30 June, 2022
Berlin Biennale 12
The Berlin Biennale 12 takes place across six venues and is titled ‘Still Present!’ Curated by Kader Attia, the artists reflect on a troubling world and the continuing impact of colonialization, right wing extremism, war and injustice. ’The present world is the way it is because it carries all of the wounds accumulated throughout the history of Western modernity’
Selected artist images: Lawrence Abu Hamadan; Amal Kenawy; Mai Nguyen-Long; Dan Chau Hai; Nil Yalter; Susan Schuppli; Asim Abdulaziz; Sven Johne; Zuzanna Hertzberg.
The Berlin Biennale 12 takes place across six venues and is titled ‘Still Present!’ Curated by Kader Attia, the artists reflect on a troubling world and the continuing impact of colonialization, right wing extremism, war and injustice. ’The present world is the way it is because it carries all of the wounds accumulated throughout the history of Western modernity’
Today we visited the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum and viewed works by some 20 artists. A number of the works were a reminder of the extent and depth of challenges the world faces.
The presentation by Forensic Architecture investigated Russia’s bombing of a site in Kiev that was the scene of Nazi Holocaust atrocities ‘covered up’ by the then invading Russian soldiers and implies a continuing effort to cover up.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan in a piece titled ‘Air Conditioning’ assembled details of Israeli military plane surveillance over Lebanon over a 15 year period ‘evoking the concept of atmospheric violence’. Following the 2006 July war Lebanese airspace was subject to F-35 fighter jets, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and low flying drones.
‘Shifting Collectives’ is the title of the work by David Chavalarias. He tracks over 5 million political interactions in the French twittersphere over more than 5 years. From Brexit, January 4 at Capitol Hill, the accession of Bolsonaro and Viktor d’Orban the tracking reveals the disruption of the democratic process and the rise of populist and fascist think groups.
Amal Kenawy’s work, ‘Silence of the Lambs’ was a reminder that public art can provide a stage for political expression. Her performance piece in Cairo, Egypt aroused strong reactions from passers-by and a questioning of the work and the motives of the artist.
KW Institute for Contempoary Art has 14 artists exhibiting their response to the theme ‘Still Present! Amongst those artists four stood out for me.
Zuzanna Hertzberg lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. Her art practice is to recover herstories of Jewish activism and the ‘blind spots of collective memory’. She has assembled ID cards, personal photos and articles from their collective meetings.
Alex Prague lives and works in LA, USA. Prager’s photographs are a reminder that ‘all fears, hopes, day jobs and aspirations are worthy of monumental and allegorical all presentation’.
Asim Abdulaziz lives and works in Aden, Yemen and is a visual artist, photographer and film maker. His work explores the act of knitting that in the USA was a significant way women participated in WW2 whilst in Yemen knitting is an act of solidarity in time of war, ‘entirely absurd’. The knitting he portrays is in an abandoned Hindu Temeple in Yemen and involves 10 men and is a ‘provocative gesture in a prudish culture which underscores the acts absurdity’.
Maithu Bui lives and works in Berlin, Germany and her work responds to the need for the world not to suffer form post colonialism amnesia. It aims to ‘establish an archive of personal memories and transgenerational traumas’.
Akademie der Kunste, Pariser Plastz exhibits the work of 19 artists. Once again I have chosen those that provided for me an insight into their art and political activism agenda reflecting the Berlin Biennale’s theme.
Moses Marz lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Moses uses a mapping approach translates texts into lines, images and quotations that are more about story telling. This approach is used to trace individual and collective movements of the Black radical tradition.
Prabhakar Kamble lives and works in Mumbai, India addresses the marginalisation of India’s silent majority and the hierarchies of caste. He relocated to the village where he was born and has constructed ‘Stacked Vessels’ to reflect the structure of Indian society and atop each a symbol of dehumanisation - a cow bell (more worthy than a human being), a street sweepers broom, a sanitation workers’s glove and a ceiling fan (from which a student hung himself protesting discrimination).
‘The School of Mutants’ is a collaborative work by artists from Dakar, Senegal, Brussels, Belgium, Paris, France, Taipei, Taiwan, London, UK and Saint-Etienne, France - Boris Raux, Hamedine Kane, Lou Mo, Stephane Verlet, Bottero and Valerie Osouf. The work was initiated in Dakar, Senegal and provided a starting point for inquiries into the role of universities, public school projects and post independence processes of nation building in Senegal.
The work by Nil Yalter who lives and works in Paris, France was a short distance from the Akademie and was on display in a shopfront. She was born in Cairo, Egypt and raised in Turkey and continues to live in political exile. Her work ‘Exile is a hard job’ is on display in both public and the exhibition.
Day 4 & 5 https://www.berlinbiennale.de/de/
At the Akademie der Kunste Hanseatenweg 19 artists respond to the theme ‘Still Present!’.
Mai Nguyen-Long was born in Tasmania to an Australian mother and a Vietnamese father and has lived in Australia, China and Vietnam. Her work titled ‘Specimen’ is a reminder of the horrific crime that was nearly forgotten in Vietnam where ‘the pace of capitalism has overridden memory’.
Dao Chau Hai lives and works in Hanoi, Vietnam. In 2010 for his work ‘Ballad of the East Sea’ responds to the border wars and migration with an industrial mechanical form with its sharp edges that suggest danger and violence beyond our notion of sea waves.
Sven Johne lives and works in Berlin, Germany and grew up in the GDR. His work reflects the so-called death strip that divided east from west. “I wanted this moment of confusion: watchtowers, fences and the path previously patrolled by soldiers….to what is now’.
At the Stasi-Zentrale. Campus fur Demokratie, our final venue, the works of 7 artists are located in the former headquarters of the Stasi in Berlin, one of 15 Stasi headquartered in cities across Germany.
We were able to view therefore not only works of artists in the Biennale but also to be informed on the role of the Stasi in their surveillance and spying on GDR citizens. The site occupies many hectares and housed Stasi staff as well as provided offices and spaces for surveillance equipment and the collection of information on citizens suspected of undermining the State.
We were shown into a room where documents that had been torn up by Stasi staff prior to the Wall coming down, piecing together the documents (16,000 bags were retrieved and 500 bags have been restored) providing information on those who were targeted and the work of the Stasi.
The works in the Biennale follow a similar revelation of surveillance by governments around the world including USA, China and Britain using face recognition CCTV and the collection of data on their citizens.
Zach Blas lives and works in Toronto, Canada and London, UK. As an artist, filmmaker and writer he ran a series of workshops in 2012 -2014 (Facial Weaponisation Suite) where masks were created from the participants and used for public interventions against the use of biometric facial recognition systems.
Susan Schuppli lives and works in London, UK. Her work responds to the discovery in 1990 of a frozen body of 17 year old Neil Stonechild of the Salteaux First Nation in a remote industrial area of Saskatoon Canada. It later emerged that he had been subjected to a ‘starlight tour’, a police practice of taking indigenous people into custody and dropping them off in remote areas rather than taking them into custody. It’s a sobering and sorrowful story. Schuppli examines several fatal cases that have used climate as a murder weapon and perpetrated by structural racism.
