Biennials / Survey Shows

Sara Arrhenius
As an outsider to Berlin, one is not so sensitive to the alleged romanticisation of the city’s worn-out image. I was positively puzzled by the bold return in ‘Of Mice and Men’, the 4th Berlin Biennial, to uncanny, slightly gothic-tinged themes, rhetorical tropes and symbols that have not exactly been embraced by recent art making. I’m not at all sure if – and, if so, why – there is suddenly a rephrasing of existential questions in art, and even a new fascination with the mystical, but I was intrigued by the way the show prompted me to think about this.

Luca Cerizza
‘Of Mice and Men’, the 4th Berlin Biennial. Although I was not very interested in the story, it was very nicely told.

Stuart Comer
I missed the allegedly excellent 27th São Paulo Biennial, but its Roland Barthes-inspired concept ‘How to Live Together’ seems all the more intriguing in the light of the collapse of Manifesta 6. Aspirations for a sequel to Black Mountain College may not have played well in Nicosia, but Manifesta’s failure highlights the urgency of constructing new systems for education and discourse that don’t sit comfortably within familiar frameworks. Its proposal moved us closer to a genuinely process-based biennial model, and its failure suggests that the art world needs to create more productive spaces for conflict and argument as it continues to dream about Utopia.

Bice Curiger
The amazing thing about ‘Of Mice and Men’, the 4th Berlin Biennial, was the coherence of the selection, which revolved around an ‘existential core’ in everything. It may have been one-sided, perhaps even risking an anachronistic sense of the universally human, but it was never embarrassing.

Charles Esche
With the current proliferation of biennials, it has become increasingly difficult to make a substantial distinction between them and large-scale group exhibitions. Perhaps the relevance of the biennial format is beginning to wane. Nevertheless, the Periferic Biennial in Iasi, Romania constructed its relationship to place very beautifully, while the Gwangju Biennial also had its moments. The most challenging project there was provided by Chris Gilbert and Cira Pascual Marquina’s section ‘Exhibiting US Imperialism and War’. They merged artistic and curatorial authorship in a way that could provide pointers for the future – and the healthy return of ideological argument was tangible. Notwithstanding the inclusion of some strong work, the approach of the 4th Berlin Biennial was illustrative and voyeuristic to such an extent that it seemed to reduce art’s capacity for complexity or ambiguity in ways that, at times, were almost unbearable.

Alex Farquharson
Although politically solipsistic, the Berlin Biennial made for beguiling dialogues between art and site; Auguststrasse became a novel of sorts. Meanwhile Jens Hoffmann’s ‘Wrong’ at Klosterfelde, did what Hoffmann does best on a boutique scale: the exhibition-as-game as played by an all-star post-Conceptual line-up.

Douglas Fogle
The laughter that you heard resonating through the courtyard of Berlin’s Kunstwerke last March was coming not only from Gino de Dominici’s 1971 sound installation D’Io. It was also the laugh of the Wrong Gallery curatorial team as they frustrated the expectations of the viewers of the 4th Berlin Biennial, hands-down the best biennial/survey show I’ve seen in quite some time. Subtitling their exhibition ‘Of Mice and Men’ (or should we say ‘Of Mice and Mengele’?), the Merry Pranksters of 20th Street were extremely sensitive to the loaded historical context of its East Berlin location, bringing together a fantastic blend of old work and new work that replaced their signature ‘smart ass’ with a much unexpected gravitas.

Jennifer Higgie
To see everything included in ‘Of Mice and Men: the 4th Berlin Biennial’ and ‘The Grand Promenade’ in Athens demanded map-reading skills and strong shoes. Both shows were messy, fascinating mixes of local history, surprising work and idiosyncratic curating. Closer to home, Mel Brimfield and Sally O’Reilly’s guided tour of Whitstable – one of the performances they curated for the English seaside town’s second biennial – was one of the funniest things I’ve experienced and the only time I have been offered sweets by a butcher and heard a poem about the actor Peter Cushing (‘blood is gushing!’) in an estate agent’s office.

Raimundas Malasauskas
Given that these days you can not only purchase a diploma over the internet but also study online, Manifesta 6, which was supposed to be a school, could just as easily have taken place in cyberspace as in Cyprus: more easily, in fact, since it wouldn’t have been cancelled. But, following the announcement that the seventh edition of Manifesta would take place in Trieste, it seems that the board members of the IFM have not learnt from their experience and remain replete with the optimism of failure. I had felt sure that Manifesta 7 would at least move to Second Life, the online multi-player role-playing domain, where dense cultures of life proliferate at the speed of several gigabytes per second, and where everybody can be a creator of their own environment and shared, aestheticised sociability (Hinrich Sachs recently staged a Second Life reenactment of one of Francis Picabia’s Gala Night of The Cannibals events). This, as a manifestation of Manifesta, could have been the ultimate achievement of the European project, not least to say that Manifesta 7 could have become the first multinational biennial operating in the virtual domain. However, it remained offline – a lesson sadly unlearned.

Shaheen Merali
The likelihood of missing a biennial this year, especially one in Asia, was comparable to that of finding a safe haven in Baghdad – nearly impossible. Nonetheless, a visit to regional China for the Guangzhou Triennial, ‘Beyond’, acted as a valuable wake-up call to the ‘West’ regarding new notions of avant-gardism. This truly was the art of the near future, with its integrated interventions and museums as vehicles of change. The problem with many such biennials and art fairs, though, is that audience involvement is taken for granted and expected. Elsewhere, the Whitney Biennial ‘Day for Night’ was so formulaic that bar a few outstanding exceptions, such as the inspired works of Josephine Meckseper and the flamboyant installations of Urs Fischer, it managed to disappoint even the very lowest of expectations. In stark contrast, the 9th Havana Biennial, running on the poetics of independence and artistic mediation, succeeded in mustering assemblages that promoted flexibility and agency as aspects of our viewing realities. Graffiti art by Brazilian brothers Os Gêmeos and works employing recycled energy and waste by Havana-based Roberto Diago proved truly dialogical within the shifting trajectories of ideas with consequences.

Helen Molesworth
I have biennial fatigue and big survey anxiety. The best show built on this logic (lots of work, lots of artists, competing quality and ideas) that I attended was the annual ‘One Minute Movies’ festival, organized by artists Moyra Davey and Jason Simon and staged in a barn in bucolic upstate New York. Artists submit a one-minute movie and then drive up to the country to drink beer, eat gumbo and watch the flicks. The crowd is loving and supportive, so everyone gets applause, but some is louder than others: this group knows a good picture when they see it. Artist Mark Dion made Martinis during the intermission, and when the lights went up after the show they were quickly turned back down again so the dancing could begin.

Simon Njami
The last Dakar Biennale, held in May, seemed to be a turning point in the organization of a big contemporary art event on the African continent. Even if there’s been a biennale in Cairo for over a decade, Dakar has always been considered Africa’s foremost capital city for contemporary art. One might have thought that the two attempts to hold a biennale in Johannesburg shortly after the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, would have generated greater international interest for African art. This, however, was sadly not the case. Dakar is therefore the only significant presentation of art left on the continent, although even 40 years after its inception there are still a couple of problems with its format. Encouragingly, however – and in a return to the approach adopted for the very first Biennale – this year a chief curator was appointed and made responsible for the selection of the artists. Even if the art on display was far from reflecting what is happening in the African art scene today, such a change gives hope for the future.

Daniel Palmer
While the inaugural Singapore Biennial, ‘Belief’, was funded as instrumental cultural policy – to coincide with the IMF/World Bank meetings, banish the city’s sterile reputation and make way for an ‘innovation economy’ – artistic director Fumio Nanjo and his dynamic collaborators chose historically rich sites and a strong set of largely Asian artists. Provocations abounded, but the best work was either delirious – a tone set by Yayoi Kusama’s red dots wrapping the trees lining the main shopping street – or delightfully modest. The documenta 11-style Sydney Biennale, ‘Zones of Contact’, appeared clever yet clumsy by contrast but still offered moments of brilliance, including works by Anri Sala, Calin Dan, Mona Hatoum and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. On
a smaller scale, the RAPT! project scattered contemporary Japanese art across
Melbourne’s smaller art spaces, while ‘Parallel Lives: Australian Painting Today’ at the TarraWarra Museum of Art proved that local painting still has a life.

Cristina Ricupero
The 4th Berlin Biennial, ‘Of Mice and Men’, certainly did not feel like the usual large-scale survey biennial. Even if not intended as a themed show, it undoubtedly succeeded in creating an overall atmosphere of threat, anxiety and obscurity. And although many criticised the curators’ decision to use symbolically charged public and private locations as venues (in particular, the former Jewish School for Girls), condemning it as a cliché of an overly-romanticised view of Berlin – some even going as far as to say that the physical spaces were more impressive than the works on show – I must say that the project as a whole managed to make a strong impact and leave a significant imprint.

Ali Subotnick
This year’s Whitney Biennial, broke free from the ‘hot young American’ formula and presented a show of works by artists from different generations and traditions. From the Peace Tower to the inclusion of Dorothy Iannone and Kenneth Anger, Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne put together a show of dark and romantic works that reflect our fucked-up times and how we’re attempting to cope with them. A biennial like this carries the weight of history and tradition, and expectations are severe, but these curators succeeded in making a show that was built by the artworks, not by statistics or surveys.

Jochen Volz
Borrowed from John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel, ‘Of Mice and Men’ was the title of the 4th Berlin Biennial, curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. Presented in a series of revealing sites along Berlin Mitte’s Auguststrasse – such as an office, a ballroom, a school, the church, the cemetery and the galleries of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art – the exhibition managed to develop some impressive narratives. Highlights included Paul McCarthy’s Bang-Bang Room (1992), Thomas Bayrle’s 16mm film Autobahnkopf (Motorway Head, 1988–9), Victor Alimpiev’s video Summer Lighting (2004), the typewriter drawings by Christopher Knowles in the former Jewish School for Girls, installations by Pawel Althamer, Michael Beutler and Jeremy Deller in the Post Office stables, and a series of Sergej Jensen’s paintings in a private apartment.

Sara Arrhenius
is the Director of Bonniers Konsthall, a new art venue in Stockholm, Sweden.

Luca Cerizza
is a curator and critic who lives in Berlin, Germany. He is also Curator of the BSI collection in Lugano, Switzerland.

Stuart Comer
is Curator of Film at Tate Modern, London, UK.

Bice Curiger
is Curator at the Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland where she recently curated ‘The Expanded Eye’. She is also Editor of Parkett and Editorial Director of Tate etc.

Charles Esche
is Director of Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and co-editor of Afterall Journal and Books.

Dominic Eichler
is a writer, musician and artist living in Berlin, Germany.

Alex Farquharson
is a curator and writer living in London, UK and a Research Fellow in Curating Contemporary Art at Royal College of Art.

Douglas Fogle
is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA, and Curator of the forthcoming 55th Carnegie International.

Jennifer Higgie
is Co-Editor of frieze and lives in London, UK.

Raimundas Malasauskas
is a Producer of CAC TV and a Curator at CAC Vilnius, Lithuania.

Shaheen Merali
is the Head of Exhibitions, Film and New Media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in Berlin, Germany.

Helen Molesworth
is Chief Curator of Exhibitions, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Simon Njami
is a freelance curator. He is Chief Curator of the travelling exhibition ‘Africa Remix’ and of the Bamako Photography Biennale.

Olu Oguibe
is an artist, curator and Associate Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut. His publications include The Culture Game; his last major exhibition was in Lucio Fontana’s studio in Albisola, Italy.

Daniel Palmer
is a Lecturer in the Theory Department of the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Cristina Ricupero
is an independent curator based in Paris, France. She curated the European section of the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea in 2006. In 2005 she co-curated the travelling exhibition ‘Populism’ with Nicolaus Schafhausen and Lars Bang Larsen.

Ali Subotnick
co-curated the 4th Berlin Biennial with Massimiliano Gioni and Maurizio Cattelan, with whom she also founded The Wrong Gallery and the publication Charley.

Jochen Volz
is the Director of Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Minas Gerais, Brazil and was a Guest Curator of the 27th São Paulo Biennial, 2006.