BERLIN.- The exhibition It’s Just a Matter of Time at Deutsche Bank’s PalaisPopulaire in Berlin will take visitors on a journey through time from April 10 to August 18, 2025. Featuring around 30 artistic positions, curators Liberty Adrien and Carina Bukuts—also curators at Portikus in Frankfurt—explore overlapping traces of time, memory, and history. These themes are associatively connected to the historic setting of the PalaisPopulaire and the building’s eventful past, along with the institutions and ideologies it has represented since its construction in 1730. From royal residence to museum, war ruin, legendary opera café, and now a contemporary cultural center, the building offers numerous starting points: “Every room, every crack in the façade, every surrounding street tells of the people who lived and worked here,” say Liberty Adrien and Carina Bukuts. The exhibition does not claim to depict or comprehensively represent history. Rather, it seeks to trace the past like an echo.
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It’s Just a Matter of Time presents works from the Deutsche Bank Collection alongside international loans by renowned artists such as Kai Althoff, Max Beckmann, Ayşe Erkmen, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Shilpa Gupta, Petrit Halilaj, Rosemarie Trockel, Rachel Whiteread, and Kandis Williams among others, spanning the period from 1946 to the present day.
Max Beckmann’s lithograph King and Demagogue (König und Demagoge, 1946), an early work in the Deutsche Bank Collection, confronts the consequences of fascism with striking intensity. Shilpa Gupta’s expansive installation For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2023)—comprising four bookshelves filled with golden metal book spines—commemorates persecuted and murdered authors, subtly evoking the book burnings carried out by the National Socialists at nearby Bebelplatz.
The 1980s, the period surrounding German reunification, resonate in various ways: in Manfred Paul’s portrait of the opera café regular Danny, in Cornelia Schleime’s photographic self-staging Auf weitere gute Zusammenarbeit, created in 1993 based on her Stasi files. Additionally, Parisian artist Georges Tony Stoll addresses the AIDS crisis, which also had a profound impact on Berlin in the 1990s. Works such as the recent installation by German-American artist Julia Phillips similarly speak of loss, change, and absence.
This exhibition invites visitors to perceive the history of the PalaisPopulaire’s location as a multi-layered echo. “Our commitment to art is centered on making not only important voices heard, but also forgotten or suppressed ones, especially in light of the current threats to democracies worldwide,” says Britta Färber, Head of Art and Culture at Deutsche Bank.
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