Tadeusz KantorThe Only Way – As part of Berlin Art Week

A new exhibition and performance space is being created on Platz der Märzrevolution, next to the Maxim Gorki Theater. It extends the theater into public space and provides a setting for photographic, filmic, and text-based works, as well as live broadcasts and performative interventions.

The wall will be activated for the first time on September 11, 2026, with The Only Way. The opening presentation features a photograph by Eustachy Kossakowski from the estate of Tadeusz Kantor. It documents the Panoramic Sea Happening, which Kantor staged on August 23, 1967, on the Baltic coast at Łazy near Osieki. The artist Edward Krasiński, standing on a platform in the water, conducted the waves of the sea, while the audience sat on deck chairs in ankle-deep water.

The transfer of the photograph onto the wall brings this historical moment into the public space of the Gorki. Kantor freed theater from its institutional boundaries and transformed the beach, sea, wind, audience, and passing strangers into elements of a shared situation.

Opening and conversation at 7 pm

To mark the first activation of the wall on September 11, 2026, Çağla İlk, Artistic Director of the Gorki, will be in conversation with Dorota Krakowska, representative of the Tadeusz Kantor Foundation, and Natalia Zarzecka, Director of Cricoteka – Museum for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor. The conversation will focus on Tadeusz Kantor’s understanding of theater, questions of public space and the archive, and how historical artistic materials can be transferred into contemporary artistic processes.

Film screening

Following the conversation, Dietrich Mahlow’s film Kantor is Here. The Artist and His World will be screened from 9 pm. The film was made in Nuremberg in April 1968 for Saarländischer Rundfunk and documents several happenings that Tadeusz Kantor realized as part of the exhibition Principle of Collage at Kunsthalle Nürnberg, including Anatomy Lesson According to Rembrandt, Conversation with the Rhinoceros, and The Great Emballage. Mahlow, then Director of Kunsthalle Nürnberg, follows Kantor in his artistic practice, making visible the connection between happening, visual art, and theater. The film offers a direct encounter with Kantor’s artistic work and complements the photographic, textual, and performative materials with a filmic document.