What to Expect at Berlin Biennale 2022

Every two years, international artists, theoreticians and practitioners gather in Berlin for the city’s Biennale. Engaging with political frameworks, and eventually breaking them apart, the Berlin Biennale uses art as a vehicle to address urgent questions of the present while inviting audiences to take part in diverse dialogues and multi-cultural exchanges. Taking place from June 11 to September 18 2022, this year’s Biennale ‘STILL PRESENT’ is curated by Kader Attia and explores themes of decolonisation, and repair through contemporary art and critical conversation, in order to find ways to care for the now. 

Spanning 3 months, the 12th Berlin Biennale is spread across a number of major participating galleries and museums in Berlin from the likes of KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Hamburger Bahnhof, Akademie der Künste, Stasi Headquarters and Dekoloniale Memory Culture in the City. Through a varied public programme, the Biennale engages with the diversity of contemporary art today. 

In an attempt to transform the sense of space and time through art, multi-disciplinary artist Myriam El Haïk will present a ritual performance of a large-scale wall drawing and the original composition for piano ‘PLEASE PATTERNS.’ Haïk’s performance, which aims to alter the viewer’s sense of perception, brings together sound, performance, ritual and drawing. Meanwhile, Zuzanna Hertzberg’s performance at KW Institute explores the individual and collective resistance of women during the Shoah in an attempt to recover historical stories of the resistance of Jewish women through storytelling. In addition to thematic tours, workshops, performances, and film screenings, a series of conferences will explore how colonialism and imperialism continue to operate in the present.

‘Imperial Ecologies’ is one of the many conversations held throughout the Biennale. Beginning on 22nd June at Hamburger Bahnhof, this conference speaks of the environmental crisis through an exploration of the role that imperialism and industrialisation have played in the current climate emergency. An urgent and timely conversation, the conference examines the “threshold of consciousness in what one could call the colonial unconscious.” Another interesting conference is Whose Universal? at Akademie der Künst Hanseatenweg on the 2nd and 3rd of July. This discussion critically examines and confronts topics of race, western epistemology, capitalism, war, power structures and aesthetic currencies to open a dialogue around society to build a dialogue around the poorly understood connection between settler colonialism and fascism. 

The 12th Berlin Biennale takes place from June 11 to September 18, 2022. Find the full programme at 12.berlinbiennale.de.