BERLIN.- Gorki Past Forward: With the 2026/27 season, Çağla Ilk begins her artistic direction of the Maxim Gorki Theater unfolding a program that claims the spaces between stage and exhibition, drama and visual art, the local and the international as its central terrain.
Guided by an understanding of theater as a living organism—shaped by people, voices, crafts, spaces, memories, and aspirations—the invited artists and performers form the nucleus of a new ensemble that will continue to evolve organically alongside the program.
The new Gorki is conceived as an open house: open from midday until the final performance, welcoming artists and audiences, neighbors and newcomers, unexpected encounters, collective experiences, and new forms of participation. It begins not from a closed concept, but from a threshold: a place where disciplines, publics, histories, and futures meet. As Gramsci reminds us: art is the advance worker of freedom.
The season opens on September 4, 2026, with a major installation by conceptual artist Sarkis, who transforms the Gorki’s stage and audience space into a composition that brings together objects from Tadeusz Kantor’s theatrical universe with the luminous, chromatic power of his own conceptual spaces. In cooperation with the Kantor Museum Cricoteka Kraków, the opening project understands theater, object, image, memory, and trauma as inseparable.
Nicole L’Huillier explores the sonic surface of the building itself with Membrane, turning architecture into a resonating body. Marco Fusinato puts Heinrich von Kleist under pressure with the force of durational noise, image, and intensity in IN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT: Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. Ulrike Ottinger returns to the Berlin stage with the premiere of her adaptation of Leonora Carrington’s feminist adventure novel The Hearing Trumpet. With Le Sacre du printemps, Göksu Kunak continues her ongoing exploration of body, ritual, and control under the conditions of modernity. Sebastian Baumgarten, together with Viron Erol Vert and Nikola Bojić, uses Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter to transform theater into a time capsule. The Gorki becomes the new artistic home of Constanza Macras and Dorky Park. In cooperation with Performa New York, the theater presents Yvonne Rainer’s HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees? in Berlin.
Further artistic positions open intimate, political, and social spaces throughout the season. Theda Nilsson-Eicke radically tests the limits of space and time. Tamer Yiğit brings to the stage a Berlin reality that is often talked about but rarely truly heard. Leila Hekmat combines opera, performance, glamour, and society’s undercurrents. Marie Schleef directs Hiroshima mon amour by Marguerite Duras. Tom Schneider, Sandra Hüller (Farn Collective) bring together acting, collective authorship, and new theatrical forms. Meg Stuart’s work moves fluidly between dance, performance, and social spaces. Yael Bartana engages questions of ritual, nationhood, and memory. Wu Tsang and Moved by the Motion transform a classical subject into a world of movement, poetry, virtual reality, and music. Robert Lippok develops a new commissioned work in dialogue with the Gorki archive, while Ayham Majid Agha approaches Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
At the Kronprinzenpalais, Udo Kittelmann and Çağla Ilk develop UNSPEAKABLE Sittenausstellung at its historical site of origin, ninety years after the Nazi exhibition Degenerate Art. The exhibition examines the conditions under which artistic freedom becomes visible, vulnerable, and urgent.
The Palais am Festungsgraben serves as a venue for extending the artistic possibilities of the house. Its Marble Hall will host performances, conversations, and gatherings. The Studio is envisioned as a link to new communities with a listening bar. With Luca Cerizza, Wolfgang Kaleck, Imran Ayata, Mohammad Salemy, Manuela Bojadžijev, Kyle Van Horn and further curators and dramaturgs at large, the Gorki becomes a place where art and public thinking do not merely complement one another, but challenge each other.
The new Gorki begins on a construction site. That is a fitting image. This house is not finished, and it should not be finished. It should change, open itself, contradict, listen, speak, play, fail, and begin again. It attempts to adopt Berlin’s structure: global, post-disciplinary, open, multilingual, conflictual, exhausted, angry, alive. “Gorki” and “Berlin” are plural words: one speaks them in the singular while meaning a multitude.
