Sarkis: FUGE

On September 4, we are opening the first season of the Maxim Gorki Theater’s new artistic direction with FUGE. The artist we have invited to begin this new chapter with us is Sarkis.

Born in Istanbul in 1938 into an Armenian family and based in Paris since 1964, Sarkis has spent more than six decades moving between contemporary art, music, architecture, memory and theatre. He has participated in documenta and exhibited in major institutions internationally. As a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme in 1978, he began Kriegsschatz—an ever-growing body of work in which objects, images and memories migrate across histories.

FUGE is both the title and the principle of this new constellation. Like the independent voices of a musical fugue, the artists, works and histories within it remain distinct while transforming one another.

Sarkis calls his works mises-en-scène: acts of invitation. Throughout his oeuvre, Sarkis has brought objects marked by displacement, conflict and memory into new relationships with colour, light, sound and architecture. His works are not closed compositions, but living constellations: they carry their histories with them while remaining open to transformation and to the presence of others.

Within FUGE, Sarkis posthumously invites Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990), Poland’s theatre revolutionary with the historical stage that travelled with him and his ensemble wherever they performed—an inseparable member of the ensemble and a mobile territory on which their theatre could emerge. The project extends Gorki’s collaboration with Kraków’s Cricoteka, the Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor.

At its heart is an entirely new work, conceived by Sarkis and brought to life in the Gorki workshops: an ancient skull becomes a mirror, carrying the trace of Sarkis’s own face. Rain falls onto its seven parts in the seven colors of the rainbow. From these infusions of color, seven continents take shape and begin to turn. Here, making becomes part of the meaning. The theatre is a place where a work can be imagined, built, activated and shared.

Here, Sarkis’s first gesture of invitation continues into another space, where archive, memory and living bodies meet across generations.

The encounter with Kantor opens a passage towards a wider encounter beyond FUGE. In different parts of Gorki, the Kantor project unfolds: an installation, two performances and a film presented during Berlin Art Week. One of Kantor’s earliest theatrical works, The Return of Odysseus (1944), will be revisited and reinterpreted by Mickey Mahar and Çiğdem Teke—both members of the new Gorki Ensemble—in dialogue with Bogdan Renczyński, a former member of Kantor’s Cricot-2 ensemble. In the early 1980s, Renczyński travelled across Kraków with Kantor, gathering materials to reconstruct the stage design of The Return of Odysseus. This reconstructed space can now be encountered in the upper foyer.

From Kantor’s wandering stage, John Cage enters. In Litany for the Whale, two whales’ underwater calls become music. Frank Steijns plays the work on a forty-three-bell carillon, its sound travelling through the theatre. Chandeliers made from birds’ feathers give life to the Gorki auditorium: they breathe, creating time through their breath. Movement continues in the foyer, where Sarkis’s Atelier de l’eau awaits. There, you experience the speed of colors as water, light, color and time flow through one another.

Throughout FUGE, the intergenerational house-ensemble Golden Gorkis perform within this constellation, using their bodies, voices, movements and breath to carry the story of the work through the theatre. Like a fugue, histories and voices enter, disappear, return and transform one another. FUGE begins the new Gorki as a house of invitation—where art and theatre alter architecture, rhythm and how we gather.

This opening expresses how we imagine us redefining the spaces of the Gorki together: not by erasing the histories they carry, but by bringing those histories into new relationships with the present—so that the theatre becomes a living organism, open throughout the day and into the night, until the last sound disappears.

Sarkis turns the entire theatre into a mise-en-scène. And you are no longer sitting opposite the work. You are already inside it. FUGE continues until 11 October, daily from 13:00 to 21:00. Admission is free. 

Please join us, the new artistic team of Gorki for the opening of the 2026/27 season and the live inauguration of FUGE, on Friday, 4 September 2026, beginning at 13:00. Since the capacity of our facilities is limited, we kindly would like to ask you to reserve timeslots.