order of appearance
Sarkis
Tadeusz Kantor
Marco Fusinato
Nicole L’Huillier
Ulrike Ottinger
Yvonne Rainer
Luca Cerizza
Constanza Macras
Mohammad Salemy
Göksu Kunak
Sebastian Baumgarten
Udo Kittelmann
Theda Nilsson-Eicke
Leila Hekmat
Tamer Yiğit
Robert Lippok
Marie Schleef
Sandra Hüller
Tom Schneider
Nikola Bojić
Meg Stuart
Wu Tsang
Yael Bartana
Imran Ayata
Wolfgang Kaleck
Mit der Spielzeit 2026/2027 beginnt am Maxim Gorki Theater eine neue Intendanz. Çağla Ilk, die das Haus seit vielen Jahren von innen kennt, präsentiert das Gorki als offenen, transdisziplinären Ort zwischen Theater, zeitgenössischer Kunst, Performance, Tanz, Musik, Sound, Diskurs und Stadt.
Das Gorki war immer ein Ort, an dem zentrale Fragen der Gegenwart formuliert wurden: Wer spricht? Wer wird gehört? Wer bekommt Raum? Es hat Sichtbarkeit geschaffen, Erzählungen verschoben und neue Stimmen ins Zentrum gebracht. Daran knüpft das neue Gorki an.
Das neue Gorki soll ein Haus werden, das nicht zwischen Bühne und Ausstellung, zwischen Schauspiel und Bildender Kunst, zwischen lokal und international trennt, sondern genau an diesen Schwellen arbeitet.
Am Anfang der neuen Intendanz steht deshalb kein abgeschlossenes Konzept. Sie beginnt mit der Erfahrung, dass ein Theater ein lebendiger Organismus ist: aus Menschen, Stimmen, Gewerken, Räumen, Erinnerungen und Zukunftsversprechen.
Die erste Spielzeit beginnt unter besonderen Bedingungen: mit Baustelle, Sparmaßnahmen und Einschränkungen. Theater entsteht selten aus perfekten Bedingungen. Es entsteht aus Notwendigkeit, Druck, Mangel und Begehren – und aus der Frage, wie trotzdem ein Raum geschaffen werden kann. Gerade deshalb soll das neue Gorki ein offenes Haus werden: offen von Mittag bis nachts, offen für Künstler:innen, Gäste, Nachbarschaften, neue Öffentlichkeiten und andere Formen der Begegnung.
The 2026/2027 season marks the start of the artistic direction at the Maxim Gorki Theater. Çağla Ilk, who has known the institution from within for many years, presents the Gorki as an open, transdisciplinary house connecting theater, contemporary art, performance, dance, music, sound, public discourse, and the city itself.
The Gorki has always been a place where central questions of the present are negotiated: Who speaks? Who is heard? Who is given space? Over the years, the theater has created visibility, shifted narratives, and brought new voices into focus. The new Gorki builds on this legacy.
The new Gorki aims to become a house that does not separate stage and exhibition, drama and visual art, the local and the international, but instead works precisely at these thresholds.
This new artistic direction does not start with a closed concept. It begins with the understanding that a theater is a living organism—shaped by people, voices, crafts, spaces, memories, and visions of the future.
The first season begins under special conditions: with a construction site, budget cuts, and space limitations. Theater rarely emerges from perfect circumstances. It emerges from necessity, pressure, scarcity, and desire—and from the question of how a space can still be created nonetheless. Precisely for this reason, the new Gorki is conceived as an open house: open from midday until the final performance, open to artists, guests, neighborhoods, new publics, and new forms of encounter.
Auftakt mit Sarkis und Tadeusz Kantor
Die Spielzeit beginnt mit einer Begegnung zwischen Sarkis und Tadeusz Kantor. Premiere: 4. September 2026 In Kooperation mit dem Kantor Museum Cricoteka Kraków verwandelt Sarkis den Bühnen- und Zuschauerraum des Gorki in eine Installation, die sich mit Kantors Welt auseinandersetzt. Kantor dachte Theater, Objekt, Bild, Erinnerung und Trauma nie getrennt. Seine Bühnenobjekte sind Träger von Geschichte. Sarkis, der seit den 1960er Jahren die Konzeptkunst entscheidend mitgeprägt hat und aus einer armenischen Erinnerungsgeschichte heraus arbeitet, lädt Kantor in sein eigenes Denken ein. Von Sarkis übernimmt das neue Gorki den Begriff der Einladung als künstlerische Form: eine Öffnung politischer, historischer und ästhetischer Räume.
Opening with Sarkis and Tadeusz Kantor
The season opens with an encounter between Sarkis and Tadeusz Kantor. Premiere: September 4, 2026 In cooperation with the Kantor Museum Cricoteka Kraków, Sarkis transforms the Gorki’s stage and auditorium into an installation engaging with Kantor’s world. Kantor never separated theater, object, image, memory, and trauma. His stage objects carried history within them.
Sarkis, who has profoundly shaped conceptual art since the 1960s and whose work is informed by Armenian histories of memory, invites Kantor into his artistic language. Following Sarkis, the new Gorki adopts the idea of invitation as an artistic form: an opening of political, historical, and aesthetic spaces.
Theater, Sound, Körper, Stadt
Parallel dazu beginnt Nicole L’Huillier mit Membrane eine Arbeit am Gebäude selbst. Premiere: 10. Oktober 2026 Architektur wird hier nicht als statischer Stein verstanden, sondern als Resonanzkörper. Fassade, Vorhänge und Oberflächen werden zu Membranen. Das Haus hört, nimmt Geräusche auf und gibt sie zurück. Die Stadt bleibt nicht draußen, sondern tritt akustisch in das Theater ein. So entsteht ein zentrales Bild für das neue Gorki: ein Haus, das nicht nur sendet, sondern empfängt.
Mit Marco Fusinato folgt In the Corpse of the Present – Prince Friedrich von Homburg nach Heinrich von Kleist. Premiere: 23. November 2026 Fusinato kommt aus Noise-Musik und bildender Kunst. Er arbeitet mit Klang, Bild, Dauer, Intensität und Überforderung. Kleists Prinz von Homburg wird bei ihm zu einer Figur der Gegenwart: zwischen Traum und Befehl, Staat und Eigenwillen, Gehorsam und Kontrollverlust. In einer Zeit, in der Vertrauen in Institutionen, Staaten und Bilder brüchig geworden ist, wird Kleist als anarchischer Geist im Gefängnis seiner Grenzen lesbar.
Im Dezember kehrt Ulrike Ottinger mit The Hearing Trumpet von Leonora Carrington auf die Berliner Bühne zurück. Premiere: 3. Dezember 2026 Die Geschichte einer 92-jährigen Frau, die in ein Altersheim kommt und dort eine Revolution beginnt, verbindet Surrealismus, feministische Imagination, Filmgeschichte und Theater. Sie fragt, wer überhört wird – und was geschieht, wenn gerade diese Stimmen beginnen, die Welt zu verändern.
Mit Göksu Kunak und Le Sacre du printemps setzt das Gorki die Frage nach Körper, Ritual, Rausch und Kontrolle fort. Premiere: 22. Januar 2027 Ausgehend von Stravinskys Skandalstück entsteht eine Arbeit über Opfer, Ekstase, Gemeinschaft und Gewalt. Im Zentrum steht nicht die Wiederholung eines historischen Mythos, sondern die Frage, wie Körper heute politisch markiert, diszipliniert, gefeiert oder geopfert werden.
Mit Time Shelter nach Georgi Gospodinov verwandeln Sebastian Baumgarten, Viron Erol Vert, Nikola Bojić und weitere Künstler:innen das Haus in eine Zeitkapsel. Premiere: 20. Februar 2027 2027 feiert das Gorki zugleich 200 Jahre Sing-Akademie und 75 Jahre Maxim Gorki Theater. Time Shelter fragt, warum Gesellschaften in die Vergangenheit zurückwollen, wenn die Gegenwart unerträglich wird. Es ist ein Stück über Demenz, Nostalgie, nationale Regression und die Möglichkeit, Zukunft zu denken, ohne Vergangenheit zu verleugnen.
Constanza Macras und Dorky Park finden im Gorki einen neuen Heimathafen. Premiere: 12. Dezember 2026 Damit öffnet das Repertoiretheater seine Struktur für Kompanie-Arbeit, Tanz, performative Formate und andere Produktionsweisen. Macras steht für ein Theater des Körpers, der Stadt, der sozialen Realität, der Überforderung und der Energie. Sie bringt Berlin nicht als Thema, sondern als Körper auf die Bühne.
Mit Yvonne Rainer und HELLZAPOPPIN: What about the bees? kommt in Kooperation mit Performa New York eine Künstlerin ans Gorki, die Tanz, Performance, Minimalismus, Feminismus und Kunstgeschichte radikal verändert hat. Ihre Arbeit fragt bis heute, was ein Körper auf einer Bühne tun kann – und was er verweigern darf.
Theater, Sound, Body, City
At the same time, Nicole L’Huillier begins Membrane, a work engaging with the building itself. Premiere: October 9, 2026 Architecture is understood not as static stone, but as a resonating body. Facades, curtains, and surfaces become membranes. The house listens, absorbs sounds, and gives them back. The city does not remain outside, but enters the theater acoustically. A central image for the new Gorki emerges: a house that not only broadcasts, but also receives.
This is followed by Marco Fusinato’s IN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT – Prince Friedrich von Homburg after Heinrich von Kleist. Premiere: October 23, 2026 Emerging from noise music and visual art, Fusinato works with sound, image, duration, intensity, and overload. Kleist’s Prince von Homburg becomes a figure of the present: suspended between dream and command, state and willfulness, obedience and loss of control. At a moment when trust in institutions, states, and images has become fragile, Kleist appears as an anarchic spirit trapped within his own limits.
In December, Ulrike Ottinger returns to the Berlin stage with The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. Premiere: December 3, 2026 The story of a ninety-two-year-old woman who enters a retirement home and begins a revolution combines Surrealism, feminist imagination, film history, and theater. It asks who remains unheard—and what happens when precisely those voices begin to change the world.
With Göksu Kunak and Le Sacre du printemps, the Gorki continues its exploration of body, ritual, ecstasy, and control. Premiere: January 2027 Beginning with Stravinsky’s scandalous work, a new performance emerges about sacrifice, violence, community, and ecstasy. At its center lies not the repetition of a historical myth, but the question of how bodies today are politically marked, disciplined, celebrated, or sacrificed.
With the adaptation of Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter, Sebastian Baumgarten, Viron Erol Vert, Nikola Bojić, and many others transform the theater into a time capsule. Premiere: February 2027 In 2027, the Gorki celebrates both two hundred years of the Singakademie and seventy-five years of the Maxim Gorki Theater. Time Shelter asks why societies retreat into the past when the present becomes unbearable. It is a work about dementia, nostalgia, national regression, and the possibility of imagining a future without denying the past.
Constanza Macras and Dorky Park Premiere: December 2026 will find a new artistic home at the Gorki. In doing so, the repertory theater opens itself to company structures, dance, performative formats, and alternative modes of production. Macras stands for a theater of the body, the city, social reality, excess, and energy. She brings Berlin onto the stage not as a theme, but as a body.
With Yvonne Rainer and HELLZAPOPPIN: What about the bees? Premiere: December 17, 2026, presented in cooperation with Performa New York, the Gorki welcomes an artist who radically transformed dance, performance, minimalism, feminism, and art history. Her work continues to ask what a body on stage can do— and what it may refuse to do.
Ein Haus, das sich räumlich erweitert
Das neue Gorki erweitert sich auch räumlich. Das Palais am Festungsgraben wird nicht bloß Erweiterungsfläche, sondern ein zweiter Denkraum. Der Marmorsaal wird zu einem Ort für Musik, Lectures, Lecture Performances, Gespräche und neue Formate. Das Studio wird als Brücke zu neuen Communities gedacht: Listening Bar, Dance Club, ein Raum, in dem Sound, Musik und Tanz neue Öffentlichkeiten einladen.
Das öffentliche Denken ist im Gorki nicht Begleitprogramm, sondern steht im Zentrum. Mit Luca Cerizza, Wolfgang Kaleck, Imran Ayata, Mohammad Salemy, Manuela Bojadžijev und weiteren Curators und Dramaturgs at Large entstehen Formate, in denen Recht, Erinnerung, Politik, Kunst, Migration, Öffentlichkeit und globale Gegenwart miteinander verbunden werden. Das Gorki soll ein Ort sein, an dem nicht nur gezeigt wird, sondern auch gestritten, gefragt, gedacht und widersprochen werden kann.
A Theater Expanding in Space
The new Gorki also adds new spaces to its existing location. The Palais am Festungsgraben becomes not merely an additional venue, but a second space for thought. The Marble Hall becomes a site for music, lectures and lecture performances, conversations, and new formats. The Studio is conceived as a bridge to new communities: listening bar, dance club—a space where sound, music, and dance invite new publics.
Public thinking is not an accompanying program at the Gorki, but central to its work. Together with Luca Cerizza, Wolfgang Kaleck, Imran Ayata, Mohammad Salemy, Manuela Bojadžijev, and further Curators and Dramaturgs at Large, a space for thought emerges connecting law, memory, politics, art, migration, public space, and global contemporaneity. The Gorki is conceived as a place not only for presentation, but also for debate, questioning, thinking, and contradiction.
Ausblick auf die zweite Hälfte
Weitere künstlerische Positionen der Spielzeit öffnen persönliche, politische und gesellschaftliche Räume: Theda Nilsson-Eicke Premiere: 19. März 2027 erzählt von Verlust, Erinnerung, Familie und einem Haus, das nicht mehr betreten werden kann. Tamer Yiğit Premiere: 14. Mai 2027 wendet sich der Jugendhaftanstalt Plötzensee zu und fragt nach Schuld, Herkunft, Gewalt, Männlichkeit, Stadt und der Möglichkeit eines anderen Blicks. Leila Hekmat Premiere: 09. April 2027 verbindet Oper, Performance, Glamour, Bühnenbild, Kostüm und gesellschaftliche Abgründe zu überbordenden, komischen, brutalen und zugleich präzisen Formen der Analyse.
Mit Marie Schleef und Hiroshima mon amour führt der Weg zu Marguerite Duras, zur Liebe im Schatten des Krieges und zur traumatisierten Sprache des 20. Jahrhunderts. Premiere: 29. Mai 2027 Schleef entwickelt aus Sprache, Körper, Raum, Sound und Bild eine unverwechselbare theatrale Form. Mit Tom Schneider und Sandra Hüller: Farn Kollektiv entsteht eine Arbeit über Schauspiel, kollektive Autorenschaft, Körper und neue theatrale Formen. Meg Stuart Premiere: 10. Juni 2027 bringt eine zentrale choreografische Position der Gegenwart ans Gorki: ein Denken des Körpers als offener, fragiler, politischer Ort.
Mit Yael Bartana entsteht eine neue Produktion zu Ritual, Nation, Erinnerung, Gemeinschaft und politischer Imagination. Wu Tsang und ihre Company Moved by Motion nehmen sich eines klassischen Stoffs an, spüren die poetischen und philosophischen Aspekte auf und verdichten sie zu einer phantastischen Welt aus Bewegung, Poesie, Virtual Reality und Musik. Robert Lippok entwickelt eine Auftragsarbeit im Dialog mit dem Gorki-Archiv und versteht Archiv nicht als abgeschlossene Vergangenheit, sondern als Klang, Speicher und bewegliches Material. Ayham Majid Agha öffnet einen Raum, in dem Theater, Installation, Exil, Erinnerung und Sprache ineinandergreifen.
Looking Ahead
Further artistic positions throughout the season open intimate, political, and social spaces. Theda Nilsson-Eicke Premiere: March 2027 explores loss, memory, family, and a house that can no longer be entered. Tamer Yiğit Premiere: May 2027 turns toward the juvenile detention center Plötzensee, asking questions about guilt, violence, masculinity, the city, and the possibility of another perspective. Leila Hekmat Premiere: April 2027 combines opera, performance, glamour, costume, and society’s darker undercurrents into excessive, comic, brutal, yet precise forms of analysis.
With Marie Schleef and Hiroshima mon amour, the season turns toward Marguerite Duras, toward love in the shadow of war, and toward the traumatized language of the twentieth century. Premiere: May 2027 Schleef develops a distinctive theatrical form from language, body, space, sound, and image. Together with Tom Schneider and Sandra Hüller, Farn Collective creates a work about acting, collective authorship, the body, and new theatrical forms. Meg Stuart Premiere: June 2027 brings to the Gorki one of the defining choreographic positions of the present: a way of thinking about the body as an open, fragile, political site.
Yael Bartana develops a new production engaging with ritual, nationhood, memory, community, and political imagination. Wu Tsang and her company Moved by Motion take on a classical subject, tracing its poetic and philosophical dimensions and transforming them into a fantastical world of movement, poetry, virtual reality, and music. Robert Lippok creates a commissioned work in dialogue with the Gorki archive, understanding the archive not as a closed past, but as sound, storage, and material set back into motion. Ayham Majid Agha opens a space in which theater, installation, exile, memory, and language intertwine.
UNSPEAKABLE Sittenausstellung im Kronprinzenpalais
Ein zentraler Bestandteil der neuen Programmatik ist die von Udo Kittelmann und Çağla Ilk entwickelte Ausstellung UNSPEAKABLE Sittenausstellung im Kronprinzenpalais. 2027 jährt sich die nationalsozialistische Ausstellung Entartete Kunst zum 90. Mal. Das Kronprinzenpalais ist ein historisch hoch aufgeladener Ort, an dem zahlreiche Werke der Moderne gezeigt wurden, bevor sie später diffamiert, entfernt oder zerstört wurden.
Im Herbst 1936 reiste Samuel Beckett durch Deutschland und hielt seine Eindrücke in Tagebuchaufzeichnungen fest. Darin schildert er seinen Besuch im Berliner Kronprinzenpalais, wo er auf eine Ausstellung traf, die bereits von der radikalen nationalsozialistischen Kulturpolitik „bereinigt“ worden war: Zahlreiche Werke der Moderne waren entfernt. In seinen German Diaries bezeichnete er die verbliebenen Bilder als „unspeakable Sittenausstellung“.
Die von Ilk und Kittelmann kuratierte Ausstellung versteht sich nicht als historische Rekonstruktion. Im Zentrum steht die Frage, wie Sichtbarkeit, Sagbarkeit und künstlerische Freiheit politisch hergestellt werden – und wie schnell sie wieder zerstört werden können. Gerade heute, in einer Zeit, in der autoritäre Kulturpolitiken weltweit erstarken, ist diese Frage nicht abgeschlossen. Kunstfreiheit ist keine Selbstverständlichkeit. Sie muss verteidigt, praktiziert und immer wieder neu hergestellt werden.
UNSPEAKABLE Sittenausstellung at the Kronprinzenpalais
A central component of the new artistic vision is the exhibition UNSPEAKABLE Sittenausstellung, developed by Udo Kittelmann and Çağla Ilk at the Kronprinzenpalais. In 2027, the Nazi’s Degenerate Art exhibition marks its ninetieth anniversary. The Kronprinzenpalais is a historically charged site where many works of modernism were once exhibited before later being defamed, removed, or destroyed.
In the autumn of 1936, Samuel Beckett travelled through Germany and recorded his impressions in diary entries. In them, he describes his visit to the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin, where he encountered an exhibition that had already been “purged” by radical National Socialist cultural policy: numerous modernist works had been removed. In his German Diaries, he referred to the remaining paintings as an “unspeakable Sittenausstellung.”
The exhibition is not conceived as a historical reconstruction. At its center lies the question of how visibility, speech, and artistic freedom are politically shaped—and how quickly they can be destroyed again. Especially today, at a time when authoritarian cultural politics are resurging globally, this question remains unresolved. Artistic freedom is not self-evident. It must continually be defended, practiced, and recreated.
Das neue Gorki als offenes Haus
Das neue Gorki soll kein Ort werden, der sich nur erklärt. Es soll ein Ort werden, der erfahrbar ist. Ein Haus, in dem man nicht nur eine Vorstellung besucht, sondern Zeit verbringt. Ein Haus, das nicht erst aufwacht, wenn abends der Vorhang aufgeht.
Das Programm geht von der Bühne aus, endet aber nicht auf ihr. Es bewegt sich durch Foyer, Marmorsaal, Studio, Palais, Kronprinzenpalais und Stadt. Berlin ist für das neue Gorki kein geschlossener nationaler Bezugsrahmen. Das neue Gorki will Berlin nicht abbilden, sondern seine Struktur aufnehmen: global, postdisziplinär, offen.
Oder, in der Kurzform: Das neue Gorki beginnt auf einer Baustelle. Und das ist ein gutes Bild. Dieses Haus ist nicht abgeschlossen. Es soll sich verändern, öffnen, widersprechen, hören, sprechen, spielen, scheitern und wieder beginnen.
Das Gorki bleibt der Ort für das Neue.
The New Gorki as an Open House
The new Gorki should not become a place that merely explains itself. It should become a place to be experienced—a house where one does not simply attend a performance, but spends time. A house that does not awaken only with the rising of the curtain in the evening.
The program begins on the stage, but does not end there. It moves through foyers, the Marmorsaal, the Studio, the Palais, the Kronprinzenpalais, and the city itself. For the new Gorki, Berlin is not a closed national frame of reference. Berlin is an international, post-migrant, conflict-ridden, exhausted, angry, multilingual city. “Gorki” and “Berlin” are plural words: one speaks them in the singular while meaning a multitude. The new Gorki does not seek to represent Berlin, but to adopt its structure: global, post-disciplinary, open.
Or, in short: the new Gorki begins on a construction site—and that is a fitting image. This house is not finished. It should continue to change, open itself, contradict, listen, speak, play, fail, and begin again.
The Gorki remains a place for the new.
Biografie Çağla Ilk
Çağla Ilk ist Kuratorin und designierte Intendantin des Maxim Gorki Theaters ab der Spielzeit 2026/27. In ihrer Arbeit verbindet sie Theater, Performance, Architektur, Sound und zeitgenössische Kunst zu einer transdisziplinären kuratorischen Praxis, die institutionelle Grenzen bewusst erweitert. Dabei entwickelt sie Formate, in denen sich Bühnen- und Ausstellungslogiken gegenseitig beeinflussen und neue vielschichtige Erfahrungsräume entstehen.
Geboren in Istanbul, studierte Ilk Architektur an der Technischen Universität Berlin sowie an der Mimar Sinan Universität in Istanbul. Mit ihrer postmigrantischen Plattform Büro Milk erarbeitete sie Performances im öffentlichen Raum unter anderem in Berlin, München und Istanbul und arbeitete wissenschaftlich im Forschungsprojekt Baukultur in der multiethnischen Stadt an der Universität Siegen. Von 2012 bis 2020 war Ilk u.a. als Dramaturgin und Kuratorin am Maxim Gorki Theater. Dort verantwortete sie zahlreiche spartenübergreifende Projekte und Festivals, die Theater mit bildender Kunst in einen transkulturellen Zusammenhang stellten. Besonders prägend war ihre Arbeit am Berliner Herbstsalon, der sich unter ihrer Mitgestaltung zu einem wichtigen Ort für interdisziplinäre künstlerische Positionen entwickelte.
Von 2020 bis 2025 leitete Çağla Ilk die Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, zunächst gemeinsam mit Misal Adnan Yıldız. Dort schärfte sie ihr Profil als Kuratorin an der Schnittstelle von Ausstellung und Performance weiter. Klang versteht Ilk dabei als gesellschaftliches und politisches Erfahrungsfeld.
International sichtbar wurde ihre Arbeit zuletzt als Kuratorin des Deutschen Pavillons der 60. Internationale Kunstausstellung – La Biennale di Venezia. Unter dem Titel Thresholds versammelte sie Arbeiten von Michael Akstaller, Yael Bartana, Robert Lippok, Nicole L’Huillier, Ersan Mondtag und Jan St. Werner. Das Projekt verstand den Pavillon als Schwellenraum, in dem Architektur und politische Gegenwart ineinander übergingen.
Mit ihrer Rückkehr an das Maxim Gorki Theater bringt Çağla Ilk eine international geprägte Perspektive mit, die Theater als offenen Begegnungsraum zwischen Kunstformen und gesellschaftlichen Fragestellungen versteht.
Biography Çağla Ilk
Çağla Ilk is a curator and the incoming Artistic Director of the Maxim Gorki Theater beginning with the 2026/27 season. Her work interweaves theater, performance, architecture, sound, and contemporary art within a transdisciplinary curatorial practice that deliberately expands institutional boundaries. She creates formats in which the logics of theatrical and exhibition practices inform one another and generate new forms of multilayered collective experience.
Born in Istanbul, Ilk studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin and at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. With her postmigrant platform Büro Milk, she developed performances in public space in cities including Berlin, Munich, and Istanbul. At the same time, she worked as a researcher on the project Building Culture in the Multi-Ethnic City at the University of Siegen.
From 2012 to 2020, Ilk worked as a dramaturge and curator at the Maxim Gorki Theater, where she initiated numerous interdisciplinary projects and festivals connecting theater with contemporary visual art in transcultural contexts. A defining aspect of this period was her work on the Berliner Herbstsalon, which evolved under her co-curation into a major platform for interdisciplinary artistic practices.
From 2020 to 2025, Ilk served as director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, initially together with Misal Adnan Yıldız. There, she further developed her curatorial approach at the intersection of exhibition-making, performance, and sound. For Ilk, sound is not merely an aesthetic element, but a social and political field of experience.
Her work gained international visibility through her role as curator of the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Under the title Thresholds, she brought together works by Michael Akstaller, Yael Bartana, Robert Lippok, Nicole L‘Huillier, Ersan Mondtag, and Jan St. Werner. Conceived as a threshold space, the pavilion explored the intersections of architecture, sound, and political contemporaneity.
With her return to the Maxim Gorki Theater, Çağla Ilk brings an internationally-informed perspective that understands theater as an open space of encounter between artistic disciplines and social realities.
Connect with us via ConnectWithUs@gorki.de
as part of ensemble
Campbell Caspary
Caroline Cousin
Çiğdem Teke
Emeka Ene
Kimberly Darcy-Mae
Lars Rudolph
Lea Draeger
Mickey Mahar
Roger Sala Reyner
Till Wonka
as part of team
Sebastian Baumgarten
Ludwig Haugk
Misal Adnan Yıldız
Finnja Denkewitz
Dmitri Ryabkov
with partners
Center for Social Critique der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Cricoteka Krakow
Performa NYC
Residenz des Schauspiel Leipzig
Staatsoper unter den Linden Berlin
order of appearance
Sarkis
Tadeusz Kantor
Marco Fusinato
Nicole L’Huillier
Ulrike Ottinger
Yvonne Rainer
Luca Cerizza
Constanza Macras
Mohammad Salemy
Göksu Kunak
Sebastian Baumgarten
Udo Kittelmann
Theda Nilsson-Eicke
Leila Hekmat
Tamer Yiğit
Robert Lippok
Marie Schleef
Sandra Hüller
Tom Schneider
Nikola Bojić
Meg Stuart
Wu Tsang
Yael Bartana
Imran Ayata
Wolfgang Kaleck
The 2026/2027 season marks the start of the artistic direction at the Maxim Gorki Theater. Çağla Ilk, who has known the institution from within for many years, presents the Gorki as an open, transdisciplinary house connecting theater, contemporary art, performance, dance, music, sound, public discourse, and the city itself.
The Gorki has always been a place where central questions of the present are negotiated: Who speaks? Who is heard? Who is given space? Over the years, the theater has created visibility, shifted narratives, and brought new voices into focus. The new Gorki builds on this legacy.
The new Gorki aims to become a house that does not separate stage and exhibition, drama and visual art, the local and the international, but instead works precisely at these thresholds.
This new artistic direction does not start with a closed concept. It begins with the understanding that a theater is a living organism—shaped by people, voices, crafts, spaces, memories, and visions of the future.
The first season begins under special conditions: with a construction site, budget cuts, and space limitations. Theater rarely emerges from perfect circumstances. It emerges from necessity, pressure, scarcity, and desire—and from the question of how a space can still be created nonetheless. Precisely for this reason, the new Gorki is conceived as an open house: open from midday until the final performance, open to artists, guests, neighborhoods, new publics, and new forms of encounter.
Opening with Sarkis and Tadeusz Kantor
The season opens with an encounter between Sarkis and Tadeusz Kantor. Premiere: September 4, 2026 In cooperation with the Kantor Museum Cricoteka Kraków, Sarkis transforms the Gorki’s stage and auditorium into an installation engaging with Kantor’s world. Kantor never separated theater, object, image, memory, and trauma. His stage objects carried history within them.
Sarkis, who has profoundly shaped conceptual art since the 1960s and whose work is informed by Armenian histories of memory, invites Kantor into his artistic language. Following Sarkis, the new Gorki adopts the idea of invitation as an artistic form: an opening of political, historical, and aesthetic spaces.
Theater, Sound, Body, City
At the same time, Nicole L’Huillier begins Membrane, a work engaging with the building itself. Premiere: October 9, 2026 Architecture is understood not as static stone, but as a resonating body. Facades, curtains, and surfaces become membranes. The house listens, absorbs sounds, and gives them back. The city does not remain outside, but enters the theater acoustically. A central image for the new Gorki emerges: a house that not only broadcasts, but also receives.
This is followed by Marco Fusinato’s IN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT – Prince Friedrich von Homburg after Heinrich von Kleist. Premiere: October 23, 2026 Emerging from noise music and visual art, Fusinato works with sound, image, duration, intensity, and overload. Kleist’s Prince von Homburg becomes a figure of the present: suspended between dream and command, state and willfulness, obedience and loss of control. At a moment when trust in institutions, states, and images has become fragile, Kleist appears as an anarchic spirit trapped within his own limits.
In December, Ulrike Ottinger returns to the Berlin stage with The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. Premiere: December 3, 2026 The story of a ninety-two-year-old woman who enters a retirement home and begins a revolution combines Surrealism, feminist imagination, film history, and theater. It asks who remains unheard—and what happens when precisely those voices begin to change the world.
With Göksu Kunak and Le Sacre du printemps, the Gorki continues its exploration of body, ritual, ecstasy, and control. Premiere: January 2027 Beginning with Stravinsky’s scandalous work, a new performance emerges about sacrifice, violence, community, and ecstasy. At its center lies not the repetition of a historical myth, but the question of how bodies today are politically marked, disciplined, celebrated, or sacrificed.
With the adaptation of Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter, Sebastian Baumgarten, Viron Erol Vert, Nikola Bojić, and many others transform the theater into a time capsule. Premiere: February 2027 In 2027, the Gorki celebrates both two hundred years of the Singakademie and seventy-five years of the Maxim Gorki Theater. Time Shelter asks why societies retreat into the past when the present becomes unbearable. It is a work about dementia, nostalgia, national regression, and the possibility of imagining a future without denying the past.
Constanza Macras and Dorky Park Premiere: December 2026 will find a new artistic home at the Gorki. In doing so, the repertory theater opens itself to company structures, dance, performative formats, and alternative modes of production. Macras stands for a theater of the body, the city, social reality, excess, and energy. She brings Berlin onto the stage not as a theme, but as a body.
With Yvonne Rainer and HELLZAPOPPIN: What about the bees? Premiere: December 17, 2026, presented in cooperation with Performa New York, the Gorki welcomes an artist who radically transformed dance, performance, minimalism, feminism, and art history. Her work continues to ask what a body on stage can do— and what it may refuse to do.
A Theater Expanding in Space
The new Gorki also adds new spaces to its existing location. The Palais am Festungsgraben becomes not merely an additional venue, but a second space for thought. The Marble Hall becomes a site for music, lectures and lecture performances, conversations, and new formats. The Studio is conceived as a bridge to new communities: listening bar, dance club—a space where sound, music, and dance invite new publics.
Public thinking is not an accompanying program at the Gorki, but central to its work. Together with Luca Cerizza, Wolfgang Kaleck, Imran Ayata, Mohammad Salemy, Manuela Bojadžijev, and further Curators and Dramaturgs at Large, a space for thought emerges connecting law, memory, politics, art, migration, public space, and global contemporaneity. The Gorki is conceived as a place not only for presentation, but also for debate, questioning, thinking, and contradiction.
Looking Ahead
Further artistic positions throughout the season open intimate, political, and social spaces. Theda Nilsson-Eicke Premiere: March 2027 explores loss, memory, family, and a house that can no longer be entered. Tamer Yiğit Premiere: May 2027 turns toward the juvenile detention center Plötzensee, asking questions about guilt, violence, masculinity, the city, and the possibility of another perspective. Leila Hekmat Premiere: April 2027 combines opera, performance, glamour, costume, and society’s darker undercurrents into excessive, comic, brutal, yet precise forms of analysis.
With Marie Schleef and Hiroshima mon amour, the season turns toward Marguerite Duras, toward love in the shadow of war, and toward the traumatized language of the twentieth century. Premiere: May 2027 Schleef develops a distinctive theatrical form from language, body, space, sound, and image. Together with Tom Schneider and Sandra Hüller, Farn Collective creates a work about acting, collective authorship, the body, and new theatrical forms. Meg Stuart Premiere: June 2027 brings to the Gorki one of the defining choreographic positions of the present: a way of thinking about the body as an open, fragile, political site.
Yael Bartana develops a new production engaging with ritual, nationhood, memory, community, and political imagination. Wu Tsang and her company Moved by Motion take on a classical subject, tracing its poetic and philosophical dimensions and transforming them into a fantastical world of movement, poetry, virtual reality, and music. Robert Lippok creates a commissioned work in dialogue with the Gorki archive, understanding the archive not as a closed past, but as sound, storage, and material set back into motion. Ayham Majid Agha opens a space in which theater, installation, exile, memory, and language intertwine.
UNSPEAKABLE Sittenausstellung at the Kronprinzenpalais
A central component of the new artistic vision is the exhibition UNSPEAKABLE Sittenausstellung, developed by Udo Kittelmann and Çağla Ilk at the Kronprinzenpalais. In 2027, the Nazi’s Degenerate Art exhibition marks its ninetieth anniversary. The Kronprinzenpalais is a historically charged site where many works of modernism were once exhibited before later being defamed, removed, or destroyed.
In the autumn of 1936, Samuel Beckett travelled through Germany and recorded his impressions in diary entries. In them, he describes his visit to the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin, where he encountered an exhibition that had already been “purged” by radical National Socialist cultural policy: numerous modernist works had been removed. In his German Diaries, he referred to the remaining paintings as an “unspeakable Sittenausstellung.”
The exhibition is not conceived as a historical reconstruction. At its center lies the question of how visibility, speech, and artistic freedom are politically shaped—and how quickly they can be destroyed again. Especially today, at a time when authoritarian cultural politics are resurging globally, this question remains unresolved. Artistic freedom is not self-evident. It must continually be defended, practiced, and recreated.
The New Gorki as an Open House
The new Gorki should not become a place that merely explains itself. It should become a place to be experienced—a house where one does not simply attend a performance, but spends time. A house that does not awaken only with the rising of the curtain in the evening.
The program begins on the stage, but does not end there. It moves through foyers, the Marmorsaal, the Studio, the Palais, the Kronprinzenpalais, and the city itself. For the new Gorki, Berlin is not a closed national frame of reference. Berlin is an international, post-migrant, conflict-ridden, exhausted, angry, multilingual city. “Gorki” and “Berlin” are plural words: one speaks them in the singular while meaning a multitude. The new Gorki does not seek to represent Berlin, but to adopt its structure: global, post-disciplinary, open.
Or, in short: the new Gorki begins on a construction site—and that is a fitting image. This house is not finished. It should continue to change, open itself, contradict, listen, speak, play, fail, and begin again.
The Gorki remains a place for the new.
Biography Çağla Ilk
Çağla Ilk is a curator and the incoming Artistic Director of the Maxim Gorki Theater beginning with the 2026/27 season. Her work interweaves theater, performance, architecture, sound, and contemporary art within a transdisciplinary curatorial practice that deliberately expands institutional boundaries. She creates formats in which the logics of theatrical and exhibition practices inform one another and generate new forms of multilayered collective experience.
Born in Istanbul, Ilk studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin and at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. With her postmigrant platform Büro Milk, she developed performances in public space in cities including Berlin, Munich, and Istanbul. At the same time, she worked as a researcher on the project Building Culture in the Multi-Ethnic City at the University of Siegen.
From 2012 to 2020, Ilk worked as a dramaturge and curator at the Maxim Gorki Theater, where she initiated numerous interdisciplinary projects and festivals connecting theater with contemporary visual art in transcultural contexts. A defining aspect of this period was her work on the Berliner Herbstsalon, which evolved under her co-curation into a major platform for interdisciplinary artistic practices.
From 2020 to 2025, Ilk served as director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, initially together with Misal Adnan Yıldız. There, she further developed her curatorial approach at the intersection of exhibition-making, performance, and sound. For Ilk, sound is not merely an aesthetic element, but a social and political field of experience.
Her work gained international visibility through her role as curator of the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Under the title Thresholds, she brought together works by Michael Akstaller, Yael Bartana, Robert Lippok, Nicole L‘Huillier, Ersan Mondtag, and Jan St. Werner. Conceived as a threshold space, the pavilion explored the intersections of architecture, sound, and political contemporaneity.
With her return to the Maxim Gorki Theater, Çağla Ilk brings an internationally-informed perspective that understands theater as an open space of encounter between artistic disciplines and social realities.
Connect with us via ConnectWithUs@gorki.de
as part of ensemble
Campbell Caspary
Caroline Cousin
Çiğdem Teke
Emeka Ene
Kimberly Darcy-Mae
Lars Rudolph
Lea Draeger
Mickey Mahar
Roger Sala Reyner
Till Wonka
as part of team
Sebastian Baumgarten
Ludwig Haugk
Misal Adnan Yıldız
Finnja Denkewitz
Dmitri Ryabkov
Martin Györffy
Eva da Silva Antunes Alves
with partners
Center for Social Critique der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Cricoteka Krakow
Performa NYC
Residenz des Schauspiel Leipzig
Staatsoper unter den Linden Berlin