BERLIN — To envision a new world, Karl Marx wrote in 1843 after studying in the German capital, you must first rigorously unpack the old one with “a ruthless critique of everything that exists”.
That energy permeates this year’s Berlin Biennale, which takes place in five museums in the city, curated by French-Algerian artist Kader Attia. However you approach the event, you are immediately confronted with art grappling with the legacies of war and colonialism; domination by race, sex, class and caste; ecological damage; disinformation; and social control.
Start at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art and you’ll stumble upon a wall-sized installation of photos and video interviews of working-class Portuguese and Turkish immigrants in Paris in the 1980s. The work was created by feminist artist Nil Yalter and is entitled ‘Exile Is a Hard Job’.
In the Hamburger Bahnhof museum, the first room contains a continuous image of clouds in a horizontal band along four walls. It is not a photograph but a digital composition by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, built from data from 15 years of Israeli surveillance flights in the airspace of Lebanon.
And at the Akademie der Künste, next to the Brandenburg Gate, you enter a space of massive works on paper by Moses März charting the political networks and intellectual history of topics such as radical ecology, the restitution of looted art, and black politics and anti-racism in Germany.
This Biennale, which runs until September 18, is serious. Very serious. It borders on humorless, although it also has moments of grace and some really transporting pieces. The roster of 69 artists and collectives includes well-known warhorses of the circuit, as well as many newcomers. It’s not a ‘global South’ exhibition – Europe is well represented – but it still tends in that direction, including notable clusters from Vietnam, India, and Arabic-speaking countries.
A strong show more than a pleasant one, the Biennale struggles with itself as well as with the problem. After all, biennials and museums are centers of power; the curator is a gatekeeper. Attia’s curatorial statement notes that the current “abundance of sprawling, monumental exhibitions” reflects “the material excesses” of global capitalism, asking, “So why add another exhibition to this?”
The answer he gets is that art – perhaps uniquely – can reclaim our attention from algorithmically enforced social control. The title of the Biennale, ‘Still Present!’, sounds partly as an exhortation, partly as proof of life. It aspires to the transition point where that relentless critique pays off, where the old is repelled for the new, with artists leading the way.
The experience can feel unforgiving. There are belts on screens of documentary and investigative art. Forensic Architecture, the pioneering data and video investigation collective, has a strong presence, including a large installation that recapitulates some of its most important investigations over the years, another about a Russian airstrike in Kiev (timely, but not hugely illuminating) and separate projects of researchers associated with the group. Videos by Susan Schuppli examine Canadian police brutality against indigenous peoples and abuse of migrants by US border agents; In a more evocative and personal multimedia installation, Imani Jacqueline Brown travels through the polluted wetlands of Louisiana, charting toxicity to suggest reparations.
At KW, a text work by leading scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay examines how visual records of the aftermath of World War II avoid the widespread rape of German women by Soviet soldiers. Her project is presented as fine print pages on the wall, plus a table display of related books that visitors are not allowed to pick up and browse – a frustrating mise-en-scene for an important topic.
And halfway down the section in the Hamburger Bahnhof is a work so grotesque and deliberately vicious that it threatens to destabilize the entire show. “Poison Soluble”, by Jean-Jacques Lebel, a French artist and veteran of activist causes, is a room-sized maze installation with partitions covered with huge magnifications of the snapshots American soldiers took as they abuse Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib -jail .
As art, it’s obscene – and certainly effective, at least in rekindling anger at these events, but when I tried to linger in the installation to pick up deeper signals, I was distracted by visitors horrified. on their heels and others made their way through, clumsily navigating around me between the panels of blood.
“Poison Soluble” was previously featured in a 2018 joint exhibition by Lebel and Attia in Paris; the two are friends. It is by far the most shocking work of this Berlin Biennale. But Lebel is involved in another piece in the show, half a century older: the 1960 “Large Collective Antifascist Painting”, created with five other European artists in response to the torture of Algerian activist Djamila Boupacha by French soldiers, who was a cause celebre. The painting is a somewhat gaudy period piece, violent in its own way.
The historical line between the two Lebel pieces is arguably the least productive vector of this Biennale – except as an object lesson in how a certain European and masculine form of anti-racist and anti-colonial art, though forged in real political battles, lost its way and into exploitation expired. Outside of “Poison Soluble,” a warning sign indicates that the work depicts intense violence, but without mentioning the subject. The instruction not to allow people “who have experienced racial trauma or abuse” to enter feels paternalistic and exclusionary.
Fortunately, this Biennale operates in several registers. While the show generally aligns closely with Attia’s preoccupations as an artist, he was assisted by a cosmopolitan curatorial team of five women—Ana Teixeira Pinto, Do Tuong Linh, Marie Helene Pereira, Noam Segal, and Rasha Salti—and it’s a relief when their combined efforts open up space for the poetic.
This is remarkable in the other location of the Akademie der Künste, in the western district of Hansaviertel, where the exhibition takes on an ecological orientation while at the same time remaining animated by social and imperial history. A poignant installation by Sammy Baloji includes tropical plants in a small greenhouse of the kind merchants used to ship specimens to Europe; a speaker softly plays drums and chants by a Congolese veteran of the Belgian army in World War I who was captured by the Germans and forced to participate in their ethnographic recordings. Nearby, beautiful drawings by Temitayo Ogunbiyi display okra, water leaf, and other vegetables of Nigerian cuisine, along with recipes.
Even as the show explores current crises, it benefits from blending documentary and other techniques. “Oh Shining Star Testify”, an installation by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme on three large screens, is lyrical and dramatic, the projected images are interrupted by stacked planks that form a kind of stage setting. The work uses surveillance tape of the murder by Israeli soldiers of a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who crossed a dividing wall to pick an edible plant, plus other footage, a soundtrack and concise text cards. It has the power of an ancient tragedy.
The French collective PEROU plays on absurdity: it combines video documentation of the police action and the eviction of a Roma encampment on the outskirts of Paris with a reading of the long, highly procedural municipal order that approved these actions, whereby the complete decoupling of bureaucratic imagination of human effort.
There’s a lot more to enjoy at this Biennale, line by line. Mai Nguyen-Long’s ‘Vomit Girl’ and ‘Specimen’ series of sculptures hover between playful and macabre as they grapple with the aftermath of the Agent Orange bombing in Vietnam. Created in the mangroves of Angola’s Kwanza River, Mónica de Miranda’s lavish film deftly connects matrilineal knowledge, civil war, and ecological dreaming. A remarkable suite — photography, sculpture, video, text — by Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige connects photographs and human remains of Sri Lankan indigenous peoples in European museums with the island’s landscape and even the artist’s own body, through a sculptural self-portrait in the manner of an ethnographic exhibition.
Even more blunt are Mayuri Chari’s vulvas, sculpted from cow dung and stitched works on fabric that address the shame of women’s bodies in India, amid conservative Hinduism’s obsession with purity. Chari and two others, Prabhakar Kamble and Birender Yadav, are Dalit artists from the lowest communities in the Indian caste system. Their works come straight from the front lines, with a material urgency – dung, brooms, urns, rough sandals from construction sites – that is clearer than any political manifesto.
It couldn’t be further in affect and clarity than Lebel’s Abu Ghraib monstrosity or other more conceptually outdated entries. This Biennale is assertive and committed, and you feel a globally congruent global perspective in the selection and curatorial team. Yet the results are everywhere – one has to study the scattering in an effort to understand the collision that caused it.
The contradictions, I suspect, reflect those of the ‘decolonial’, a concept that Attia evokes abundantly in the exhibition texts and in his earlier projects. The term has been spreading in the art world for a decade or so since it jumped out of academia. It was created by Latin American scholars who argue that the entire fabric of the modern world — in fact since 1492 — has been contaminated by the racial and other hierarchies of colonialism.
While decolonization in the classical sense was a political, territorial project with no inherent grievances against modernity, today’s “decolonial practice” is about changing systems of knowledge—a more woolly, potentially endless project. This Biennale is presented as a meeting of ‘decolonial strategies’. The task, Attia writes, is to tend to “all the wounds that have accumulated in the history of Western modernity.”
If so, then every institution needs decolonization because it perpetuates the damage, including biennials and museums. But the risk is solipsism: more institutional thinking, just different. This Berlin Biennale feels entangled in this way, overloaded by its own conceptual apparatus. Yet many of its parts point beautifully in the direction of freedom.
