BERLIN.- Gropius Bau announced the 2026 programme, featuring a multifaceted live programme and exhibitions by Marina Abramović, Peter Hujar and Liz Deschenes, Christoph Schlingensief, Gabriele Stötzer and many other artists who cast an uncompromising gaze on society.

Leila Hekmat: Roses Rising—The Movement
March 6 and 7, 2026

How does the bourgeois longing for revolt take shape, when the faith in progress and reason is unsettled? And how tightly entwined are self-interest and radical dissent? Berlin-based artist and director Leila Hekmat explores these questions in her newly commissioned performance Roses Rising—The Movement. 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.

Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision
March 19 to June 28, 2026

Bringing together the works of Peter Hujar and Liz Deschenes, Persistence of Vision opens an intergenerational dialogue on photography. 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, Hujar’s photographs are interspersed with contemporary works by New York City-based artist Liz Deschenes. These interludes invite viewers to pause and explore the uncompromising clarity of vision that defines both artists’ practices.

Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition
April 15 to August 23, 2026

One of the most influential performance artists, Marina Abramović presents Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition at Gropius Bau. 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. It highlights the artist’s performances not merely as acts of personal endurance, but as imagined rituals that reposition the erotic body as carrier of spiritual, political and ecological meaning.

Gabriele Stötzer: Dabei sein und nicht schweigen
June 19 to December 6, 2026

For more than five decades, Gabriele Stötzer has been grappling with questions of justice, gender and self-determination. Her own body often plays a central role in her work—not as an object, but as a site of resistance and feminist self-assertion. As Stötzer’s largest institutional solo exhibition to date, Dabei sein und nicht schweigen highlights the diversity of her œuvre—encompassing painting, literature, photography, textile art, Super 8 film, performance and public interventions—and intends to catalyse the long-overdue broader recognition of this groundbreaking artist.

Kreuzberg (working title)
September 10, 2026 to January 17, 2027

Nowhere were the social and cultural changes of 1960s and 1970s West Germany more powerfully manifest than in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood. Here, the broader transformations reshaping life in the Federal Republic through labour recruitment agreements with countries including Italy, Greece, and Turkey became visible at the local scale. Featuring both historical and contemporary works by artists including Vlassis Caniaris, Azade Köker, Nuray Demir and Monika Sieveking, the group exhibition Kreuzberg (working title) focuses on the diverse and largely overlooked cultural production on the topic of labour migration and on how artists in the neighbourhood have responded to the tensions and issues of their time.

Christoph Schlingensief: ES IST NICHT MEHR MEIN PROBLEM, MACHT EURE SCHEISSE ALLEINE (working title) 
October 9, 2026 to January 17, 2027

Over the course of his artistic career, Christoph Schlingensief relentlessly confronted the absurdities of the present. In autumn 2026, Gropius Bau presents his visionary work with ES IST NICHT MEHR MEIN PROBLEM, MACHT EURE SCHEISSE ALLEINE (working title), an exhibition that spans the range of his œuvre from sensational political actions to radical stage productions and the coalescence of performance and visual art. The exhibition is not a retrospective in the classic sense of the word; instead, it brings Schlingensief’s central bodies of work into conversation, highlighting the ways in which his artistic strategies permeated one another and constantly challenged audiences to take active positions.

Spätschicht—Live Programme at Gropius Bau

Spätschicht is a monthly series of free events with an interdisciplinary programme ranging from talks, book discussions and film screenings to concerts and DJ sets. Each edition of the event series is co-curated with an institution, collective or artist. Sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, experimental and always open to clashing—a space to discover new things and shift perspectives.

January 8, 2026 Spätschicht x Schwules Museum
March 26, 2026 Spätschicht x C/O Berlin
Further editions on June 4, July 2, August 6 and October 1, 2026

BAUBAU—A Play Space for Kids

With colourful wallpapers, dinosaurs, fantastical beings and abstract elements, artist Kerstin Brätsch has created a free play space for kids: BAUBAU. As a permanent part of Gropius Bau, it invites children to play, laugh, make noise or simply do nothing—because here, more is allowed than forbidden. In this way, BAUBAU playfully questions the nature of a museum or art institution.