Hamburger Bahnhof hosts first major European retrospective of Ryuichi Sakamoto
Ryuichi Sakamoto’s exhibition seeing sound, hearing time brings the late Japanese composer’s experimental sound installations to Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin. Running from 11 September 2026 to 20 June 2027, the exhibition is the first major European retrospective dedicated to his work across sound and visual art. Presented in the museum’s Rieckhallen during its 30th anniversary year, the exhibition brings together seven works across five large-scale installations covering approximately 1,500 square metres. Developed through collaborations with international artists and filmmakers, the presentation examines Sakamoto’s relationship with technology, natural phenomena, memory and the perception of time.
The exhibition begins with IS YOUR TIME (2017/24), developed with Japanese artist Shiro Takatani. A piano damaged during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami stands in a pool of water, connected to an automated mechanism that converts global seismic data into movements of its keys. Earthquakes occurring across the planet become an unpredictable musical composition, connecting geological activity with an instrument carrying the physical traces of disaster. The installation reflects Ryuichi Sakamoto’s longstanding interest in environmental processes and the relationship between human activity and natural forces.
Another collaboration with Takatani, async–immersion (2023), occupies an expansive gallery featuring an 18-metre-long LED wall. Photographs of objects from Sakamoto’s New York studio form a continuously changing visual sequence, accompanied by music from his 2017 album async. A multichannel speaker system distributes sound throughout the room, creating an immersive audiovisual installation in which images, spatial acoustics and musical fragments operate together. The exhibition also includes async–first light (2017), by filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, presenting images of everyday encounters, sleeping figures and urban environments. Its companion film, Durmiente (2021), features actor Tilda Swinton falling asleep.
Water returns as a central element in TIME, TIME (2024), another collaboration with Takatani, adapted from the 2021 theatrical production TIME. Three monumental projections depict dancer Min Tanaka and shō musician Mayumi Miyata performing on a water-covered stage. The work brings performance, music and moving images together through a sequence that questions conventional chronological structures. Throughout Ryuichi Sakamoto’s practice, water represented memory, continuity and change, providing a recurring material and visual reference for compositions concerned with mortality and the passage of time.
The final gallery focuses on Ryuichi Sakamoto’s two-decade collaboration with Berlin-based artist Carsten Nicolai, also known as Alva Noto. Two videos from Nicolai’s developing film installation, PHOSPHENES and ENDO EXO, combine abstract imagery and footage of specimens from Berlin’s Natural History Museum with tracks from Sakamoto’s final studio album, 12. Created between 2021 and 2022, the album documents a particularly personal period in the composer’s life. These works extend the exhibition’s examination of sound, scientific observation and visual perception.
Curated by Ingrid Buschmann and Sachiko Namba in close collaboration with The Estate of Ryuichi Sakamoto / KAB Inc and Dumb Type Office Ltd, the exhibition forms part of Hamburger Bahnhof’s anniversary programme. Sakamoto, who died in 2023, became internationally recognised through Yellow Magic Orchestra before developing an influential career spanning electronic music, cinema and installation art. His achievements included an Academy Award for The Last Emperor. In Berlin, his sound installations present a significant dimension of his artistic legacy, inviting visitors to experience music through space, movement and time.
All images courtesy of Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart
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