The Cologne-based photographer Candida Höfer will be awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2024. With this prize, the Akademie der Künste honours one of the most internationally recognized German photographers, whose oeuvre, which has grown over five decades, is considered part of the contemporary photographic avant-garde. To mark the awarding of the prize, the Akademie der Künste is showing an exhibition of works by Candida Höfer.

On the occasion of the transfer of their advance legacy to the Academy’s Architectural Archives, Louisa Hutton and Matthias Sauerbruch have reconceived their retrospective exhibition “draw love build” and extended it significantly: access to the archives generates surprising dialogues between iconic architectural visions from the first half of the 20th century and the projects by the Berlin-based architectural team.

The Akademie der Künste has one of the largest Exile Archives on art and literature in any German-speaking country, with over 300 artistic estates and collections from or on artists who emigrated under the Nazi regime. The exile archives are part of the founding history of the academies in East and West Germany after 1945, with the aim of retrieving and rehabilitating the work of the persecuted artists.

Bertolt Brecht's study, Helene Weigel's conservatory, Anna Seghers' “crow's nest” : Regular tours offer visitors a chance to view the homes and studies of the writer Bertolt Brecht, actress and theatre director Helene Weigel and the writer Anna Seghers, largely kept in their original condition. The tours provide an insight into how these three major international figures in the arts world of the 20th century lived and worked.

In the middle of the political “Tauwetter-Periode” (thaw period), the master students of the German Akademie der Künste celebrate carnival in the coal cellar in 1957 and 1958. The murals by Manfred Böttcher, Harald Metzkes, Ernst Schroeder and Horst Zickelbein can be visited as a unique testimony to unofficial art in the GDR and as part of the eventful history of the institution and the building. Guided tours in German.

The Akademie der Künste is an international community of artists that currently totals 433 members in its six Sections Visual Arts, Architecture, Music, Literature, Performing Arts, Film and Media Arts. It is an exhibition and event location. Its Archives collectively form one of the most important interdisciplinary archives on 20th century art. Founded in 1696, the Akademie der Künste in Berlin is one of the oldest cultural institutes in Europe.