From 26 to 29 June, the Studio for Electroacoustic Music at the Akademie der Künste will once again invite you to KONTAKTE. The festival will showcase how versatile contemporary sound art reacts to current technological and societal developments. The Akademie buildings at Hanseatenweg and Pariser Platz will be permeated by experimental sound structures and transformed into places of intensive listening.

The Library of the Arts is one of the largest special libraries on culture and the modernist arts. Its holdings are characterised by media from every artistic genre from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, as well as valuable private libraries, which are accessible to everyone free of charge. The voyage of discovery through its treasures begins in the Reading Room on Pariser Platz and leads into the hidden stacks. Guided tour in German.

Using photomontage, John Heartfield attempted to defeat Adolf Hitler on the battlefield of propaganda during his exile in Prague (1933–1938). But after the end of the Second World War, the artist summarised in 1964 “Unfortunately still relevant”. Can art help to resolve conflicts today? Artists, locals and guests come together at the photomonteur's summer house to celebrate contradiction, beauty and the unexpected. In German.

When Christa Wolf's novella What remains was published in 1990, a fierce debate broke out in the literary feuilleton about the role of literature in the GDR. Almost 40 years later, many traces of and connections within this literary community can be found in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery. This walk explores these traces to conjure up the image of a failed society whose utopian dream reverberates in the literature it produced. In German.

Few other opera houses in the world have staged as many world premieres as the Deutsche Oper Berlin since 2012, under the directorship of Dietmar Schwarz. In conversation about the recently published book Wie kommt das Neue in die Welt? (How does the new enter the world?), which summarises the directorship, Akademie members Schwarz and Rebecca Saunders as well as composers Detlev Glanert and Sara Glojnarić will provide insights into the creative process. In German.

The surrealist is regarded as a “rule-breaker par excellence – a kind of poet with a knife between his teeth”, remarks Julien Gracq in the essay Surrealism and contemporary literature (SINN UND FORM 4/2025). The editor of the French edition of his works, Bernhild Boie, the poet Norbert Hummelt and the editor of SINN UND FORM, Gernot Krämer, talk about his work. In German.

JUNGE AKADEMIE fellowship holders will open their studios: In their compositions, performances and feature films, Huihui Cheng (Music), Lisa Gertsch (Film and Media Arts), gruppe-aja (Architecture) and Kira Xonorika (Human Machine Fellowship) will provide insights into their current projects dealing with topics such as neurodiversity, sustainability, technosciences and acoustic-electronic landscapes.