Some artists arrive in a city with a new body of work. Sophie Calle arrives in Berlin with a question. “Is It Better?” opens today, 13 November 2026, at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart and runs until 4 April 2027. It is the French conceptual artist’s first solo exhibition in the German capital in more than twenty years, and it is timed to the moment the museum itself celebrates its 30th birthday.
A work that was born with the museum
The starting point is personal for both sides. In 1996 – the year Hamburger Bahnhof opened – Calle made The Detachment in Berlin: twelve photographs of public places where symbols of the GDR had been removed after reunification, each paired with descriptions from passers-by of what used to be there. The series is now in the museum’s collection, and it remains one of the most quietly devastating works about how a city edits its own memory. What is missing becomes the subject; the words of strangers stand in for the vanished monument.
Around it, the curators Sam Bardaouil, director of Hamburger Bahnhof, and Lisa Hörstmann have gathered six bodies of work from the past three decades, spanning photography, text, installation and video. Calle’s method has always been to blur the line between autobiography and investigation – following strangers, documenting her own losses, inviting others to tell her stories – and the result is often morbid and funny at the same time.
Ghosts of another railway station
One of the highlights is Les fantômes d’Orsay (2022), shown here for the first time since Calle created it for the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Between 1978 and 1981 she spent time almost daily in Room 501 of the abandoned hotel inside the former Gare d’Orsay, long before the station became one of the world’s great museums. The installation brings together found objects, photographs and texts from those years. Seen in Berlin, inside another former railway terminus turned art museum, the parallel is impossible to miss: two stations, two conversions, and an artist who keeps track of what lingers in empty rooms.
For the anniversary, Calle is also creating a new work that will enter the Hamburger Bahnhof collection as a donation – a fitting gesture for an exhibition that is as much about institutions remembering as about individuals forgetting.
Thirty hours, eight exhibitions
The opening falls on the museum’s anniversary weekend from 13 to 15 November, when the building stays open continuously for 30 hours and hosts an international conference on the future of museums that collect contemporary art. Across 2026, Hamburger Bahnhof has marked the jubilee with eight special exhibitions, a new collection presentation, and performances and concerts reaching into the surrounding city.
Calle, born in Paris in 1953, lives and works in Malakoff. She represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and has shown at institutions from the Centre Pompidou and Tate Britain to the Art Institute of Chicago and Tokyo’s Hara Museum. A catalogue appears in the Hamburger Bahnhof series published by Silvana Editoriale; the show is supported by the Hamburger Bahnhof International Companions and the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung.
Whether things are “better” now – after reunification, after a museum’s first thirty years, after a life spent turning loss into art – is a question Calle leaves open. That openness is exactly why the visit is worth it.