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Berlin Biennale

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Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva

 

The Berlin Biennale Goes Back in Time to a Fork in the Road of Our World Political History Where Western Capitalism Could Have Made Better Decisions.

"Art is probably the unique tool that the human mind has invented to make visible the invisible."

Kader Attia

 

 

Right from its onset, the statement made by Kader Attia’s Berlin Biennale Present! Still—co-curated with Đỗ Tường Linh, Marie Helene Pereira, Rasha Salti, Noam Segal, and Ana Teixeira Pinto—is that our current state of world affairs is not a random unfolding of history, but the consequence of centuries of economic developments and power mechanisms, from slavery to colonisation to racism to subjugation. And at its centre resides the self-deceptive belief the capitalistic Western model has in the superiority of its modernity and progress. 

Through 70 propositions, including historical works and more than 30 new commissions [or coproductions], and in six different locations throughout Berlin, this 12th edition of the Biennale points at the responsibilities of our current dominant model — and its unwillingness to assume them — for the “world of wounds” it produced. As a result, the de facto victims are those who don’t fit the myth of a homogeneous society: foreigners; people of different faiths, religions, sexual orientations, and ways of life; those suffering of mental illness; women; the poor; the colonised; the homeless; and so on—“The list of what has been destroyed by the capitalist project is endless” says Attia. To add insult to injury, their situations are dismissed, made invisible even, and this is what this exhibition is addressing: bring denial and its use as a weapon of control to the surface. Attia has spent more than 20 years working on questions of material and immaterial reparation, and draws from the work of a rich list of thinkers, including Franz Fanon, whom he quotes saying that “Dreaming is anti-colonial”; French philosopher Daniel Bougnoux, for he asks about what type of machines could be used for slowing us down; and Algerian psychoanalyst Karima Lazali and her work on invisibilisation. 

 

 

Ammar Bouras, Mai Nguyễn-Long, exhibition view. Berlim Biennal, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg. Photography: dotgain.info

 

 

At the Akademie der Künste [Hanseatenweg], Algerian artist Ammar Bouras presents the multimedia installation 24°3′55″N 5°3′23″E [2012/2017/2022], the title of which refers to the coordinates of the 1962 Béryl incident, a nuclear test carried by France in then French-occupied Algeria, and which resulted in contamination leaks. Through photographs and a video, the artist proposes a visual language made of fragments of the Algerian desert—near those coordinates—that together attempt to show the agonising reality of a landscape that was never healed, and still suffers in silence. Next to it is a shelf with Specimen [Permeate], by Mai Nguyễn-Long, a cabinet of curiosities that stocks what looks like body parts and organs in formaldehyde [but of dolls and toys]. It is to remind us of Agent Orange, the chemical used by the US military as part of its herbicidal warfare programme during the Vietnam War. Like the unexploded ordnance they also left behind, the consequences of the War are still impacting the populations of Indochina, including its new-borns, nearly 50 years later.

Elsewhere, Dana Levy’s Erasing the Green [2021/2022] focuses on the terrain traversed by the Green Line, a demarcation between Israel and Palestine established after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and used until 1967, whose status and legal framework is uncertain since. Levy's installation consists of a documentation wall [with colour prints, maps, and photographs] accompanied by a film that shows these with their sources and courtesies [digital archives, the artists’ own photos, children’s drawing, social media etc.] and blends them with an online conversation where two experts speak about the legal framework of the non-border, which incrementally benefits Israeli settlers. The work’s first impression is that of a documentary, which quickly becomes an exercise in multidirectional thinking where a constellation of details stage human rights, ecology, and geopolitics to create a visual and sonic mind scape of sorts. The result is a conceptual portrait of the physical, environmental, and legal erosion of Palestinian lands and of the imbalance of power between the two sides. 

Nearby, another conversation between two protagonists unfolds — on the one hand is the last Javan rhinoceros of Vietnam, who was killed in 2010, and on the other the sacred Golden Turtle, a popular mythological hero who brought Vietnam’s independence from Chinese rule in the 15th century. Their voices are the narrative protagonists of Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires [2017], a beautifully made two-channel video installation where two screens mirror each other, not unlike an inwards-moving Rorschach test [in colours]. The rhino is angry at the human race for their greed and violence, while the turtle dispenses her wisdom in a soothing voice. The images on screen are neither quite illustrative of the conversation nor quite narrative on their own, but together, accompanied by a background musical soundtrack that strikes a balance between dream and anxiety, they offer a sad story rich in details: men are widening the rift between themselves, but also with Nature and the spiritual. Although presented in the context of Vietnam, the work has the quality of a fable, and as such it is universal. 

Another highlight of this Biennale is the short video Les Indes Galantes, by Clément Cogitore, at the Hamburger Bahnhof. It takes its title from an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, to the tune of which a diverse group of krump dancers battle feverishly. lt is a delicious encounter, dramatically filmed in chiaroscuro, powerful and invigorating, and it offers a hopeful release at the very end of a display of very confronting works. One such is Layth Kareem’s The City Limits [2014], where the artist asked friends and family to gather in a junkyard that had been the scene of an explosion in Baghdad in 2006. An abandoned car serves as a cabin to watch images of daily violence in Iraq and record personal reactions [participants typed sentences on the provided computer or talked to the camera]. The result is heart-breaking. Most share a sense of helplessness in the face of the continuous state of fear for their lives they are subjected to. In succession, messages such as “I can’t watch this” or "Damn my parents who gave birth to me in this Iraq” appear; many others refer to God as a potential salvation, yet some as a source of blame. One of the most disturbing interventions at the Hamburger Bahnhof is Soluble poison: Scenes from the American occupation in Baghdad, by Jean-Jacques Lebel, which traps you in a labyrinth of walls made of blown-out photos of selfies made by American soldiers documenting the atrocities they subjected their Iraqi prisoners to. Besides shocking the viewer like a sensationalist tabloid [and, again, these images have circulated for a while now] and obscuring other works in the show, it doesn’t offer further resolution or artistic transcendence. But the redeeming quality of the work is the biography of the artist himself. Born in 1936, Lebel has been an anti-colonialist and anti-war activist for decades, and he is known as the one who made the first Happening in Europe in the 1960s. He is also the instigator of the impressive and historical Grand tableau antifasciste collectif [1960], also on show at the Biennale at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, a collective painting [Lebel, Antonio Recalcati, Gianni Dova, Roberto Crippa, Erró, Enrico Baj] that denounces the torture and rape of 15-year-old Djamila Boupacha. An activist from the Algerian National Liberation Front [FLN], she was wrongly accused of a bomb attack in Algiers in 1960. The painting was seized by the carabinieri two weeks after Galeria Brera in Milan showed it in June 1961, and was only retrieved 27 years later. 

 

Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige, exhibition view. Berlim Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Photography: Silke Briel

 

 

In the same ground-floor high-ceiling space is the intriguing intervention by Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige, a Sri Lankan artist currently living in France. In her presentation, an arresting topless 3D-printed replica of herself, only slightly smaller, Self-Portrait as Restitution — from a Feminist Point of View [2020] stands with a strange combination of fright and defiance in her eyes. In her hands, she firmly holds a copy of the skull of an Adivasi man. As a woman of colour, the representation of her partially naked body attempts to challenge the usual erotisation and exoticism associated with the representation of people of colour since colonial art times. Paying homage to her ancestors, the Indigenous Adivasi people of Sri Lanka [formerly known as Vedda], her work is based on research into the collection of skeletal remains held today in museums in Basel, Berlin, and Paris, which were brought [unscrupulously] by Swiss naturalists Paul and Fritz Sarasin from their scientific expeditions to Ceylon [today’s Sri Lanka] between 1883 to 1907. Several photographs from her series 136 years ago & now [2019] hang on the wall nearby, each showing the hand of the artist holding an archival mugshot, front and side, of an Adivasi woman against a Sri Lankan landscape. Performative in its preparation, the artist went back to Sri Lanka for this series, in order to release the trauma associated with the mechanical anthropological treatment of her ancestors by White Europeans. By holding their likeness up high, she releases their soul back to their homeland in a thoughtful gesture. 

 

 

Myriam El Haïk, exhibition view. Bienal de Berlim, KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Photography: Silke Briel

 

 

In a cave-like space nearby, Portuguese artist João Polido [2022] presents a newly commissioned multi-channel sound installation with suspended wooden disks engraved with minimal patterns and birds’ silhouettes. The work is abstract, but we learn that it is a form of resistance against the rigid codes of the patriotic folklorisation of Portuguese national identity, inherited from Salazar's 40-year-long dictatorship, which only ended in 1968. Upstairs, more sound and cultural identities explorations are on-going. Franco-Moroccan artist and composer Myriam-El-Haik’s installation of Berber carpets and drawings takes us to a suspended place in time where a thread, a musical score [through interventions on the piano], and a drawn line meet to create a singular language through which to see the world holistically. 

 

 

Nil Valter, exhibition view. Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Photography: Silke Briel

 

 

In the entrance is Exile Is a Hard Job [1983/2022], by pioneer artist of socially engaged art Nil Valter. It is composed of a wallpaper and several screens featuring archival videos of interviews with Portuguese and Turkish families living in France, who share their experience of exile and immigration. By putting our attention to these stories, the artist offers them — and the individuals who can relate to them — a means of validation and confidence in order to participate in the discourse of society building. 

 

 

Mathieu Pernot, exhibition view. Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Photography: Silke Briel

 

 

It is shown next to another work focusing on an invisibilised community, by French artist Mathieu Pernot. Several photographs from his series Les Gorgans [The Gorgans, 1995—2015] portrays the members of a Roma family living in the South of France to whom the artist grew closer over the years. It is at once voyeuristic, for the viewer is confronted to a social reality and the cultural codes of a community living on the fringes of French [and European] society, and full of affection and social liberation. Never straying too far from the theme of decolonisation, KW also shows Lisbon/Luanda-based Mónica de Miranda's film Path to the Stars [2022] — named after the poem “O caminho das estrelas” [1953], by poet and former president of Angola Agostinho Neto, who led Angola to its independence from Portugal in 1975. It is a 34-minute solemn odyssey in the jungle that features a Black woman travelling on a small boat along the Angolan Kwanza River. Both a symbol of the country’s occupation by the colonisers — who used it to navigate inland— and independence, for the strength of its flow also nourished multiple sites of resistance. The determined protagonist’s navigation along the river, like a psychological but also campaign-like voyage, is punctuated by esoteric encounters on its banks, with her older self, animals, soldiers, and such.

Ironically, considering the Biennale includes many academic works, the installation that literally represents a classroom is one of the most playful. All Fragments of the World Will Come Back Here to Mend Each Other, by The School of Mutants, at the Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz, features a large round ottoman that invites you to share its cushy surface with others, which the artists did when I was visiting. It also comprises colourful painted school chairs, fabrics, and photography, and an expert boutique library that includes Léopold Sédar Senghor’s speech “Pour une relecture africaine de Marx et d'Engels”, Traité du Tout Monde by Édouard Glissant, and a book on the movie Bamako by Abderrahmane Sissako, which through political fiction denounced the exploitative effects of globalisation in Africa. 

In this venue also, Haitian artist Dubréus Lhérisson shows several pedestaled glittery skulls. He retrieved them in the aftermath of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake and decorated them evoking Vodou traditions at the intersection between the festive and the macabre. In the same space is the whimsical short film Dream Your Museum, 2022, by Khandakar Ohida, affectionally inspired by her uncle, a compulsive hoarder whose memorabilia at home spans 47 years of collecting. The candid relationship between the child and the elder in what appears an amateur museum in the tropical wilderness is endearing. More academic, Moses März delivers several fascinating pencilled maps on paper nearby. Inspired by Édouard Glissant's thought on radical diversity, the artist's own collaborative work at the pan-African literary magazine Chimurenga Chronic, and movements outside of the "Euroliberal paradigm”, März creates intriguing mind maps of sort putting those thoughts in relation to Berlin, where the artist lives and works. They are erudite and intriguing, like smart political infographics.

 

 

Moses März, exhibition views. Berlin Biennale, Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz. Photography: dotgain.info

 

 

Although the main culprit throughout the show is the hegemony of Western capitalism—directly or indirectly—the works unfold like independent isles of meaning, each providing a window into their own, and conceptually organised in four directions, like those of a compass: heritage and debates around restitution; ecology; the need to decolonise feminist discourse; and the relationship between fascism and colonialism—ultimately, the exhibition unfolds as a continuous list of unnerving world injustices. In larger spaces, it even feels like visiting the sections of an alternative library—strong contents, albeit uninspired hanging. But, not unlike in traditional therapy, this Biennale advocates that, if the symptoms persist, the first step is to acknowledge and understand the trauma—and this it does well. This grim, at times guilty-looking, albeit intellectually stimulating show, and its idea to revisit moments in time that still have devastating consequences in our present, is valuable research very much worth considering, whichever side of the world you come from or crossed over to. 

 

 

Berlin Biennale

 

 

 

 

 

Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva  is an art critic, curator and writer. She is a regular international contributor to art publications such as Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and other publications including the South China Morning Post. She was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hong Kong-based independent art magazine Pipeline that ran print editions form 2011 to 2016 where she curated thematic issues with artists, curators and other art contributors. She has a Masters degree in International Prospective from Paris V University. She is the editor-in-chief of Curtain Magazine.

 

 

Proofreading by Diogo Montenegro

 

 

 

 

 

 

The School of Mutants, exhibition views. Berlin Biennale, Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz. Photography: dotgain.info

Cover Image: Khandakar Ohida, exhibition views. Berlin Biennale, Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz. Photography: dotgain.info

 

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