RIO REISER. ECCE HOMO - MEIN NAME IST MENSCH

In the organizer's words:

On the occasion of his 75th birthday, the Browse Gallery Berlin is showing an exhibition of original works by Rio Reiser, pioneer and most influential poet in the history of German-language rock music:
Fragments of his creative cosmos - drawings, photographs, notes, diary entries, song lyrics - much of it from the Rio Reiser archive.

The curatorial approach follows the perspective of the traveling exhibition WENN DIE NACHT AM TIEFSTEN - TON STEINE SCHERBEN IN IHRER ZEIT, also conceived by the Browse Gallery. Rio Reiser's work and its relevance over time are revealed in personal references to and political confrontation with the social context - both historical and contemporary. For Rio, the personal was political and the political personal.

The context is provided by photographs (esp. by Jutta Matthess and Rita Kohmann), which show Rio Reiser and Ton Steine Scherben and Berlin-Kreuzberg in the early 1970s, as well as a video, which draws on the local and contemporary context of the youth revolt in the late 1960s and early 1970s (with short interviews with band members and Rio's brother Gert Möbius) and an audiovisual video collage, which transports the spirit of George Grosz's relentless caricature work "Ecce Homo" from the time of the Weimar Republic (1923) and Rio's epic humanist song "Mein Name ist Mensch" into the present day.

In the exhibition, we see the world through Rio's eyes. He looks social realities in the eye and beyond, not critically distanced, but with compassionate solidarity, especially with the particularly vulnerable - certainly also from his own torn identity, his personal experience of despair and injustice.

As a person and artist, he seeks truthfulness in the expression of his experience of reality and his dreams - places of longing and refuge and at the same time spaces and sources for change. He always holds on to it and to love with courage: " Man, you have the choice and the responsibility!

Buy tickets here:

Price information:

reduced 2,00 EUR, up to 18 years free of charge