A museum is more than a container for art: it is a building that layers former uses and new interpretations over one another. Sophie Calle knows this principle from her own work. For her Berlin exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, which opens on 13 November 2026 in the museum’s anniversary year, the traces of a city and the past of a museum are interwoven.
Calle presents six groups of works spanning three decades — photography, text, installation and video. The starting point is a work from the 1996 series “Die Entfernung”, which is already in the museum’s collection. It is joined by a new work that the artist is creating to mark the 30th anniversary and giving to the museum. Exactly what it will contain has yet to be revealed.
What remains when a symbol disappears?
In “Die Entfernung”, Calle photographed public places in Berlin where symbols of the GDR had been removed after reunification. The twelve images are accompanied by descriptions from passers-by. The work focuses not only on what has vanished, but also on how people remember its former presence and put it into words. An empty stretch of wall or an altered square thus becomes an occasion to reflect on political and personal interpretations of history.
The fact that this work from 1996 now opens the exhibition is more than a return to the artist’s own past. The year it was made was also the year Hamburger Bahnhof was established as a museum. A work about removed symbols thus encounters an institution whose present function overlays an earlier use: the railway station became a place for art. The connection to the site therefore lies not only in the subjects depicted, but also in the question of what a building preserves and what it leaves behind.
A railway station remembers a railway station
This interweaving becomes particularly clear in “Les fantômes d’Orsay” from 2022. The large-scale installation grew out of Calle’s engagement with the abandoned hotel in the former Gare d’Orsay railway station in Paris. Between 1978 and 1981, she spent time in room 501 almost every day. For her later work, she brought this personal search for traces back to the site, which had since become a museum. Found objects, photographs and texts address the uses and people that are no longer there.
Hamburger Bahnhof, too, is more than a neutral shell for contemporary art. Its history as a transport building and its present-day museum activities exist side by side, without fully merging into one another. Calle thus continues a method that combines image and writing in many of her works: a document provides evidence of something, but it does not tell the whole story. Memory emerges in the gap between what can be seen and what people say about it.
An anniversary as a commission
An anniversary work is always also part of an institution’s account of itself. When a museum invites an artist to engage with its history, the result can be more than a celebratory retrospective — but that cannot be anticipated before the opening. What will matter is whether the new work opens up perspectives on the collection and the site, or primarily validates the occasion.
The connection to “Die Entfernung” and “Les fantômes d’Orsay” suggests a productive tension: Calle draws attention to gaps, to symbols that have been cleared away and to objects that bear witness to a former use. The museum thus becomes not only an exhibition venue, but itself the subject of a memory that remains incomplete and can continue to change. The exhibition is scheduled to run from 13 November 2026 to 2 May 2027 at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin.
Original reviewed by the editors · 3 November 2026
