During the last week of August 2025, the Neue Nationalgalerie the music series 'Soundscapes in the Garden', featuring ambitious live concerts specially tailored to this special venue, featuring five internationally renowned musicians. For the Long Night of Museums on Saturday, August 30, a day of special music installations is also planned in honor of the Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya (*1933), whose fog sculpture played over the Nationalgalerie's sculpture garden this summer.
“Soundscapes in the Garden” opens a new dimension to the tradition, which has existed since the opening of the Neue Nationalgalerie, of using Mies van der Rohe’s sculpture garden as a venue for some groundbreaking and innovative musical formats – from the “Jazz in the Garden” events in the 1970s and 1980s, which featured greats such as Alice Coltrane and Keith Jarrett, to the broader concept “Sound in the Garden,” with which this tradition was re-established after the reopening in 2022.
The clarity and precision of Mies van der Rohe's architecture and the ephemeral poetry of Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculpture serve as inspiration for this series, exploring music as a spatial art form. In the sculpture garden, music can be experienced just as intensely while wandering among the garden's plants and sculptures as in the static darkness of many conventional concert venues. To convey the spatiality and site-specificity of the live concerts and sound installations, d&b audiotechnik will provide an immersive d&b Soundscape audio system for the duration of the series. The series invites visitors to understand openness and closedness not only as important architectural themes of the Neue Nationalgalerie, but also as categories for experiencing sound and music.