in Englisch | through the exhibition <a href="content_link_text;type=kbb_festspiele.auffuehrungauswahl;gid=15ae6b0a-35ba-425f-84b9-d64fa5323ddb">“Philippe Parreno”</a>

Our public tours offer an overview of our current exhibition themes and the opportunity to discuss the ideas and backgrounds of the respective exhibition.Information and booking: Museumsdienst Berlin Tel +49 30 24749 888 Fax +49 30 24749 883 <a href="museumsinformation@kulturprojekte.berlin">museumsinformation@kulturprojekte.berlin</a> <a href="http://www.museumsdienst.berlin" target="_blank" title="www.museumsdienst.berlin">www.museumsdienst.berlin</a>

Gropius Bau

Gropius Bau 2023

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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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Tickets for ten selected concert highlights of the Musikfest Berlin, which in 2026 will also mark the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele, are 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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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 Berlin, on Berlin’s Ringbahn and at other locations in the city.&nbsp;

75 Years of the Berliner Festspiele

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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 will be announced on 29 January, with advance ticket sales beginning on the same day.is published; advance ticket sales are on.

MaerzMusik

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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 April, advance ticket sales will begin on 18 April at 10:00.

Theatertreffen

More Berliner Festspiele

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A Free Play Day for Everyone

BAUBAU Play Day Pop-up

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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

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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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Free Admission to the Exhibition

Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision

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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

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 Playing in the City 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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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!

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 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.

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 Playing in the City 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 &nbsp;

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Persistence of Vision

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

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Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition

Marina Abramović

Currently &amp; Upcoming

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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.

Ab 4. September

Festivals & Programme Series

Ausstellungen 2018

Ausstellungen

&ldquo;Nothing will have taken place but the place.&rdquo; 
St&eacute;phane Mallarm&eacute;

<a href="artist_connector">Philippe Parreno’s</a>&nbsp;untitled solo exhibition at the Gropius Bau Berlin has yet to exist and will perhaps never exist as it is described here. This is not to say that it is any less real. To be sure, this show has many different modes of existence which, as of now, are purely virtual, sites of possibility which may or may not become actual. To date, the exhibition exists in various modes that have changed over time including one which can be experienced through VR headsets. Yet at this time, nothing appears fixed, the future that the exhibition takes remains open, and we can only imagine what Parreno intends to do.
It seems certain that some old works will reappear. For example, a cuttlefish, an animal that turns up often in Parreno’s work will star in “Anywhen”, a film shot in 2016, which has recently been entirely re-edited. Many of these past works that may reappear were never really artworks to begin with. For example, the flower wallpaper previously seen as a background element in the set of Parreno’s film “Marilyn” (2012) moves to the foreground becoming an individual work covering a gallery wall. “Fireflies” will return too: hundreds of drawings of lightning bugs flash on a large LED screen and then fade away, their lifespan governed by complex algorithms. Certainly, this coming and going of old characters has something to do with birth, death and rebirth. Indeed, two gigantic inflated cartoon baby heads, one of Parreno’s oldest works dating to 1993, will take on a new life. When (or if) these old works meet, only time will tell how they will get along. Will they resonate? What new realities might emerge?
Disembodied free-floating sensations and intensities will directly affect the bodies of the works themselves and those visiting the show. In one room, three different wind vortexes designed by scientists will guide the circulation of balloon fish on an elaborate path. This course in turn will be altered in unexpected ways as the fish interact with the spectators. Live sounds, emanating from somewhere in or beyond the city, leak inside and spread from one room to the next. These sounds re-surface in the reflecting pool of the atrium as they are transduced into visual patterns of waterlilies. Light constantly changes in the galleries as automatic blinds go up and down following a rhythm governed by an unknown authority. Light reflected off the facing buildings slowly moves across the museum floor in what Parreno calls a “heliostat choreography”. Another area is bathed in an eerie orange glow that evokes the fictional future of our fading sun. In another room, the temperature changes drastically. Is it just our imagination? How can we feel these intensities if they have yet to be actualized?
As we move through the exhibit, we begin to feel as if we had entered a dimension not organized according to our normal spatial coordinates. This is an inner space, a purely mental landscape, a site animated by a paranoiac logic. In a back room, sits a bioreactor, consisting of a beaker in which micro-organisms multiply, mutate, and adapt to their environment. Connected to computers that orchestrate the events in the exhibition, these bacteria develop a memory, a collective intelligence that learns the changing rhythms of the show and evolves to anticipate future variations. As the micro-organisms persistently interact with each other, and with the contingent events taking place in the museum, their neural circuitry sets in motion a complex non-deterministic, non linear mise en scene. This alien brain in a vat becomes the living control center, the mastermind, of the exhibition. The bioreactor’s thought process is imperceptible to humans. We can only imagine what it intends to do.
—&nbsp;Zoe Stillpass, 2018

Philippe Parreno

Philippe Parreno: Rückblick auf eine zukünftige Ausstellung

Philippe Parreno: Looking back on a Future Exhibition

Veranstaltungen

2018

Programm

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.

Berliner Festspiele

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furtherInformation

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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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The exploration of myths and rituals shapes the fourth edition of the Performing Arts Season with works by Marina Abramović, Mario Banushi, Marie Chouinard, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker / Rosas, Ictus, Bl!ndman, Dumb Type, Damien Jalet / Kohei Nawa and Gisèle Vienne. The programme will be published on 18 June, and advance ticket sales will start.

Performing Arts Season

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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.