Text/Siddhartha Mitter, Compiler/Lu Linhan
Recently, the 12th Berlin Biennale "still exists!" "(Still Present!) is on display. It is a serious exhibition without a sense of humor, the aim of which is to soothe "all the wounds accumulated in the history of Western modernity". At the risk of conceptual overload, the exhibition discusses the various crises that exist today. While the Biennale is "wrestling" with the agenda, it is also "wrestling" with itself.
Karl Marx, after studying in Berlin, wrote in 1843 that to imagine a new world, you first had to rigorously deconstruct the old world, "a ruthless critique of all that exists."
This critical spirit pervades this year's Berlin Biennale. The biennale is held in five museums in Berlin and curated by the French-Algerian interdisciplinary artist Kader Attia. Whatever you do, you'll immediately see works of art that struggle with the legacy of war and colonialism, about race, gender, class, ecological destruction, disinformation, and social issues.
Starting at the KW Center for Contemporary Art, you'll see a wall-sized installation featuring photographic and video interviews with Portuguese and Turkish workers who lived in Paris in the 1980s. Created by feminist artist Nil Yalter, the work is titled Exile is a Hard Job.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan's Air Conditioning
In the first exhibition hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof museum, a continuous image of clouds is displayed along the horizontal band of four walls. This is not a photograph, but a synthetic image made by Lawrence Abu Hamdan based on data from 15 years of Israeli surveillance flights in Lebanese airspace.
At the Akademie der Künste at the Brandenburg Gate, you'll enter a space filled with huge paintings by Moses März. These works depict political networks and intellectual histories, with themes including radical ecology, the issue of the return of looted art, black politics in Germany, and anti-racism.
This year's Berlin Biennale "still exists!" (Still Present!) is a serious exhibition that will run until September 18. While the Biennale also contains elegant moments and some touching clips, most of the time, it doesn't have a sense of humor. Among the 69 artists and groups participating in the exhibition, there are veterans in this circle, and there are also many newcomers. This is not a "Global South" exhibition, and although there are many representative works by European artists, it still includes many art groups from Vietnam, India and Arabic-speaking countries.
Vietnamese artist Dao Chau Hai's Ballad of the East Sea
This is a powerful exhibition, not a pleasant one. While the Biennale is "wrestling" with the agenda, it is also "wrestling" with itself. Atiyah's curatorial statement noted that today's "massive, massive, monumental exhibitions reflect the material excesses of global capitalism" and asked, "Then why another exhibition?"
Atiyah's answer is that art may be unique in its ability to withdraw our attention from algorithmic coercion of social surveillance. It is a transitional point where, under the guidance of the artist, the old is abandoned and the new is accepted.
This kind of viewing experience can feel unforgiving. There is a lot of documentary and investigative art on the screen. Forensic Architecture, a groundbreaking data and video research institute, is highly influential, and the showcase includes a large installation that reviews some of the agency's major investigations over the years, another about a Russian airstrike in Kiev (which, while timely, but not very enlightening), and multiple projects by researchers associated with the agency. Susan Schuppli's video shows atrocities committed by Canadian police against Indigenous people and abuse of immigrants by U.S. border agents; Imani Jacqueline Brown, in a multimedia installation that evokes more memories, shows Louisiana's polluted wetlands, depicts the hazards there, and proposes restoration.
Imani Jacqueline Brown's multimedia installation What's Left at the End of the Earth? 》
Renowned scholar Ariella Azoulay presented an article at the KW Center for Contemporary Art exploring how visual documentation after World War II avoided the rape of German women involving Soviet soldiers. But her project is just a small piece of paper on the wall, coupled with a form of related books that doesn't allow viewers to pick up and browse, making the presentation of this important topic frustrating.
Works by Areira Azoulay
In the middle of the exhibition area of the Museum of Contemporary Art, there is a work that looks strange and disgusting, upsetting the balance of the entire exhibition. French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel's "Soluble Poison" is a room-sized labyrinth installation strewn with partitions filled with photographs taken by American soldiers as they mistreat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. As a work of art, it is obscene, but it is also valid. At least in the display of these events rekindled the anger of the people.
Soluble Poison is the most shocking work of this year's Berlin Biennale, which was presented at the 2018 Paris Joint Exhibition. In addition, Lebert has another work in this biennale, which was created half a century earlier than this one. Created in 1960, Large Collective anti - fascist Painting was co-created with five other European artists in response to the abuse of Algerian activist Djamila Boupacha by French soldiers, which later became a public welfare event. It is a slightly fancy work with a uniquely violent style.
Jean-Jacques Lebel's Soluble Poison
Lebel co-painted Large Collective anti - fascist Painting
In addition to being able to tell how a certain European and male pattern in anti-racist and anti-colonial art came into being in real political struggles, the historical boundaries between Lebel's two works are probably the least productive vehicle for this biennale. On the outside of Soluble Poison, there is a warning sign suggesting that the work depicts intense violence, but does not illustrate the subject. It instructs that people who have "experienced racial trauma or abuse" should not enter here.
Fortunately, this biennial operates in many locations. Although the exhibition as a whole has close ties with Atiyah, he is also supported by a curatorial team of five women from around the world. With the combined efforts of Ana Teixeira Pinto, Đỗ Tường Linh, Marie Helene Pereira, Noam Segal, and Rasha Salti, they opened up a space of poetry.
Installation by Sammy Baloji
In the Western Hansa Neighborhood, where the exhibitions retain the vibrancy of social and imperial history while adopting an environmental orientation. Sammy Baloji designed a moving installation that included a small greenhouse tropical plant (traders used to ship specimens to Europe); There is also a picture of a Congolese veteran of the Belgian army who was captured by germany during World War I and forced to participate in their ethnographic recordings. Not far away, exquisite paintings by Temitayo Ogunbiyi depict okra, water leaves and other vegetables in Nigerian cuisine.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme's Oh Shining Star Testify
The installation Oh Shining Star Testify by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme on three large screens is poetic and dramatic, with projected images divided by stacked planks to form a kind of stage set. The work uses a surveillance video of a 14-year-old Palestinian boy killed by Israeli soldiers while picking an edible plant through the wall. Some shots, a soundtrack and concise text give this work a classical tragic power.
Mai Nguyen-Long's "Vomit Girl" series of sculptures shows the historical trauma of the Vietnam War
The French art group PEROU, for its part, pointed out the absurdity, putting together video files of the police cracking down and cleaning up a gypsy camp on the outskirts of Paris with municipal orders approving the actions, showing that the imagination of the bureaucracy was completely out of touch with the interests of the people.
In the Biennale, there are many other things to enjoy. On a single project, Mai Nguyen-Long's "Vomit Girl" and "Sample" sculpture series tell the story of the explosion of Vietnam's "Agent Orange", with the artistic style hovering between playfulness and horror. Mónica de Miranda shot a film in the mangroves of the Kwanza River in Angola, lush and subtly linking matriarchal knowledge, civil war and ecology. Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige associates photographs of the indigenous inhabitants of Sri Lanka in European museums, landscapes of the island and the artist himself, presenting a series of photographs, sculptures, videos, texts, etc. in the form of ethnographic displays and self-sculptures.
Films shot by Monica de Miranda
Mayuri Chari's vulvas, carved from cow dung and sewn on cloth, are more straightforward. In the Hindu obsession with purity, this work addresses the Indian humiliation of the female body. Chari and two others, Prabhakar Kamble and Birender Yadav, who come from the lowest communities in India's caste system, point straight to the front lines with a sense of material urgency, showing items like feces, brooms, urns, and sandals from construction sites that are clearer than any political declaration.
Works by Mayuri Chari
Work by Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige
The Berlin Biennale is confident and determined, and from the exhibition roster and curatorial team one can feel a broad and consistent global vision. Of course, the results are varied, and one has to study these extended expressions of the works and try to understand these collisions.
The contradictions of the exhibition reflect the concept of "decolonization" that Artias has quoted extensively in the text of the exhibition and in his past projects. The word emerged from academia and circulated in the art world for about a decade. "Decolonization" originated with Latin American scholars who believe that the entire modern world has been built— in fact, since 1492, the world has been polluted by colonialism, race, hierarchy, and so on.
Decolonization in the traditional sense is a political, territorial project with no inherent dissatisfaction with modernity. Today's "decolonization practice" is about changing the body of knowledge, a more ambiguous, and potentially never-ending project. This biennale is a collection of "decolonization strategies". The task, Atiyah writes, was to heal "all the wounds accumulated in the history of Western modernity."
If that's the case, because of these perpetual harms, every institution, including biennials and museums, needs to be decolonized. This Berlin Biennale also struggles to avoid this tendency – it is extremely heavy on its own unique concepts. Even so, the Biennale is subtly creative in many ways.
(This article is compiled from The New York Times, and the author is an art critic)
Editor-in-Charge: Lu Linhan
Proofreader: Ding Xiao