Radical Playgrounds was an art parcours that took place in front of Gropius Bau in spring and summer 2024. As part of the reopening of BAUBAU – a Playspace for Kids at Gropius Bau – contributors to the resulting digital publication discuss the political dimensions of play in the city.

The Radical Playbook will be accessible for free on the website of Berliner Festspiele from 19 March 2025.

Radical Playgrounds used playground elements – be it a swing, a water fountain, a carousel or a labyrinth – to reveal what is left unspoken: histories of inclusion and exclusion, engaging activism through the medium of play or the dark past buried under the parking lot of Gropius Bau. A number of contributors to the resulting digital publication discuss the political agency of play, its healing potential, the history of playgrounds as well as what happens where more is allowed than forbidden.

With Jenny Schlenzka, Director Gropius Bau, Joanna Warsza and Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, curators Radical Playgrounds, Lan Linh Merli-Nguyen Hoai, assistant Curator Radical Playgrounds, Jonas Tinius, contributor Radical Playbook

Engaging with desire and alienation, artist and choreographer Alex Baczyński-Jenkins presents his new work Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin), developed for the atrium of Gropius Bau. In his practice, he approaches choreography as a way of reflecting on themes of feeling, perception and collectivity, while indulging in other ways of experiencing memory, time and change. 

As part of the first Long Evening and the public programme for the exhibition DAS GLÜCK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG by Rirkrit Tiravanija, artist Luiza Prado De O. Martins will present The Kitchen Network. The cooking show delves into the politics of food as entertainment, as we increasingly consume food through content on screens. Unfolding as an episode in the last reality TV food competition on earth, the performance uses humour to examine the divide between online food cultures and their disconnection to wider issues of class, gender and geography. 

As part of the public programme accompanying the exhibition DAS GLÜCK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG by Rirkrit Tiravanija, the Gropius Bau invites you to a monthly series of Long Evenings. In addition to the cooking show, there will be a book presentation with Josephine Apraku, Eric Otieno Sumba, Sharonda Quainoo and Nadine Nzambisa Ngolo, a film screening by Rirkrit Tiravanija, a DJ set with Ayzon and a performance by Petra Hermanova taking place on the same evening.

From avocado toast to baked feta pasta, our relationship with food is increasingly shaped by social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Hashtags such as #TikTokFood and #Foodtok have gained billions of views, sparking surges of interest in certain ingredients and causing long queues at restaurants. As we consume food content on screens – whether through reality TV shows or viral trends – the realities of food production and its environmental impact have been hidden under digital layers of gold-leaf everything; long, melty strands of cheese, and dramatic reality TV storylines. With soaring energy and food costs, labour shortages, the cost-of-living crisis and ongoing supply chain issues, we eat with our eyes and ears. Food as entertainment is a geopolitical issue, masked and filtered through phone lenses to perform wealth, virtue, goodness, practicality, ease and skill.
 

Luiza Prado De O. Martins is an artist, writer and researcher. Their work moves between installation, sculpture, video and food, using performance and ritual as a way of invitation and activation for audiences. Their practice often explores anticolonial strategies in relations and knowledge between nourishment, herbal reproductive medicine, infrastructures and technology and questions what structures and processes are needed for collective concerns of care.

During the event, photographs and video recordings may be made in which you may be recognisable. By attending, you consent to these recordings being used to communicate the event or exhibition.
 

The demo station by Rirkrit Tiravanija is a stage-like sculpture that invites people to “demonstrate” something. Tiravanija plays with the different meanings of the term “demonstration” as both a political protest and a presentation of someone’s talent or hobby. For the duration of the exhibition, the demo station provides a space for daily public performances.

The demo station is activated daily (except on the closing day on Tuesday) between 15:00 and 17:00 with various events. From DJ sets and concerts to workshops and readings, the varied programme invites you to watch, listen or participate. The demo station is located in the atrium of the Gropius Bau, the events are free of charge and accessible without a ticket to the exhibition.

During the event, photographs and video recordings may be made in which you may be recognisable. By attending, you consent to these recordings being used to communicate the event or exhibition.

Queer Ping Pong is coming to the Gropius Bau: combining table tennis with queer club culture, the participatory project creates a social space that overcomes the supposed contradiction between play and discourse. Accompanied by DJ sets, newcomers, pros, artists and children can come together in a playful way in the Gropius Bau. As part of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s solo exhibition, eight table tennis tables are set up in the atrium – free of charge and accessible to all. Rackets and balls are provided so that everyone can play.

This guided tour is part of the BerlinArt Week tour programme and invites you to explore the festival centre BAW Garten and the Gropius Bau.

Guided by: Olga Lang

Meetingpoint: Gropius Bau, Außenbereich, BAW Garten

Duration: 90 minutes

10€; tickets exclusively via Berlin Art Week

Rediscovering the Gropius Bau and its architecture: this architectural tour invites you to holistically explore the building – the focus is put on structures, surfaces and ornamentation as well as the turbulent history of destruction, reconstruction and a divided Germany.

On three Fridays in August, the Gropius Bau invites you to round off the day on Beba’s summer terrace with DJ sets by Castro and Nemo from Sound Metaphors. From 18:00 to 21:00, the DJ sets celebrate the Berlin summer in a relaxed atmosphere. The evenings are accompanied by fresh herbal cocktails and delicious street food from the kitchen of Restaurant Beba.

Public space is also a relation between strangers. A place that not only unites, but also reveals what divides us. City playgrounds are particularly significant public realms because it is here that the tension between rules and freedom, the familiar and the unknown, borders and transgression, the present and the future, risk and security are constantly negotiated.

Curated by Joanna Warsza and Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius
Architecture: raumlaborberlin

With How Love Moves, the Gropius Bau presents the first major institutional solo exhibition of Pallavi Paul. As an artist and film scholar, Paul engages the camera as her primary tool to interrogate how regimes of “truth” are produced and sustained in public life. Through her multimedia practice encompassing film, installation, performance, drawing, photography and writing, she negotiates the documentary not only conjured as film or image – but as an ecology of materials, a network of alliances, a system of thought and a site of sensation.

Over the course of five decades, Nancy Holt explored how we perceive our environment and how we attempt to understand our place on the surface of this planet. From March 2024, the Gropius Bau presents Circles of Light (AT), the artist’s most comprehensive survey exhibition in Germany to date. It includes film, video, photography, sound works, concrete poetry, sculptures and expansive installations as well as drawings and documentation from over 25 years.

Beginning 11 November 2023, the Gropius Bau presents her0, a presentation by visual artist Selma Selman. At its core lies the development of her performance Motherboards (2023–ongoing), in which Selman and members of her family dismantle electronic waste. Challenging oversimplified and racialised narratives, the performance offers palpable insights into dynamics of power around the notion of sustainability. 

In 2023 Ayumi Paul will further activate The Singing Project – following the cycle of the moon – through open workshops around the year’s changes of seasons.

Challenging both the art world and society at large, General Idea remain a lastingly influential artist group whose groundbreaking practice spans 25 years. In the most comprehensive retrospective on the trio ever produced, the Gropius Bau presents more than 200 works from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.

Apis Gropius (2022) is an augmented reality experience by Ana Prvački. Inspired by the botanical motifs embedded in the Gropius Bau’s architecture, the artist invented a new species of bees, Apis Gropius, which leads visitors on an immersive tour through the atrium.

Soundshapes – In Between Frequencies activates the two entrances of the Gropius Bau with sound works by Kapwani Kiwanga and Janine Jembere. Drawing from the potential of porosity, this architectural intervention challenges the monumentality and statics of the building in an attempt to destabilise the divide between interior and exterior. Soundshapes – In Between Frequencies is conceived and curated by Julia Grosse and Carolin Köchling.

Taking place both online and offline, the Gropius Bau’s first programme on artificial intelligence (AI) focuses on AI’s utopian and poetic possibilities. From June 2023, the first part of the programme, Ether’s Bloom, kicks off a sequence of new projects including a Writer in Residence, artistic explorations, a podcast, lectures and conversations. The development of an app with a special focus on education and accessibility forms the programme’s second part.

Mangrove Sunset is a six-hour composition of sound, language, and fading light inspired by poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, taking place free of charge as part of the exhibition Daniel Boyd: RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION).

Date: Saturday, 29.4.2023: 18:00-23:55

On 29.04. the exhibitions in the Gropius Bau will remain open until 18:00. With the beginning of the event, the exhibitions are closed. However, the house will remain open for the event.

Taking the stories and histories of the Indian Ocean as its departure point, the group exhibition Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora investigates the links between the continents of Africa and Asia.

Rainbow Serpent (Version) is the most comprehensive exhibition of Daniel Boyd’s artistic practice in Europe to date. It provides an overview of Boyd’s image-making that counters the colonial narrative of Australia’s history, engages transnational networks of resistance, Indigenous knowledge production and personal family histories, which he reflects in relation to the context and architecture of the Gropius Bau.

The Singing Project ist eine kollektive Praxis und singende Skulptur von Ayumi Paul, Artist in Residence 2022 des Gropius Bau. Das Projekt setzt sich in diesem Jahr durch eine Reihe offener Workshops und Praxisnotizen, die im frei zugänglichen Bereich des Ausstellungshauses installiert werden, fort. Der erste Workshop im März steht in Resonanz zum Frühlingsbeginn.

Of Whales is derived from Wu Tsang’s multidisciplinary research around Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick (1851). In the atrium of the Gropius Bau, surreal ocean environments are dynamically regenerated in real time by a virtual reality game engine. A 16-channel score blends horns, saxophone, clarinet and contrabass, unleashing a soundscape that fills the entire space and invites viewers to states of natural flux.

Featuring the diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives of 26 artists, Yoyi! Care, Repair, Heal addresses issues such as the politics of health, the resilience of Indigenous knowledge systems, forms of kinship, fair land use and its distribution, decoloniality and the rights of the non-human, all entangled with various concepts of care, repair and healing.

The Woven Child is the first major survey to focus exclusively on Louise Bourgeois’ fabric-based works. The exhibition charts the artists’ lifelong connection to textiles, and the memories they conjure, through a diverse body of sculptures, installations, drawings, collages, books and prints.

Takeover invites children to take on the role of curators. Featuring works by international artists, the exhibition curated and realised by Berlin primary school students is now on view on the ground floor of the Gropius Bau.

Since the 1980s, Dayanita Singh has pioneered a genre-defying approach to photography that pushes the limits of the medium. Dancing with my Camera presents the major phases of the internationally renowned artist’s oeuvre, from her earliest works through today. Along with key past works, including her “museums”, the new project, Let’s See, is especially realised for the Gropius Bau exhibition.

Zanele Muholi self-identifies as a visual activist and has been documenting the life of Black LGBTQIA+ communities since the early 2000s in intimate and powerful photographs across South Africa and beyond. From 26 November 2021 to 13 March 2022, the Gropius Bau will host Muholi’s first major survey in Germany.

The video installation A Continual Cry explores liveness in the absence of the performer’s live presence. Programmed so as not to repeat, the video is a jarring, fragmented work, ever unfolding in the here and now.

From October 2021, a site-specific installation by artist Emeka Ogboh occupies the Gropius Bau’s vast atrium, which is freely accessible without an entry price, welcoming all visitors to the very center of the building.

"Painting Space" brings together a variety of contemporary artists exploring the materiality of painting and its relationship with space. Existing works sit alongside new commissions created especially for this show, inviting visitors to experience painting both visually and physically.

Thea Djordjadze’s artistic practice can be understood as a process of continually reusing, reconfiguring and rearranging objects. Starting on 10 September 2020, the Gropius Bau presents existing and newly created works by the Berlin-based artist, whose sculptures and interventions engage in a dialogue with the historic building.

In the year marking the 30th anniversary of German reunification, the Gropius Bau will host a group exhibition uniting paintings created during the Cold War in both centres of global political power, including works by Andy Warhol, Il’ja Kabakov, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler and Erik Bulatov.

As In House: Artist in Residence 2020, the artist and theoretician Zheng Bo embarked on the question of how plants practice politics. In 2021, his exhibition "Wanwu Council 萬物社" will expand upon themes that Zheng Bo worked on during his one-year residency at the Gropius Bau.

At the heart of Hella Jongerius’s artistic practice is the connection between industry and craft as well as traditional knowledge and technology. In spring 2021, the Gropius Bau will present a solo exhibition devoted to the artist and designer that will continue to develop over the course of time.

Yayoi Kusama is one of the world’s most important contemporary artists. In March 2021, the Gropius Bau will devote the first comprehensive retrospective in Germany to Kusama’s work. Presented across almost 3000 m², the exhibition will offer an overview of the key periods in her oeuvre, which spans more than 70 years, and feature a number of current works as well as a newly realised Infinity Mirror Room.

Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility revisits a dazzling yet disconcerting chapter in Beirut’s modern history bookended by the late 1950s and the late 1970s, corresponding to the Lebanon crisis of 1958 and the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. The exhibition traces the complicated relationship between Beirut’s artistic cosmopolitanism and the surrounding trans-regional and political antagonisms.