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.

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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…)

Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art has announced that the New York-based DIS Collective will be the curator’s for the 2016 edition of the Berlin Biennale. The collective has made increasingly larger waves among the institutional art world in the past years, drawing rave reviews for its DISown exhibition, as well as its DIS Images Studios project last year.  Previous curators include Klaus Biesenbach, Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni. (more…)

Rock Climbing Wall at DISown, via Art Observed

Dis has always had one foot in the world of fashion.  Its close ties to Hood by Air and Telfar Clemens notwithstanding, the New York-based collective has a long history of covering contemporary fashion and arts with a similarly detached eye, always seeking to underline the commodity culture lurking behind the guise of both “high arts.”  Now, the group is taking its longtime skirting of the line between art and commerce to a new level, opening its “retail diffusion” shop DisOwn at Red Bull Studios this week during Armory Week.

DISown at Red Bull Studios (Installation View), via Dis (more…)

Multimedia arts publication DIS Magazine has announced a new partnership with 89plus, the young artist program co-founded by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist, for the arts grant competition Younger Than Rihanna, aimed at offering money for young artists and their creative proposals.  Hosted on the DIS website, the competition welcomes young artists born in 1989 or later to upload their work and statement, placing them in contention for over $19,000 in grant money, and a gallery exhibition this fall. (more…)