French artist Sophie Calle is returning to Berlin with her first solo exhibition in the city in more than two decades. Titled "Is It Better?", the show opens at Hamburger Bahnhof, the Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, on 13 November 2026 and continues until 4 April 2027. It arrives as the museum celebrates its 30th anniversary, and the opening falls within a special anniversary weekend when the building will stay open for 30 hours continuously with free admission.

The exhibition brings together six groups of works made over the past thirty years, spanning photography, text, installation and video. Among them is The Detachment, a series of photographs from 1996 in which Calle recorded symbols of the former East Germany as they were taken down in Berlin after reunification. Also included is The Ghosts of Orsay, a large-scale installation from 2022 built around her long relationship with the former Paris railway hotel that now houses the Musee d'Orsay; it is being shown for the first time since it was created for that museum. The multi-channel video work Voir la mer, from 2011, in which Istanbul residents see the sea for the first time, is part of the selection as well.

Calle has also produced a new work for the occasion, created specially for the anniversary and destined to join the museum's collection. The starting point for the exhibition is a piece from her Detachment series that already belongs to Hamburger Bahnhof, anchoring the show in the museum's own history as a former train station.

Born in Paris in 1953, Calle has built an international reputation on work that turns episodes from her own emotional life into carefully rule-bound investigations, told through photographs, found objects and written accounts. Recent years have brought a United States retrospective, Overshare, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the exhibition Something Missing? at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and Turner Contemporary in Britain. The Berlin show, her first major presentation in the city since the 1990s, places that practice in the city where one of its key early series was made.