Berlin — To imagine a new world, Karl Marx wrote in 1843 after studying in the German capital, you first rigorously unpacked the old in “a ruthless critique of everything that exists.” Have to.
That energy will penetrate this year Berlin BiennaleIs curated by French Algerian artist Kader Attia and spans five museums in the city. No matter how you approach the event, you will instantly encounter the art of tackling the heritage of war and colonialism. Domination by race, gender, class, caste. Ecological damage; disinformation; and social control.
Starting with the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, he hit a wall-sized installation of working-class Portuguese and Turkish immigrants in Paris in the 1980s with photographs and video interviews.made Feminist artist Nil JarterThe title of the work is “Exile is a hard job”.
The first room of the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum has a series of images of horizontal strips of clouds along four walls.By digital compositing, not by photo Lawrence AbhamdanConstructed from data on Israeli surveillance for 15 years Flight in Lebanon airspace.
Then, next to the Brandenburg Gate, at Akademie der Künste, you’ll enter a space decorated with a huge collection of paper-written works. Moses Meltz It represents the political network and intellectual history of topics such as radical ecology, the return of columnar art, German black politics and anti-racism.
This Biennale, which will be held until September 18, is tough. It’s very serious. It also includes graceful moments and some really transporting parts, but it’s approaching something without humor. The roster of 69 artists and groups includes the familiar war horses on the circuit, but there are also many newcomers. This is not a “Global South” exhibition, Europe is well represented, but it is still leaning that way, including notable clusters from Vietnam, India and Arabic-speaking countries.
The Biennale is more than a fun show, it’s more than just a fun show, it’s not just about the subject, it’s about itself. After all, the Biennale and the museum are places of power. The curator is a gatekeeper. Attia’s Curator statement He said that today’s “large number of vast and monumental exhibitions” reflects the “material excess” of global capitalism, “Why add yet another exhibition to this?” Is it? “
The answer he arrives at is that art can probably independently regain our attention from the social controls enforced by the algorithms. The title of the Biennale, “Still Present!”, Sounds as a proof of some recommendations and some lives. It aims at an artist-led transitional point where its ruthless criticism bears fruit, the old is stripped away for the new.
The experience can be felt relentlessly. There is a series of screens for documentaries and research arts. Forensic architecture, A pioneering data and video research group, a large installation summarizing some of the major researches over the years, another installation on Russia’s airstrikes in Kieu (timely, but not so bright), With groups that have a strong presence, such as individual projects by related researchers.Video by Susan Supuri Investigate Canadian police atrocities against indigenous peoples and immigrant abuse by US border guards. Imanilla Clean BrownTravel through the polluted wetlands of Louisiana, map toxicity and offer compensation in a more exciting and personal multimedia installation.
At KW, text works by well-known scholars Ariella Aisha Azurey Find out how visual records of the aftermath of World War II avoid dealing with the widespread rape of German women by Soviet soldiers. Her project is presented as a small printed page on the wall and a table display of related books that visitors are not allowed to pick up and view. This is a frustrating Mise-en-Seine on an important topic.
And there is a risk of instability throughout the show, with very grotesque and deliberately vulgar pieces in the middle of the Hamburger Bahnhof section. “Poison Soluble” Jean-Jacques RubelA French artist and activist veteran, is a room-sized labyrinth installation with a partition covered with a huge blast of snapshots taken by American soldiers during the abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war in Abu Ghraib prison.
Obscene as art, and certainly effective at rekindling anger at least at these events, but if you stay in the installation and try to pick up a deeper signal, the visitor will hate you and turn your heels or something else. Awkwardly navigated between the gusset panels on the way, distracted by people pushing them.
Previously featured “Poison Soluble” 2018 joint exhibition In Paris by Lebel and Attia. The two are friends. This is by far the most shocking work at the Berlin Biennale. But Lebel is involved in another piece of the show, half a century ago. It is a 1960 “large-scale group anti-fascist painting”. Created with 5 other European artists In response to the torture of Algerian activist Jamila Bupacha by French soldiers Cause Celebrity.. The painting is a rather flashy historical drama and is violent in itself.
The historic line between the two Lebel works is probably the least productive vector of this Biennale. Except for certain European and masculine anti-racist and anti-colonial art modes, which were trained in actual political battles, but lost their way and were exploited. Outside of “Poison Soluble,” warning signs indicate that the work portrays violent violence, but does not mention the topic. The instruction that “experienced racial trauma and abuse” should not be entered feels paternal and exclusive.
Fortunately, this Biennale works with multiple registers. The show as a whole closely resonates with Atia’s commitment as an artist, but he is endorsed by an international curator team of five women (Anouncer Pinto, Dotuonlin, Marie Helen Pereira, Noam Seagull, Rasha Salti). it was done. An open space of effort for poets.
This is noteworthy elsewhere in the Akademie der Künste in the western part of the Hansaviertel district. There, the exhibition is environmentally oriented, energized by social and imperial history.Affected installation by Sammy Barodi Includes tropical plants in small greenhouses of the type used by traders to ship specimens to Europe. The speaker quietly plays drums and songs by a Belgian Congo veteran who was captured by the Germans in World War I and forced to participate in ethnographic recordings.Exquisite painting nearby I tried it Along with the recipe, I draw Nigerian okra, water leaves and other vegetables.
Even when the show is investigating the current crisis, it benefits from mixing documentaries with other techniques. Installation by “Oh, the testimony of a shining star” Basel Abbas and Luang Abouram Three large screens, lyrical and dramatic, projected images split by stacked boards create a kind of stage set. This work uses other footage, soundtracks, and concise text cards, in addition to surveillance tapes of the killing of a 14-year-old Palestinian boy by Israeli soldiers who choose edible plants across separation barriers. It has the power of ancient tragedy.
French group Peru Key to absurdity: It is a bureaucratic imagination that repeats video documents of police crackdowns and the removal of Roman camps on the outskirts of Paris, reading long and highly procedural local government orders that approved their actions. Shows that is completely separated from humans.
There’s a lot more fun at this Biennale on a line item basis. Mai Nguyen-LongThe “Vomit Girl” and “Specimen” sculpture series of “Vomit Girl” floats between playful and creepy while working on the aftermath of the defoliant bombing in Vietnam. Monica de Miranda’s lush movie Made from the mangroves of the Kwanzaa River in Angola, it cleverly combines maternal knowledge, civil war, and ecological dreams.Notable suites of photos, sculptures, videos, texts and more Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige The photographs and remains of Sri Lankan indigenous peoples in museums in Europe are linked to the landscape of the island and the artist’s own body through sculptural self-portraits like ethnographic exhibits.
Even dull people Mayuri ChariThe vulva carved from cow dung and the work sewn on the cloth solve the shame of the Indian woman’s body in a conservative attachment to Hindu purity. Chari and the other two, Prabhakar Kamble When Birender Yadavthat is Dalit artist, From the lowest community of Indian caste system. Their work comes straight from the front lines and has important urgency (feces, brooms, jars, crude sandals from construction sites), which is clearer than any political manifesto.
It could not bring further influence and clarity from Lebel’s Abu Ghraib prison monster, or other more conceptually older entries. This Biennale is assertive and devoted, and I feel a broadly consistent global outlook for the roster and the entire curator team. Still, the results are everywhere. Scattering needs to be studied in order to understand the collisions that caused it.
I think that contradiction reflects the contradiction of “decoronial”, a concept that Atia has abundantly evoked in the texts of exhibitions and past projects. The term has spread to the world of art for about a decade after jumping out of academia.that is Latin American Scholar Those who claim that the entire construction of the modern world (in effect since 1492) is contaminated by colonial races and other classes.
Decolonization in the classical sense was a political and territorial project with no essential complaints about modernity, but today’s “decolonization practice” is about changing the system of knowledge. Thing. This Biennale is “Colonial strategy.. The challenge that Attia writes is the tendency to “all the scars that have accumulated throughout the history of modernity in the West.”
If so, all institutions, including biennales and museums, need decolonization to perpetuate the harm. But the risk is solipsism. It’s a more institutional way of thinking, it’s just different. This Berlin Biennale feels overloaded and intertwined by its unique conceptual equipment. Still, much of that part is beautifully pointing to freedom.
