Forget Fear, 2012; installation view of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s ground floor, 7th Berlin Biennale, 2012. Courtesy of Frieze.

It is hard to do justice to this summer’s triumvirate of European mega-exhibitions—Documenta 13, Manifesta 9, and the 7th Berlin Biennale—within the confines of a single article. It is hard to cover the multiplicity of venues—from museums and galleries to train stations, defunct mining complexes, park pavilions, movie theaters, department stores, and hotel ballrooms—by foot, let alone by pen. It’s harder to convincingly illuminate a tenth of the hundreds of works collectively on display without losing even the most dedicated reader. But the hardest is to analyze the themes at play without resorting to generalizations. What follows here, then, is a sprint through some of the artistic and curatorial highlights and low points, in search of commonalities, contradictions, and the ultimate conclusions to be drawn from three very different iterations of more or less the same idea: wresting art from the thrall of the market and restoring it to a conscientious existence.

It’s perhaps useful to preface these observations with a reminder about the forces of capitalism at play in the organization and staging of these exhibition events. All three are recognized art magnets. Documenta, the grande dame, is expected to attract audiences upwards of 750,000 this year, at the same time it will net somewhere in the region of 100 million euros for Kassel’s denizens. Established in 1955 as an enlightened endeavor to return art to the ruins of the heavily bombed city, the quinquennial has been heavily subsidized by the city government since the late ’70s—giving the curatorial team an extremely healthy budget with which to work—and is increasingly beloved by its inhabitants. Documenta occupies the 18th-century building of the Fridericianum Museum, as well as numerous other locations, and its artistic directors are free to designate additional sites. This year’s edition occupies the most square footage and number of venues to date. Traces of previous iterations live on in the form of commissioned works—such as Joseph Beuys’s ongoing 7,000 Oaks project— that gradually ameliorate the brutality of Kassel’s grim postwar architecture and enmesh the exhibition ever further in the fabric of the city.

Read the full article here.

Bottom floor of the Berlin Biennale, "Occupy Berlin," photo courtesy http://universes-in-universe.org

To transport an Occupy movement to the sanitized dominion of a museum is, as my art historian friends would say, problematic.  This year’s incarnation of the Berlin Biennale (the seventh) has thus far received anemic reviews, with some hinting at real vitriol.  The exhibition is partly as curator Artur Zmijewski envisioned it; full o’ problems.  In interviews Zmijewski offers cryptic monologues about equally cryptic solutions.  I think there are plenty of strategies to be found in the Biennale, but they are buried beneath sprawling and lofty ambitions, making it feel, as Frieze writer Christy Lange writes, like “an awkward slog.”

The impulse to undermine traditional artistic hierarchy by including documentary filmmakers, self-identified social activists and other non-artist-artists is good and worthy and exciting.  And there are moments in the Biennale where ideas ignite and excite viewers to imagine a world with a more porous understanding of art and the things it can accomplish.  The Biennale is awash in beautiful gestures: Lukasz Surowiec transplants trees from Auschwitz-Birkenau,  Yael Bartana stages the first ever international congress of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, Khaled Jarrar creates postal and passport stamps for the non-existent state of Palestine.

But these gestures are at times overshadowed by an exhibition layout at Kunst Werke that is heavy-handed and foggy.  It’s like it was curated by the gruff classist landlord of a turn-of-the-century New York tenement: the poor students and occupy protestors have the ground floor where they take care of the garden, ride a solar revolution bike and lead wacky seminars about street art and self-sustaining garden communities.  They conduct casting calls for a porn movie, make mandalas out of tobacco shavings and read leftist literature on the ragged arms of a hand-me-down couch.  There are no museum guards there (trust!) and the offices of Kunst-Werke employees are conspicuously ajar (transparency!).  It’s a dirty little utopia in the middle of one of the richest streets in central Berlin, a hypocritical, twingy concession in a district full of wealthy patrons and designer yogurt.

Meanwhile, the “real” artists can be found on the remaining 3 floors.   This architectural caste system is no exaggeration; the participatory element ends with the blackboard paint (which covers the entire ground floor).  Suddenly the walls become the shade of primeval white that we as gallery attendees are accustomed to.

 Marina Naprushkina’s oversized comics hang in the stairwells on the way “up.”

*Sorry, I don’t want to indulge in this super easy metaphor; I’m just really tired (maybe the curators were too?).

Marina Naprushkina with newspapers © Olga Karatch, image courtesy artnet.de

Naprushkina’s pieces are lovely and sincerely concerned with gender inequity and Russian nationalism in Belarus.  She uses graphic works to disseminate information, and last year created a comic newspaper documenting the police brutality that took place against protestors in Belarus in December of 2010.

Naprushkina is one of few object-makers in the Biennale, as the Biennale is focused largely on ephemeral actions and intervention (and the resulting footage of said ephemeral actions and interventions).  Pawel Althamer combines these pursuits with his beautiful if somewhat staid exercise in communal creation; a draw-in called “A Draftsmen’s Congress” at the St. Elisabeth Church.

This Biennale was one of the more anticipated in recent years, in part because it was helmed by controversial Polish artist Artur Zmijewski along with the Russian activist group Voina acting as associate curators.

Zmijewski received quite a bit of attention for his short film Berek, which was pulled from an exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin last year.  Zmijewski includes Berek in the top floor, offering one of the Biennale’s most affecting statements.  In it we see men and women of various ages, naked, engaging in a game of tag inside a former nazi death camp gas chamber.  Their child-like delight at the game borders on manic glee, an emotion belied by damp and ghastly surroundings.  Their nudity, innocent and liberating, forces us to imagine those for whom nudity was neither innocent nor liberating.

Artur Zmijewski "Berek", 1999 (Videostill), Foto: © Artur Zmijewski, Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation

Occupying most of the top floor is Berlin-Birkenau, an installation and acccompanying video by Polish artist Lukasz Surowiec.  Surowiec brought 320 Birch trees from the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau to Berlin, planting many of them in front of Kunst-Werke, enlisting the help of local students in his effort.  Surowiec offers Biennale visitors the chance to take a birch sapling with them, along with a certificate of ownership and directions for its care.  He asks that participants report the final location so as to be included in a “living  archive” of repurposed history.  Maybe it’s a bit treacly, but watching German kids plants those trees made me cry.

I wish I had equally touching reactions to the other videos screened at Kunst-Werke, but the majority were installed next to each other in one giant room, with cries from Tahrir Square co-mingling with anti-capitalist chants from European Action Day.  I would have liked to spend more time with each video, but instead I just got annoyed at the buzzing amalgam of multiple videos sonically invading each other.  And I think this might sum up the Biennale; it’s full of great moments, but the noise around it can be deafening.

Resistance, 2006; Courtesy the artist; Courtesy gb agency, Paris; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Johnen Galerie, Berlin

The work of Slovakian artist Roman Ondák has been referred to as “intervention,” a label which makes reference to the way a piece confronts the viewer with an unexpected experience. Ondák, who is currently participating in the Berlin Biennale through August 8, 2010, creates work that is at once mischievous, hilarious and stone serious. He deals with social issues of both the grand and trivial scales and swaddles participants—whether knowingly or not—inside the folds of each performance. In the manner of a social scientist, he is wont to stage “temporary situations and imaginative sitespecific constructions that predict various communication patterns in behavior and in the perception of things.” (source) In his 2009 presentation of Measuring the Universe (2007) at Museum of Modern Art in New York, Ondák urged museum visitors to mark their height and first name on a white wall—the same way a child might over the years in a hallway at home—until the thousands of black ink markings became as visually dense as they were socially significant.

In Loop, his installation for the Slovakian Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, he brought the lush grounds of the Giardini Publici into the interior pavilion, causing guests to take pause before realizing that the artist’s installation was in fact the well-ordered plant-life which surrounded them. His 2006 video Resistance, originally staged during an opening at Viennese Museum of Modern Art, plays with ideas of social status by following the feet of a group of guests with untied shoelaces. As reported by Kontakt, the Art Collection of Erste Group (whose artists were being presented in the exhibition during which Resistance was staged), “Fellow visitors were puzzled by this intervention, since there was no direct clue as to why certain people were posing this way. Thus Ondák queries the bondage, not necessarily visible, of certain peer groups, in this case through the need of people working in the field of art to proclaim otherness as a means counterbalancing social standardization.” (source)

Loop, 2009; Courtesy the artist; Courtesy gb agency, Paris; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Johnen Galerie, Berlin

Roman Ondák was born in 1966 in Zilina, Slovakia and now lives in Bratislava. He was recently included in I’m Not Here. An Exhibition Without Francis Alÿs at De Appel, Amsterdam—a “solo exhibition that takes the form of a group exhibition in which works by the contributing artists evoke the atmosphere of the work of an absent Francis Alÿs.” He has been included in numerous solo presentations internationally, including at MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; 2009 Venice Biennale; and 2008 Shanghai Biennale.