Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound, hearing time

Hamburger Bahnhof - Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Invalidenstraße 50, 10557, Berlin

September 10, 2026 – May 23, 2027

The exhibition is the first major retrospective of composer and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto in Europe. As a pioneer of electronic and experimental music, Sakamoto redefined the boundaries between sound, film, performance and visual arts. The Hamburger Bahnhof shows seven works in five large-scale installations on around 1,500 square meters in the Rieckhallen. In »Is Your Time« (2017), a piano destroyed by the 2011 tsunami becomes the starting point for a sound work that uses digitally converted seismological data from global earthquakes in real time. Further installations were created based on Sakamoto's album »async« (2017) in collaboration with Shiro Takatani and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Two films by Carsten Nicolai use music from »12«, Sakamoto's sound diary recorded between 2021 and 2022.