Sophie Calle and Ryuichi Sakamoto at Hamburger Bahnhof

Hamburger Bahnhof opened as a museum on 3 November 1996, in one of Berlin’s first railway terminals. The station closed to trains in the 1880s and later became a museum of transport and building, a name still carved over its arches. Today it is the Nationalgalerie’s museum of contemporary art, and it has spent its 30th year with eight new exhibitions. Two of them are the reason to go this winter: Ryuichi Sakamoto’s sound installations in the old freight halls, and a Sophie Calle show that opens on the anniversary weekend.

Sophie Calle: Is It Better?

For more than 40 years, the French artist Sophie Calle has turned her own life, and the lives of strangers, into photographs and text. Is It Better?, from 13 November 2026 to 4 April 2027, is her first solo exhibition in Berlin in over 20 years, with six bodies of work from the last three decades. It starts with Die Entfernung, from 1996, already in the museum’s collection: twelve photographs of places in Berlin where the symbols of the GDR were removed after reunification, each paired with what passers-by remembered of them. Les fantômes d’Orsay, made in 2022 for the Musée d’Orsay, is shown in Berlin for the first time. It returns to Room 501 of the abandoned hotel in the old Gare d’Orsay, where Calle went almost every day between 1978 and 1981. One former station speaks to another. A new work, made for the anniversary, will stay in the collection.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound, hearing time

Sakamoto, who died in 2023, is best known for his film scores and as a founder of Yellow Magic Orchestra. For the last two decades of his life he also made installations, working with artists such as Shiro Takatani and Carsten Nicolai. This is the first major retrospective of that work in Europe: seven works in five large installations across about 1,500 square metres of the Rieckhallen, the museum’s former freight sheds. IS YOUR TIME, with Takatani, is built around a piano damaged in the 2011 tsunami in Japan. async–immersion turns his late album async into a room of image and sound, and ENDO EXO, from 2024, is a collaboration with Nicolai. Come with time to sit; the installations reward it. The show runs until 20 June 2027.

Thirty hours for 30 years

The museum marks its birthday from 13 to 15 November 2026, the weekend Sophie Calle opens. On 14 and 15 November it stays open for 30 hours without a break, with free admission over the anniversary weekend and an international conference on the future of museums that collect contemporary art.

Plan your visit

Hamburger Bahnhof is on Invalidenstraße, a few minutes’ walk from Berlin Hauptbahnhof. Tickets, opening hours and the anniversary programme are on the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin website.