Berlin Biennale: art against vulnerability

Museums, galleries and essential institutions on the artistic map are found in Berlin and it is also where the Biennale takes place, which this year reaches its 11th edition. The adventure of the four experiences in this edition began in September 2019 and was scheduled to open its fourth part at the beginning of summer. However, the challenge of the pandemic forced the organization to postpone its epilogue to September, lasting two months. The four spaces where it will take place will combine the three previous experiences with the artistic participation of some creators from different corners of the world. As the curatorial team points out “solidarity, vulnerability and resistance” they materialize in these strange times we have had to live through.

If the 11th Berlin Biennale raised urgent social issues from the beginning, the spread of COVID-19 has only brought these issues to the fore.. “The biennial speaks to the vulnerability of this capitalist, expansionist, sexist, Eurocentric and patriarchal system that stated that our resources were unlimited,” says Agustín Pérez Rubio, one of the four curators of the event. In this event that will bring together a hundred artists, we meet Spanish creators such as Larar Troupé, a collective that talks about psychosocial illnesses, the queer duo El Palomar, Andrés Fernández, Azucena Vieites and Sandra Gamarra, an artist who addresses colonial issues about Andean objects in museums and Spanish collections.

After the first three parts in which “the stories behind maternity wards, time care, reproductive work, bodies queer or the need to understand other beliefs”, the biennale closed with an epilogue that embraced all these realities with a careful sense of continuity. But reality is sometimes capricious, and the coronavirus has caused a paralysis from which we have not yet recovered. The first decision the organization made was not to make noise, not even on social media, and after a period of reflection they decided to postpone their last installment. “Many of the artists in this biennial have never been to Europe and our fear was that the pandemic would once again widen the vulnerability gap”argues Pérez Rubio.

Thus, the Berlin event immerses us in the cracks and fissures that separate us and unite us, issues that some of the artists who come together have worked on. The title The crack starts within It was taken from Iman Mersal (Egypt, 1966), a poet who explores the ghosts of motherhood, “destroying its contemporary morality”, say the curators in a statement. Ultimately, “like an epilogue The crack starts within denounces the fallacy of claiming for oneself the destruction of the old and the birth of the new.”

Four locations for a biennale

Each of the four locations (the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the daadgalerie, the Gropius Bau and the ExRotaprint) has an independent character thanks to a diverse program. Thus, the ExRotaprint building, in a neighborhood in the north of the city with a high percentage of immigration, is outside the artistic center where cultural institutions are located. This was a considered decision because, as Agustín Pérez Rubio says, they were concerned about “the gentrification that Berlin has experienced in recent years”.

The Living Archive is the title given to the exhibition in this building, which for a year has been a place for exchanges and experiences. Therefore, we will now bring together some of the experiences that Wedding residents put together. “Many have to do with the idea of transmitting learning, with the way of counting”, says Pérez Rubio. Here we can see In the jungle there is a lot to do, tape recorded by three filmmakers based on the story of Uruguayan artist Mauricio Gatti. The film was considered lost, but after being located it was restored and will be presented at the biennial. ExRotaprint “has been used as a safe house, a place where things can be slow, porous, and on a human scale. People gathered, talked and listened. What remains is a living archive of the hospitality of all of them”, point out the curators.

A walk takes us to the Mitte neighborhood, where KW proposes a more political question in The Anti-Church: there is talk of homeland, nation, heteropatriarchy, motherhood, church and state and “how these traditional powers take over bodies”. In this space, “historical and colonial issues will be discussed, but there will also be conceptual versions”, comments Agustín Pérez Rubio, such as the work of the El Palomar collective on Paul Schrader and the figure of the father who must be killed. “Can patriarchal violence be purged from our collective bodies?” the curators ask.

Leaving behind the ecclesiastical spirit brought by the KW columns, we come to Daadgalerie, a space that focuses on Store for dissident bodies, “a piece composed of clothing for bodies of political resistance, indigenous, Afro-descendant and queer bodies”, comments Pérez Rubio. Clothes help us inhabit and transform space and the daadgalerie becomes “ready-to-wear architecture for vulnerable movements and their fashion politics, upending the hypersexualized normality of department store seasonal collections.” Clothing, therefore, reveals identities but can also serve as a “shield, a form of load or defense”reflects the commissioner.

The fourth venue for this edition of the Berlin Biennale is Gropius Bauwhich will become an anti-museum over the next two months in which visitors will see how from the Enlightenment to the present “The notions of museums and their museography are based on Eurocentrism, racism and the way in which we have objectified other knowledge and cultures”. We are facing a critique “of the notions of education and the colonial transmission of education, since racism does not only have to do with objects and the land, but also with temporalities”, says Pérez Rubio. The investment is total because you enter through the exit and bring us closer to the work of artists of African descent, indigenous people or people with mental problems who are often not considered artists, but patients.” Although there are other types of museums, “we must understand – concludes Agustín Pérez Rubio – that all modernity implies coloniality and, therefore, all museums are colonial. The foundations are like that and you have to start tearing them down.”

@scamarzana