Fifty years ago, on 12 December 1976, the artist Ulay walked out of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin with Carl Spitzweg's The Poor Poet under his arm, drove it to the home of a Turkish guest-worker family in Kreuzberg, and hung it on their wall. The painting was back within 30 hours, but the action became one of the defining gestures of postwar performance art. Now the museum is bringing Ulay home.

'Ulay, Ulay & Abramovic' opens at the Neue Nationalgalerie on 28 November 2026 and runs until 2 May 2027. At its centre is the film documentation of the 1976 action, 'Irritation - There is a Criminal Touch to Art', in which Ulay questioned the museum as a place of cultural authority and asked who its pictures were actually for. A version of The Poor Poet will hang in dialogue with the film, on loan from the Grohmann Museum in Milwaukee: the original was stolen for real in 1989 and has been missing ever since.

The exhibition also restages Imponderabilia, the 1977 performance in which Ulay and Marina Abramovic stood naked facing each other in a narrow doorway, forcing visitors to squeeze between their bodies to enter. It will be performed live every day from 3 to 4.30pm. Around these two anchor works, the show gathers Ulay's early solo practice, including the intimate self-portrait series S'he from 1973-74 and FOTOTOT, unfixed photographs that slowly vanish when exposed to light.

The show is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, the Neue Nationalgalerie's director, with Ricarda Bergmann and Alenka Gregoric, artistic director of Ljubljana's Cukrarna Gallery. It arrives as the museum also celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the Hamburger Bahnhof, and as Abramovic's collaborations with Ulay continue to be reassessed half a century on.