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| Leonora Antunes |
During a week of retreat in Berlin, Dominic White (St Dominic's Priory, Newcastle) stumbled upon the 8th Berlin Biennale...
Mining under sacred
sites in South Africa; 'exchanged' ethnic minorities in Bangladesh; chemicals
plants in China; racism exposed. The 8th Berlin Biennale for
Contemporary Art continues its tradition of hard-hitting documentary art. While
other concerns and themes are also explored, what’s clear is that artists are
the philosophers of our time, and galleries are where we go to tackle big questions
and issues. The organisers were clearly aware of this even in the location of
the works: the biggest venue is Kunstwerke
(“Art Works”), known as KW and located on the edge of hip Prenzlauer Berg.
A former margarine factory, it was taken over by artists in 1998 and helped
establish Berlin as an artistic capital. The other two sites are in leafy West
Berlin: the pretty Haus am Waldsee, a tiny gallery on the Waldsee lake; and the
Museen Dahlem, an ethnographic museum complex. In the latter, the Biennale
works sit in the and around the galleries with the permanent exhibition and
interact, sometimes uncomfortably, with the history of European exploration of
other cultures: Gordon Bennett’s Notepad
Drawings expose racism, David Chalmers Alesworth contributes a restoration
of a Kashan carpet, while Alberto Baraya, pastiching 19th-century
illustration techniques, satirises modern Europe in Expedition Berlin, a Herbarium of Artificial Plants.
Some works create
tensions by being split over two sites, such as Anri Sala’s video UNRAVEL, in which a woman 'plays' the
music of Ravel with her hands on a record (KW) and distorts it by fiddling with
the needle (Haus am Waldsee, a perfect place for summer concerts). The overall
impression, however, is of an isolated human being tending towards narcissism. And
taken as a whole, the installations at KW both oppressed and depressed. The
documentaries revealed injustice and existential crisis without really offering
new vision, while Juliette Aranda’s Stealing
one’s own corpse, a coolly
cynical and sickening depiction of a potential new world in space, represents a
hackneyed formula of contemporary art which might best be called Despair Porn.
I couldn’t help contrasting this with Sarah Crisp’s recent installation Scene at The Holy Biscuit: she
accompanies a no-holds-barred presentation of domestic abuse is with the music
of Hildegard of Bingen, which holds it and raises it up in a tension of hope.
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| Gordon Bennett, Notepad Drawings, 1992 |
But the Berlin
Biennale has one work which is an utter treasure: somewhat improbably called Crash Pad (click here for pictures), and situated in the front of KW, it
lifted my soul. Andreas Angelidakis’ meditation on life after the Greek
economic crash is first of all a work of justice, the precondition of hope: the
rugs were specially commissioned from Greek artisans. They’re arranged around
two rooms to create comfortable sitting areas, each with a bookshelf to hand,
featuring classic counterculture philosophers such as Foucault and Marshall
McLuhan. The idea is to stimulate thought and conversation between the visitors,
and plaster Greek pillars suggest both fragility and the enduring value of
ancient civilisations, in which dialogue was essential to philosophy.
Angelidakis’ relational, resourcing art reminded me too of the friendly, community-focussed
experiments in artistic working space currently taking place at Newcastle’s NewBridge Project. The beginning of
hope?
Practical stuff: the
Berlin Biennale is on till 3rd August. A single 16-euro ticket
covers all three venues. And you can take
photos – audience participation and free publicity for the artists…
The Berlin Biennale is the forum for contemporary art in one of the most attractive cities for art. Taking place every other year at changing locations throughout Berlin it is shaped by the different concepts of well-known curators appointed to enter into a dialogue with the city, its general public, the people interested in art as well as the artists of this world.
