SarkisFUGE

On September 4, the Maxim Gorki Theater opens the first season of its new artistic program with FUGE, a performative installation by Sarkis, a major conceptual artist. Across the stage, auditorium, foyers and passages, visual art, performance, sound, memory, and collective presence meet: theater as a porous form and a space of invitation.

Born in Istanbul in 1938 into an Armenian family and based in Paris since 1964, Sarkis has exhibited at documenta and internationally. In 1978, as a DAAD guest in Berlin, he began Kriegsschatz (War Treasure), an evolving work where objects, images, and memories migrate across histories. Now he enters the theater in this form for the first time.

Sarkis calls his works mises-en-scène: acts of invitation that bring artists, works, memories, and histories into new relationships. Here, theater becomes a space of hospitality where time periods and voices coexist.

At the center of the stage, a mirrored skull based on “Little Foot,” one of the oldest near-complete hominin skeletons, recalls Sarkis’s face. Rainbow rain falls in seven colors onto its seven parts. From this color, seven continents emerge and turn on the Gorki stage, setting the world in motion. Conceived by Sarkis and produced in the Gorki workshops, the work asks where we come from and where we are moving to.

Into this constellation, Sarkis invites Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990), Poland’s theater revolutionary. A platform recalls his ensemble’s travelling stage—an inseparable companion and mobile territory for theater. Thirty-one crosses and rainbow light enter Sarkis’s world, while another space traces Kantor from The Return of Odysseus (1944) to the Happenings that carried theater into the world. It extends Gorki’s collaboration with Kraków’s Cricoteka, the Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor.

From Kantor’s wandering stage, John Cage enters. In Litany for the Whale (1980), two whales’ underwater calls become music. Frank Steijns performs the work on a forty-three-bell carillon, its sound travelling through the theater. Kantor’s thirty-one crosses listen with us. Chandeliers made from bird feathers breathe with the air, creating time through movement.

Throughout FUGE, the intergenerational Golden Gorkis activate this constellation with their bodies, voices, movements, and breath. Like a fugue, histories and voices enter, disappear, return and transform one another. FUGE opens the new Gorki as a house of invitation—where art alters architecture, rhythm, and modes of coming together.

In the gallery, formerly the foyer, Sarkis’s L’atelier d’aquarelle dans l’eau (2005–2026) invites visitors to experience the speed of colors as water, light, and time flow together.

FUGE runs September 4–October 11, daily from 13:00 to 21:00. Admission is free.