In Berlin, there will be the largest retrospective ever dedicated to Ryuichi Sakamoto.

It is titled seeing sound, hearing time and, after Tokyo and Beijing, it finally arrives in Europe, from September 11, 2026 to May 23, 2027.

From September 11, 2026, to May 23, 2027, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin will host seeing sound, hearing time, the first major retrospective dedicated to Ryuichi Sakamoto, finally arriving in Europe after its debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and its stop at the M Woods Museum in Beijing. The exhibition will tell the legacy of the Japanese master, who passed away in 2023, and will focus on the fundamental principle of his work: to unite music with video, performance, and artistic installations, transforming sound into an “entity” that exists within the same space where human beings exist.

The exhibition will open during Berlin Art Week and will be part of the celebrations for the 30th anniversary of the Berlin museum, which will celebrate the anniversary with a continuous 30-hour opening in mid-November. seeing sound, hearing time is a journey designed to immerse visitors in Sakamoto’s works, also exploring his historical connection with Germany and the European electronic scene. The event spans an area of about 1500 square meters in the Rieckhallen halls. Among the seven works exhibited, divided into five large installations, the most famous is IS YOUR TIME, from 2017. At the center of the room is a piano, saved from the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. Sakamoto considered it a sort of “piano corpse,” freed from the artificial tuning of humans and returned to its primordial nature. He recovered it and connected it to a digital system that receives real-time seismic data from earthquakes occurring around the world: these impulses make the strings vibrate on their own, translating the movements of the Earth into real sounds.

Another section of the exhibition tells the stories of projects born from collaborations with other artists, a fundamental aspect in the last twenty years of the master’s career. There are installations born from the album async, an album marked by the first cancer diagnosis and the desire to create the soundtrack for a non-existent film, made together with visual artist Shiro Takatani and director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Two videos curated by Carsten Nicolai, known as Alva Noto, are also featured, who has been Sakamoto’s artistic partner for twenty years. These use tracks from 12, the last album recorded by Sakamoto between 2021 and 2022, as their soundtrack. It is a sound diary of the last months of his life, where the tracks have no title but are named only by the date they were recorded, and where the master’s labored breaths and the sound of keys pressed weakly by a man who is gradually losing strength can be clearly heard.