BERLIN.- Hamburger Bahnhof presents the Berlin-based artist Annika Kahrs with the most extensive selection of her works to date at the intersection of art and music. Kahrs explores the cultural and social functions of music: in an abandoned church in Lyon, during the parade of an intergenerational orchestra in an Italian village, or in Berlin department stores. The video “A Cashier’s Opera” (2025), created for the exhibition, the sound installations “My Favorite Music” (2020) in the historical passageways, and the live performance “For Two To Play On One” (2012) in the Forum Hamburger Bahnhof create resonant spaces that repeatedly surprise visitors as they move through the museum. More than ten video works, sound installations, and performances from 15 years are presented at Hamburger Bahnhof, the Musikinstrumenten-Museum, and in a projection at Ku’damm Eck in public space. From February to April 2026, a performance programme will take place as part of the exhibition.

“Annika Kahrs. OFF SCORE” at Hamburger Bahnhof presents films that address the structural transformation of once-active sites: “Le Chant des Maisons” (2022) traces, with professional and amateur musicians as well as craftspeople, the history of the deconsecrated church Saint-Bernard in Lyon; “La Banda” (2024) accompanies the parade of an intergenerational orchestra in the Italian village Olevano Romano; and the film “A Cashier’s Opera” (2025), created for the exhibition, makes four Berlin department stores audible as places whose repurposing is imminent. As visitors move through the historical passageways from the East and West Wings to the main building, they encounter Kahrs’s two-part sound installation “My Favorite Music” (2020). This work thematizes the use of classical music in train stations to drive away or deter allegedly unwanted people. Passing the entrance area and bookshop, visitors hear piano music from the performance “For Two To Play On One” (2012), which they can finally locate in a separate room behind the museum’s Forum, behind a closed door.

The art of Annika Kahrs (born 1984) questions traditional listening habits, breaks with expectations, and provokes new perspectives. Kahrs often develops her works in collaboration with professional and amateur musicians as well as actors from various social spheres. Her works frequently take shape in architecturally and historically charged spaces—former churches, train stations, department stores, or warehouses that are not mere backdrops but active participants. As places of transition, they become resonant spaces where history, memory, and the present intersect. Music renders these fleeting processes audible and tangible for viewers and reveals the social and political dimensions of a space. The film “La Banda” (2024), for example, documents the parade of an intergenerational orchestra through the small Italian village Olevano Romano. Here, Kahrs is less interested in musical perfection than in the moment of togetherness and social interaction in public space.

In “Le Chant des Maisons” (2022), created for the Biennale in Lyon, professional and amateur musicians and craftspeople perform in the deconsecrated church Saint Bernard. While musicians use historical organ and loom punch cards as notations, carpenters construct a wooden structure in the middle of the sacred space. Voices, tools, wind instruments, organ pipes and the room’s resonance merge into a dense soundscape. The church itself, with its history of social struggles by Lyon’s silk weavers, becomes the protagonist of the artwork.

In her work “A Cashier’s Opera” (2025), created for the exhibition, four Berlin department stores and shopping centers—the Galeria am Alexanderplatz, the Mall of Berlin in Mitte, and two in the Ring Center in Lichtenberg—become stages for musical and performative interventions. Together with the Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, a youth choir, an opera singer, a DJ, and employees of the department stores, a dialogue emerges about the history and transformation of these places. The department store, once an urban hub and social meeting point, appears as a fragile structure between consumption and community.

The two-part sound installation “My Favorite Music” (2020) in the museum’s two historic passageways deals with classical music that has been played since 2001 at Hamburg Central Station to drive away homeless and drug-dependent people. In the first part, located in the eastern passage, Kahrs incorporates the music of the station together with its ambient noises, contrasting it in the opposite western passage with interviews of street newspaper vendors talking about their musical preferences. The sound installation finds a particularly fitting setting in the transitional spaces leading to the museum´s historical hall—the former railway station once connecting Hamburg and Berlin.

With “For Two To Play On One” (2012), Kahrs creates an intimate performance in which the audience becomes part of the work itself. From a separate room in the museum’s Forum, hidden piano sounds can be heard. As soon as a person enters the room where two pianists are seated, the playing ceases. The two musicians look silently at the visitor. Only after the person leaves the room, the piece continues. The performance creates an unusual, intimate moment and subverts the traditional relationship between performer and spectator.

The exhibition presents Kahrs’s works within a network that connects Berlin museums and urban space. Thus, beginning on 19 February 2026, the Musikinstrumenten-Museum will show the film “Ganz ungültig, nur ein Versuch" (2024), in which the "Nullte," the invalid symphony of Austrian composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896), becomes the starting point for a collective reinterpretation. On the large LED screen at Kurfurstendamm, the so-called Ku’damm Eck, the film “how to live in the echo of other places” (2022/25) will be shown hourly from Thursday, 13 November 2026, between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. It connects a digital sunset with texts of memories of sunsets by artist friends in English, German and Turkish. The roughly two- to five-minute films invite viewers to pause amid the bustling Kurfürstendamm.

From February to April 2026, as part of the exhibition, a performance programme will take place at the Musikinstrumenten-Museum, the Berliner Medizinhistorischen Museum, and the Heilige-Geist-Kirche. The programme “Hamburger Bahnhof On Tour”, marking the museum’s 30th anniversary, emphasizes exchange and networking with other Berlin museums and cultural actors in the city.

The exhibition is curated by Ingrid Buschmann, Curator, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.