Tacita Dean, 10 to the 21, 2014. Installation view. Courtesy Tacita Dean; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris. Photo: Anders Sune Berg
Polite, restrained and oddly pleasing, Olaf Nicolai’s geometric floor-painting “Szondi/Eden” in the entrance corridor of the ethnographic museum in Dahlem was an apt welcome to this year’s 8th Berlin Biennale. In stark contrast to Artur Zmijewski’s edition, where the art disappeared under the discourse, curator Juan A. Gaitán prefers to let the objects do the talking. Art, for him, is a resource of autonomy and individuality – for makers and viewers – in a normatised society. From Wolfgang Tillman’s typically lush photographs, to Anri Sala’s video remix of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, to Tonel’s installation dedicated to the Cuban space (“Commerce”) and Shahryar Nashat’s video “Untitled”, strong individual positions dominated.
The Berlin Biennale can be a poisoned chalice: while it is the second-largest temporary exhibition in Germany after Kassel’s Documenta with corresponding expectations attached to it, it subsists on much smaller budget. Unlike the Documenta, it has its roots in the punk make-do experimentalism of 90s Berlin Mitte, and as the district has outgrown its squatters’ heritage, the Biennale too must find ways beyond political gesturing and the now tired trash-appropriation aesthetic. The 8th Biennale addresses this by using state museums and cultural institutions (the Dahlem museums and the Haus am Waldsee in addition to the KW) as staging posts, and by refraining from posting an overall concept.
This year’s edition leaves the visitor to make their own narrative: the artworks are arranged like objects in a display cabinet, with little or no unifying theme. There are threads, here and there: alternative readings of (post-colonial) history (apt, given that one of the sites is Dahlem’s ethnographic museum), environmental concerns, and exploration of alien spaces, but none suffices to build a unifying position or theme.
Olaf Nicolai, Szondi/Eden, 2014. Chalk on granite, four lamps. Dimensions variable. Each lamp ca. 290 x 100 x 100 cm Installation view Courtesy Olaf Nicolai; Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig/Berlin. Copyright Olaf Nicolai / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014 Photo: Anders Sune Berg
Of course, this is part of Gaitán’s strategy: rather than dictating a theme for artists to illustrate, in the style of the star curator, he assembled a group of artists with established positions and let these dictate the tone. At times, this means that it feels like we are ticking off greatest hits: there is Tillmann’s 21st Century Memento Mori, a Carsten Höller immersive environment (“7,8 Hz”), a Tacita Dean homage to celluloid (“10 to the 21”), Julieta Aranda taking her biopolitical commentary into space via an installation which owes a great deal of debt to post-internet practices (“Stealing one’s own corpse”), an outdoor version of a Slavs and Tartars carpet. Of course, there are also some outstanding, lesser-known artists, and a strong framing programme of theatre (Goshka Macuga’s art world satire “Preparatory Notes for a Chicago Comedy” with Dieter Roelstraete), Ballet (Carla Zaccagnini, “Le Quintuor des Negres, encore”) concerts (Tarek Atoui’s “Dahlem Sessions”), talks and a daily web journal.
Both Anri Sala’s video piece and Santu Mofokeng’s photographs of South African burial grounds had a previous outing at the 55th Venice Biennale last year: Mofokeng represented Germany and Sala France (Germany and France had swapped pavilions that year). Similarly, with Goshka Macuga, Tarek Atoui, Gordon Bennett, Tacita Dean, Mario García Torres, Christodoulos Panayiotou and Julieta Aranda (among others), there are numerous parallels with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s dOCUMENTA (13).
Gaitán not only shows similar artists: the overall (non)theme also owes a debt to Christov-Bakargiev’s exploration of an artwork’s agency, with Gaitán’s insistence on the autonomy of the art object, and his focus on how we encounter (as subjects) these objects in space and the museum. Each object stands for itself and not a generic concept or position, but in the end this means that the Biennale’s connections to Berlin are at best, tenuous. The ultimate impression the visitor is left with is that of an oddly institutionalised (given the use of the Dahlem museum space), well-behaved Berlin Biennale. BB8 feels like a pocket version of its larger cousins in Venice and Kassel: a rehearsal for an exhibition that is yet to come.
Text by Jeni Fulton
The 8th Berlin Biennale is on show from 28 May – 3 August 2014 at Haus am Waldsee, Museen Dahlem, KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Crash Pad c/o KW Institute.