seeing sound, hearing time concentrates on the period from the 2000s onward, when Sakamoto increasingly expanded composition into three-dimensional environments. Instead of separating music, film and visual art, he treated sound as something capable of occupying space, interacting with light, image, technology and the physical body of the visitor. The five installations across the Rieckhallen make that evolution tangible rather than simply documenting it historically.

Nature and technology repeatedly overlap. Earthquake data becomes music; a damaged piano becomes both witness and instrument; digital systems make invisible forces perceptible. The exhibition therefore connects Sakamoto’s experimental practice with his long-standing concerns around environmental destruction, fragility and time.

Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952–2023) was a Japanese composer, producer and artist who moved effortlessly between electronic music, classical composition, pop and cinema. He co-founded the hugely influential Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978 and composed nearly 45 film and television scores, winning an Academy Award, two Golden Globes and a Grammy.

But his importance goes well beyond film music. In his later decades he increasingly worked inside contemporary art, collaborating with visual artists and filmmakers while exploring sound as a spatial, material and environmental medium.

For Artlovers, this is one of Berlin’s major exhibitions of 2026–27. The combination of Sakamoto’s cultural importance, the European-retrospective status and the scale of the installations makes it much more than an exhibition for music fans.

It is about what happens when sound becomes something you can inhabit — and that makes it one of the clearest examples of where contemporary art, technology and music now meet.