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Alternde Meister / Fountains of Youth

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Ersan Mondtag and Nadim Samman: Aging Masters

Performance as part of Berlin Art Week

Ersan Mondtag and Nadim Samman are staging a Berlin-style vanitas at the Gemäldegalerie, creating a dialogue between living and deceased Old Masters.

  • Alternde Meister von Ersan Mondtag und Nadim Samman

    Alternde Meister von Ersan Mondtag und Nadim Samman

    © Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Katrin Hammer

  • Ersan Mondtag und Nadim Samman

    – Ersan Mondtag und Nadim Samman

    © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie / Katrin Hammer

Serving as a bridge between theater and museum, a living tableau unfolds throughout the entire collection, hovering between exhaustion and reinvention, disappearance and permanence.

The Gemäldegalerie houses numerous works that explore mortality and transformation. At the same time, its mission is to preserve the paintings themselves from aging and decay. “Aging Masters” connects the mythical time of religious and allegorical imagery with the lived time of artists and their careers. Their visibility is never permanent. It arises at a specific moment and fades again as soon as attention shifts.

For the artists, therefore, the process of becoming visible begins anew time and again. In this way, the piece also paints a collective portrait of Berlin, a city that has based its identity on youth and freedom in recent decades and is now grappling with the fractures in this narrative. The city itself is reflected in the piece’s protagonists: as a performer who ceaselessly stages her own youth while, beneath the surface, bearing the traces of countless lived stories.

The performance repeats in 30-minute cycles throughout the show. At the beginning of each sequence, the performers remain motionless in various exhibition rooms. They appear among the paintings, as if they were part of the collection. Gradually, they awaken, get dressed, and carry out individual actions before gathering in a common space for a collective ceremony. The group then disperses again, and a new cycle begins. Visitors can join the performance at any point, follow individual performers, and move freely between the rooms.

The dramaturgy is inspired by Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting “The Fountain of Youth” (1546), an exploration of age and transience. Cranach depicts elderly women who regain their youth by bathing in a stone fountain; they are then dried off, dressed in fine garments, and led into a garden filled with music, dance, and festivity. The painting can be read, not least, as a mirror of courtly vanity: it is not virtue that is renewed, but outward appearance and desire. 

“Aging Masters” follows the sequence of transformation, dressing, and communal gathering, but alters the outcome of the events. The performers are not preparing for a celebration, but are gathering for a memorial service: In each cycle, one person takes center stage and is mourned by the other participants. The ritual is accompanied by a sequence from Gustav Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” (1901–1904), based on poems by Friedrich Rückert about the loss of a child. The songs do not end in despair, but in an image of peace: the children return home and sleep, as if the loss had been undone.

The ritual of the performance takes up this movement and simultaneously reverses it. Grief dissolves into shared laughter, which eventually freezes into a tableau in which grief and vitality merge.  Visitors are invited to observe the performers and their actions with the same attentiveness as they would the works of the Old Masters. The performance draws attention to bodies in which the traces of time become visible. Ersan Mondtag and Nadim Samman suggest interpreting wrinkles, scars, exhaustion, and vulnerability as testimonies to a life lived.

Note: The performances on Saturday and Sunday, September 12 and 13, 2026, at 10:30 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and 3:30 p.m., can be attended with a ticket to the Gemäldegalerie for the respective day.

Runtime: Fri, 11/09/2026 to Fri, 11/09/2026

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