Out of the Box – 75 Years of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste
10/8/2025 – 1/18/2026
To mark its 75th anniversary, an exhibition shares 75 stories – about memory work, the genesis of artistic works, the structure and organisation of cultural knowledge, and questions of transmission and missing items. In an age of “alternative facts” and artificial intelligence, the archives remain a beacon of reliable information and authentic sources. At the same time, they embrace new forms of artistic expression, media, storage and communication.
About the Exhibition
- Location:
Pariser Platz - ElevatorLimited wheelchair accessAudio guide
- Date:
10/8/2025 – 1/18/2026 - Time:
2 – 7 PM - Price:EUR 10 (Reduced: EUR 7)
- Languages: German, English
- Save appointment
Tue–Fri 2–7 pm
Sat, Sun, holiday 11 am – 7 pm
Closed 24 and 31 DecFree admission for under 18s, Tuesdays
Combined Ticket with “Every Artist Must Take Sides – Resonances of Eslanda and Paul Robeson” € 17/12
An audio guide in German and English is available for the exhibition
To celebrate the 75th anniversary of its archives, the Akademie der Künste is opening its repositories and showing auratic documents and objects from its collection. The title of the exhibition, Out of the Box, is meant literally. Selected from cardboard boxes and filing boxes, from drawers, cabinets and folders, 75 objects tell stories about the creation of artistic works, about the structure and organisation of cultural knowledge, about transmission and lacunae.
The objects include iconic works such as Walter Benjamin’s fragment What Is Aura?, Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, George Grosz’s satirical work Christus mit der Gasmaske, one of Käthe Kollwitz’s diaries, Nam June Paik’s video Der Dom als Medium, Hermann Scherchen’s futuristic Nullstrahler, Anna Seghers’s love letters, and Mary Wigman’s notations documenting her expressionist dances.
“Work in the archive. The most fantastic discoveries. Memory is not sufficient to always keep the good things at hand.“
Walter Kempowski, 1986
The exhibits tell the stories not only of artists but also of archival work, which facilitates new ways of accessing material through the processes of selection, evaluation, organisation, and in-depth cataloguing. In the charged zone between memory and forgetting, order and chaos, analogue and digital, the Akademie Archives are faced with tremendous challenges.
As the most important interdisciplinary archive of the art and culture of modernity in the German-speaking world, it is a locus that brings together art and scholarship in an open exchange and fosters interactions between different art forms. Rooted in an artists’ association that has been in existence for over three hundred years, involving every artistic discipline, and coalesced from the two institutions in East and West, the Akademie Archives are unique in their ability to afford linkage in the contemporary art world and networking between the arts – where the boundaries between genres are increasingly disappearing – thereby generating unparalleled synergies in an “archive of the arts”.
Creative ways of thinking and acting also operate “out of the box”. Going beyond traditional patterns, artists set new agendas, provoke discussion and can have a lasting influence on people. The works on display give an idea of the intellectual universe of the resources stored in the archives and make it clear that they are a vital element in our cultural heritage.
Artistic Positions
Ingo Gerken / Echo Ho / Dominique Hurth / Marcel Odenbach
Featured in the exhibition
Alvar Aalto / Mario Adorf / Ellen Auerbach / Horst Bartnig / Vicki Baum / Paul Baumgarten / Johannes R. Becher / Walter Benjamin / David Bennent / Carl Blechen / Gerhard Bohner / Bertolt Brecht / Micha Brendel / Ernst Busch / Herbert Freiherr von Buttlar / Jurriaan Cootwijk / Nelly Dix / Otto Dix / Wils Ebert / Elke Erb / Eberhard Fechner / Lyonel Feininger / Franz Fühmann / Hartmut Geerken / Ingo Gerken / Jochen Gerz / Friedrich Gilly / Günter Grass / George Grosz / John Heartfield / Suzette Henry / Wulf Herzogenrath / Birger Heymann / Alfred Hirschmeier / Echo Ho / Rolf Hochhuth / Walter Huder / Dominique Hurth / Walter Jens / Volker Kahl / Georg Kaiser / Alfred Kantorowicz / Walter Kempowski / Imre Kertész / Irmgard Keun / Barbara Köhler / Carl Wilhelm Kolbe d.Ä. / Uwe Kolbe / Käthe Kollwitz / Carl Kretschmar / Christina Kubisch / Dieter Ladewig / Alice Lex-Nerlinger / Peter Lilienthal / Franz Lippisch / Volker Ludwig / Heinrich Mann / Eva Maria Marcus / Penny McCarthy / Ludwig Meidner / Leopoldo Méndez / Marlene Moeschke-Poelzig / Heiner Müller / Wiebke Müller / Péter Nádas / Nam June Paik / Erna Pinner / Marcel Odenbach / Emine Sevgi Özdamar / Edgar Reitz / Paul und Eslanda Robeson / Thomas Rosenlöcher / Johann Gottfried Schadow / Hans Scharoun / Hermann Scherchen / Max Schirner / Jörg Schlaich / Einar Schleef / Christine Schlegel / Oskar Schlemmer / Silvia und Dieter Schlenstedt / Christoph Schlingensief / Volker Schlöndorff / Andreas Schlüter / Rolf Dietrich Schmidt / Anna Seghers / Gerd Sonntag / Klaus Staeck / Maria Steinfeldt / Katharina Thalbach / Wolfgang Trautwein / Gudrun Trendafilov / Herbert Tucholski / Gisela Tuchtenhagen / Maxie Wander / Helene Weigel / Günther Weisenborn / Peter Weiss / Rudolf Weißer / Trak Wendisch / Charles White / Mary Wigman / Roger Willemsen / Christa Wolf / Konrad Wolf / Karla Woisnitza / Peter Zadek / Leopold Zielke / Bernd Alois Zimmermann / Arnold Zweig
Impressions
