04.08.2026
Gemäldegalerie
As part of Berlin Art Week, Ersan Mondtag and Nadim Samman stage a dialogue between 25 performers and the Gemäldegalerie’s collection. Bridging theatre and museum, a living tableau unfolds throughout the galleries, confronting the pictorial worlds of the Old Masters with the transience of contemporary bodies and lives. The performance explores themes of exhaustion and reinvention, disappearance and endurance. The cast brings together actors, visual artists, singers and dancers from different generations, including Frank Büttner, Eva-Maria Keller, Sema Poyraz, WestBam and Louis Hofmann.
Premiere: Friday, 11 September 2026, 7 pm and 8.30 pm
Performances: Saturday, 12 September 2026, and Sunday, 13 September 2026, at 10.30 am, 1 pm and 3.30 pm
For the Performances on Friday, 11 September 2026, at 7 pm and 8.30 pm (outside the Gemäldegalerie’s regular opening hours):
Berliner Ensemble websites
Performances on Saturday and Sunday, 12 and 13 September 2026, at 10.30 am, 1 pm and 3.30 pm. These performances are included with admission to the Gemäldegalerie on the respective day.
Website of the Gemäldegalerie
The Gemäldegalerie is a repository of European representations of mortality and metamorphosis—and an institution devoted to keeping those images from ageing. "Alternde Meister" connects the mythic time of religious and allegorical paintings with the lived time of artists and their careers. Their visibility is never permanent. It emerges in a particular cultural moment before fading as attention shifts elsewhere, demanding that artists begin again.
At the same time, the work creates a collective portrait of Berlin – city that, in recent decades, has built its identity on youth and freedom, yet is now reckoning with the fractures in this narrative. In its protagonists, the city itself comes into focus: a performer perpetually staging its own youth while carrying the traces of countless lived histories beneath the surface.
The performance runs on a thirty-minute loop during opening hours. At the start of each cycle, performers occupy fixed positions throughout the galleries, in states of stillness—sleeping, resting, appearing dead—arranged among the paintings as though they had always belonged to the collection. In the minutes that follow, each awakens, dresses, and carries out an individual action before converging on a shared location for a communal ceremony. The group then disperses, and a new loop begins. Visitors are free to enter the work at any point, follow individual performers, and move freely between the galleries.
The performance draws on the dramaturgical arc of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s "The Fountain of Youth" (1546), a meditation on ageing and mortality. Cranach depicts old women restored to youth by bathing in a stone pool, before being dried, richly dressed and welcomed into a garden of music, dancing and feasting. The painting can also be read as a satire of courtly vanity: what is restored is not virtue, but outward appearance and desire. "Alternde Meister" adopts Cranach’s sequence of transformation, dressing and communal assembly, but changes the course of events. Rather than preparing for a celebration, the performers gather for a funeral.
In each cycle one performer is placed at the centre and mourned by the rest of the company, accompanied by a choral excerpt from Gustav Mahler’s "Kindertotenlieder" (1901–1904)—a cycle of songs based on Friedrich Rückert’s poems of parental bereavement. The lyric closes not on devastation but rest. In its final image the children are returned home, asleep as though nothing has been lost. The performance ritual follows this trajectory before overturning it: mourning breaks into collective laughter, this laughter freezes into a tableau, and for an instant grief and vitality hold the same pose. Then this image dissolves and the departed rises again to begin a new loop.
Visitors are invited to look at the performers and their actions with the same patience and attention they bring to the works of the Old Masters. The performance turns its attention towards bodies marked by the passage of time. Ersan Mondtag and Nadim Samman invite us to read wrinkles, scars, exhaustion and vulnerability not as signs of decline, but as testimonies to lives lived.
Artistic Direction: Sema Moritz
Choir members:
The performance is supported by the Fontana Stiftung. Catering for the production is sponsored by Uzun Masa.
Related Link
Additional Information on the Various Rooms: Performance Notes (PDF, 74 KB)
Exhibition
Paintings from the 13th to 18th Century
Permanent exhibition
Press release
Gemäldegalerie | Ersan Mondtag and Nadim Samman: Alternde Meister | 11.-13.9.2026
