Ozem Altin at Berlin Biennale, via Art Observed
With summer in full swing, the Berlin Biennale has opened in the German capital, bearing the title We Don’t Need Another Hero. Referencing Tina Turner’s song from 1985, the show points to a moment before the major geopolitical shifts still rippling across the globe. (more…)
Berlin Biennale at the Kunstakademie, all photos via Anna Corrigan for Art Observed
While the DIS-curated Berlin Biennale is spread across a range of exhibitions and venues in the German capital, the beating heart of this year’s show is arguably the Academy of the Arts, a sleek modernist building located adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate and perched over a square heaving with tourist activity and history. Walking into the foyer of this building, one immediately encounters a series of large, high-resolution photographs depicting warped, fragmented nationalities and identities. Further upstairs, the cluster of screens, plastic and digital games that have come to define this Biennale buzz take over, creating a clustered, albeit striking experience of the post-digital arts landscape. The location is densely packed with artists and works whose nationalities and political concerns range from brand-name art projects to a poignantly honest confessional rap about the refugee experience in Berlin.
An Installation by Puppies Puppies
The 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, curated by DIS (the New York art collective formed by collaborators Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro), has long promoted a vision of the future as now. Steeping their work in the ambitious task of interrogating relationships between the human and the digital, the collective has been turned loose on the prominent art biennial, using their unique brand of commentary on politics, happiness, commercial branding and the paradox of the modern age to frame the show as a brand, a tourist trap, and a materialization of the virtual in tandem. The Present in Drag channels the discomfort and drastic uncertainty that is a product of uncertain links and porous borders established by technological advancement. Expanding beyond its traditional venue at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, additional sites for this Biennale are scattered throughout the city in various buildings and institutions. Its main point of departure is the Academie der Künst, located off Pariser Platz, and to the tourist mainstay Brandenburg Gate, and moves through the fabric of the city with its humorous, haunting and at times grotesque commentary on contemporary art in the digital age. (more…)
The 9th Berlin Biennale has announced its locations for this summer, including the Akademie der Künste, the European School of Management and Technology, the Feuerle Collection, the Blue-Star sightseeing boat by Reederei Riedel, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The Biennale will be curated by DIS, and focuses on “the virtual as the real, nations as brands, people as data, culture as capital, wellness as politics, and happiness as GDP.” (more…)
Video still from Episode 3, artwork by Renzo Martens
One of the highlights of the current Berlin Biennial is the work of a young Dutch artist – Renzo Martens. Titled Episode 3 (2008), Martens’s 90-minute video constitutes a challenging portrait of contemporary media and capitalist exploitative foundation that continues to run a deep division between North and South. Martens takes a candid, often tragically ironic, approach in exposing and criticizing First-World self-righteous image.
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Oranienplatz 17, Berlin – Kreuzberg. All images by Art Observed unless otherwise noted.
Of the circuit of international biennials, Berlin’s event remains one of the most unpredictable and fresh contemporary art forums around. Opening to the general public on June 11th, the Kathrin Rhomberg-curated Berlin Biennal is titled: what is waiting out there. The exhibition cites its crux in the ambiguity of reality, space, and time: out there. Spreading its reach across six venues–4 in Kreuzberg district, 2 in Mitte)–the Biennial unfolds into an artistic treasure hunt, both in terms of the pieces it presents, and in the unusual environments Rhomberg has selected for the exhibitions. Berlin’s eclectic atmosphere serves as a natural complement to the aesthetics and emotions of the show.
Sprawling across the 2nd floor Oranienplatz 17 gallery is a work by Marcus Geiger, titled Kommune. Image via Welt.de
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