Sophie Calle returns to Berlin with Is It Better? at Hamburger Bahnhof

Sophie Calle has her first solo exhibition in Berlin for more than twenty years. Is It Better? opens at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart on 13 November 2026 and runs until 4 April 2027. The museum is marking its 30th anniversary, and the show opens on the anniversary weekend.

What is on show

According to the museum's exhibition page, the show is made up of six bodies of work from the last three decades. Between them they cover photography, text, installation and video. Memory, loss and history run through the work, often told from Calle's own life. The museum describes the tone as sometimes morbid but often playful.

The exhibition starts from a work in the museum's own collection, part of the series The Detachment. Calle made the series in Berlin in 1996, the year Hamburger Bahnhof was founded. Its twelve photographs show public places in the city where GDR symbols were taken down after reunification. Each is paired with descriptions given by passers-by. In the collection the works are catalogued as colour photography combined with a book, which tells you how much text and the printed page matter in Calle's work.

The second key piece is Les fantômes d'Orsay (2022), a large installation made for the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and shown here for the first time since then. Between 1978 and 1981 Calle went almost every day to Room 501 of the abandoned hotel in the old Gare d'Orsay railway station. The installation combines found objects, photographs and texts from that time. The setting suits the venue: like the Gare d'Orsay, Hamburger Bahnhof is a former railway station that became an art museum.

For the anniversary Calle is also making a new work, which she will donate to the museum's collection.

Curators and catalogue

The exhibition is curated by Sam Bardaouil, director of Hamburger Bahnhof, and Lisa Hörstmann, a curator at the museum. It comes with a catalogue in the Hamburger Bahnhof series, published by Silvana Editoriale. Collectors who follow Calle's books may want to add it to the shelf, since her work has always relied on image and text appearing together.

The artist

Calle was born in Paris in 1953 and lives and works in Malakoff. She represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Her work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, among other collections, and by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Visiting

The museum is at Invalidenstraße 50, near Berlin Hauptbahnhof. Over the anniversary weekend, the building stays open continuously from 11 am on Saturday 14 November until 6 pm on Sunday 15 November, and admission is free throughout.

Sources

• Sophie Calle. Is It Better? at Hamburger Bahnhof, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
• Hamburger Bahnhof Celebrates Its Birthday with Free Admission around the Clock, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin