Profil

The 2026/2027 season marks the start of the artistic direction at the Maxim Gorki Theater. Çağla Ilk, who has known the institution from within for many years, presents the Gorki as an open, transdisciplinary house connecting theater, contemporary art, performance, dance, music, sound, public discourse, and the city itself.

The Gorki has always been a place where central questions of the present are negotiated: Who speaks? Who is heard? Who is given space? Over the years, the theater has created visibility, shifted narratives, and brought new voices into focus. The new Gorki builds on this legacy.

The new Gorki aims to become a house that does not separate stage and exhibition, drama and visual art, the local and the international, but instead works precisely at these thresholds. 

This new artistic direction does not start with a closed concept. It begins with the understanding that a theater is a living organism—shaped by people, voices, crafts, spaces, memories, and visions of the future.

The first season begins under special conditions: with a construction site, budget cuts, and space limitations. Theater rarely emerges from perfect circumstances. It emerges from necessity, pressure, scarcity, and desire—and from the question of how a space can still be created nonetheless. Precisely for this reason, the new Gorki is conceived as an open house: open from midday until the final performance, open to artists, guests, neighborhoods, new publics, and new forms of encounter.