebrities as well as everyday scenes and landscape, he draws on his intuitive feel for people, situations, milieus and clich&eacute;s to create images of great immediacy and deceptive simplicity. His compositions often convey a sense of the incidental or even slapdash, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that they are very carefully composed and conceptualised. Implicit in many of his works is the deliberate breach of viewer expectations &ndash; Teller does not idealise, romanticise or prettify. Instead, his pictures aim for the very core of the subject and foreground the idea of imperfect beauty.

Juergen Teller. Enjoy Your Life!

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Ausstellungen 2017

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Exhibitions 2017

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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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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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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