Looking Forward: 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art

Some months before the opening of the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, scheduled for April 2008, I was given the opportunity to talk to its curators, Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic, and one of the participating artists, Daniel Knorr, to gain some insight into their respective aspirations for the biennial. For art historian Filipovic, who co-edited the book The Manifesta Decade – debates on contemporary exhibitions in post-wall Europe (2005), the biennial is one of her most ambitious projects to date – although she is also currently working on the first South American retrospective of Marcel Duchamp’s work, which opens at Museu d’Arte Moderna, San Paulo this year. She was invited to co-curate by Szymczyk, who was one of the founding members of the Foksal Gallery Foundation, and is also currently the director of Kunsthalle Basel. Although they divulged only a handful of names from their list of participating artists among them, Kristina Norman and Nairy Baghramian – they said that numbers would be kept down to between 40 and 50 artists, around 70 percent of whom will present new work. The other cornerstones of the duo’s curatorial concept are that the biennial will be a nocturnal as well as a diurnal event, and that it will be structured around three terms rather than themes: ‘human’, ‘thing’ and ‘use’. While they admit these terms are ‘archaic’ and ‘basic’, they hope that they will open up a web of associative discussions, maximizing the potential for ‘complex artistic responses’.

The original plan for my meeting with Szymczyk and Filipovic was that I would accompany them on a few studio visits and observe their machinations like a Dictaphone-bearing fly-on-the-wall. That didn’t eventuate entirely as promised, perhaps because the artists preferred not to be part of the proposed media experiment. I am especially grateful to Knorr, therefore, for his patience, and for showing me, amongst other things, one of his hilarious begging tin robots, Lui & Morty (2002) – a work which, given the way my supposedly exclusive preview was unfurling, I could readily identify with. However, after a couple of afternoons, Szymczyk and Filipovic’s open and critical ‘artist-minded’ approach to their project eventually became more tangible. I began to look forward to this biennial. Especially as we stood – not without self-irony – like a newly formed indie-rock band in a vacant lot in the middle of Berlin, surrounded by waist-high weeds and golden poplars and birches, and tried to imagine contemporary art, along with an anticipated 60,000 or more visitors, placed on that very spot in the near future.

This outdoor wasteland – a collection of mainly privately owned adjoining vacant lots – is one of the biennial’s three main venues. It’s also featured on the first promotional postcard for the event, designed by modular urban typeface maverick Ludovic Balland. But the crucial piece of contextual information here is that the site is an inner-city remnant of the Todesstreifen (death strip) or ‘no-man’s land’ along the former Berlin Wall. The fact that it still exists in this state is more a testimony to the ups and downs of the local property market than to any sense of historical import. In many places, the only sign that the Wall once bisected this area is a line of granite cobblestones marking the West Berlin boundary. On the East side there was a second wall and a no-go zone. The curators have been told that if their plans for the site require them to dig deeper than two metres, they will have to obtain mine clearance. Amongst the grass and occasional wildflowers lie all kinds of debris: from large chunks of buildings left from Allied bombings or GDR demolitions to a rusting spotlight tower to the kinds of traces typically left by dog walkers and lonely strangers who gravitate to such a heterotopia.

I got the impression that the curators don’t intend to clean the area up before installing the Biennial, which seems appropriate given their choice of artists: Cyprien Gaillard, for instance who is intrigued by the idea of ruins and the legacy of Land art. It is also seems like a provocative setting for the ambivalent posters of Caner Aslan, which feature slogans collected from sources such as extremist websites.

Listening to the curators talk about this heavily loaded place, I was impressed by the fact that they clearly think of it as an abstract ‘space’, even though its walls are afforded by surrounding apartment buildings, a recently sold cigarette factory and a high-security Federal Government printing press for passports, and its ceiling is formed of an expanse of grey sky. The site was enabled for use thanks to the cooperation of the independent artists’ collective, Skulpturenpark Berlin Zentrum, who have already staged events and exhibitions there. So, in an odd way, the space is institutionalized, too. Knorr already has a work on its fringes – his project 1 Year Warranty (2007), black and white signs all placed at the same height on buildings and in public places which state that he personally guarantees ‘one year of public space’ – although he is planning a new work for this biennial. Szymczyk and Filipovic have offered this difficult space as a challenge to several other artists, but the results of their efforts are currently still under wraps. I asked them whether or not this part of the exhibition would relate to the typical uses of other such sites in Berlin – trashy flea markets or circuses, for example – and whether they worried it might end up looking like a kind of hippie mini-golf course. Szymczyk mused wryly that, to his mind, the site is more like a venue for paintballing – which is possibly the only kind of painting that would work here.

Stark contrasts of all kinds are something of a Berlin trope. It nonetheless came as a surprise to learn that, in addition to this outdoor site and the biennial’s regular home base of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Szymczyk and Filipovic have pulled off an admirable coup in securing Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Neue Nationalgalerie as a third venue. This is particularly big news because the relationship between Berlin’s major museums and its contemporary art movers and makers hasn’t exactly been one of harmonious mutual support. The biennial will fill Mies’ wall-less, glassed-in, ultra-Modernist Utopian piazza on the ground floor, while the impressive permanent collection will remain on view below. To the curators this venue represents a ‘challenge to imagine new forms of exhibitions and art making’. It is notoriously difficult as a space, of course, and many before have tried and failed to install work successfully here. As part of their research, Szymczyk and Filipovic looked at Mies’ original collages showing how he imagined art might be displayed in the building: free-standing abstract paintings and sculptural nudes hovering weightlessly on an endless, pencil-thin grid.

Among the works planned for one of these three venues are Susan Hiller’s The Last Silent Movie (2007), an audiovisual piece partly consisting of recordings of people speaking languages that are either already dead or are on the brink of extinction. Elsewhere David Maljkovic will present an extension of the project he originally proposed for the Croatian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale – before his invitation to participate was revoked in odd circumstances at the last minute. His work Lost Memories from These Days (2005–6) consists of a video shot at the ‘Italian Pavilion’ outside Zagreb, which was built in 1961 as a showcase for Italian cars during a world trade fair. It features a cast of posing, bored and heat-exhausted model/hostesses captured while waiting for what they expect to be the real shoot to begin. This video and other materials will be housed in a structure that recalls the work of the 1950s’ ‘lost artist group’ from Zagreb, EXAT 51.

I don’t know if anyone has accurate figures for the number of artists who have moved to Berlin in recent years, but it must run into the thousands. The vibrancy and activity that they have brought to the local scene is palpable at every opening and art event on any given day of the week and carries on well into the night. It is this fact which makes the curators quietly confident that – more so than at other biennials with programmes of screenings, performances and talks – their events evenings will run successfully for the entire duration of the Biennial. The projected line-up includes around 62 different events at venues throughout Berlin, including one at the Zeiss Planetarium in East Berlin. Some artists will participate in both halves of the exhibition. The curators acknowledge the idea is not new, citing Catherine David’s ‘100 days – 100 guests’ at documenta X as an important precedent. Their aim is to spread the action around, thus helping to take the pressure off the opening days of the Biennial, when such events usually get trampled, and ‘to expand the spatial and temporal dimensions of the exhibition’. Szymczyk and Filipovic are confident that their evening programme won’t simply be the day programme’s little adjunct, although that’s hard to imagine in practice. The first catalogue – for which the artists have been invited to present their references and influences rather than their own work – will include only the ‘daytime’ participants, although a follow-up catalogue is planned. But with proposed events such as a workshop with theatre legend Augusto Boal, Oksana Bulgakowa lecturing on gesture in Soviet films, and Melvin Moti ‘s presentation of an out-of-the-body-lecture with neuro-scientist Olaf Blanke, the nights of the 5th Berlin Biennial promise not to be just another day.