75 Years of the Berliner Festspiele

In the anniversary year Marina Abramović, one of the most influential performance artists to this day, will feature both at the Gropius Bau and in the Performing Arts Season at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele with her work Balkan Erotic Epic:

Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition can be seen at the Gropius Bau from April 2026. Based on the folklore of the Balkans – the region in which Abramović grew up – the artist interweaves filmic and sculptural installations with live performances. In these she explores eroticism as a bridge between life and death that connects the self with the cosmos.

In October 2026 the Performing Arts Season presents Balkan Erotic Epic. The Stage Version at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Based on her eponymous video work from 2005, Abramović creates a powerful new stage work about female energy, shame, desire and the relationship between the body and history.

The Berliner Festspiele are a cultural institution closely connected with the changing history of Berlin and the partition of Europe. But what marks out the present state of the world? What are the political, social and cultural consequences derived from a global order that is increasingly shaped by wars, imperial power grabs and multipolar lines of conflict? The four-day focus Reflexes & Reflections Die große Unordnung (The Great Disorder) will examine the effects of these developments on liberal democracies and international co-operation. 

Opening with Le Grand Macabre by György Ligeti on 28 August 2026 in co-operation with the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation, this year’s Musikfest Berlin revolves entirely around the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele. Ligeti’s only opera is a profoundly dark parable of war and the end of the world, but ultimately humour gains the upper hand and helps to overcome the fear of death. György Ligeti’s music was repeatedly performed at the Berliner Festwochen, and later at the Musikfest Berlin from the 1960s onwards: “My home is actually Berlin, as strange as that may sound. […] The city has become highly interesting through its proximity between West and East”, the composer remarked in 2003. 

The exceptional work Tutuguri by the young Wolfgang Rihm, Hans Werner Henze’s Tristan and a concert performance of the opera Porgy and Bess are among the highlights already published of a programme that marks the anniversary.  

For the 75th anniversary, Japanese artist Akira Takayama invites the audience of the Berliner Festspiele to take a trip on Berlin’s Ringbahn. On four weekends he will organise “guided tours” of the 27 S-Bahn stations on the Ring, which he proposes to makeover by realising a site-specific artistic project at each one. However, the ideas for these projects are not new, but have been found in the drawers of the Berliner Festwochen, the Berliner Festspiele, other Berlin cultural institutions and artists. Unrealised projects from the past will be presented on the Ringbahn by experienced tour guides – and thereby transposed to the present by Takayama, highlighting Berlin’s visible and invisible, old and new borders. At the end he will ask us which of the projects we actually want to see realised in the future – for the next Berlin, our New Berlin.