| On the grandiose and mirrored second floor of the Ballhaus Mitte, two performers enact an erotic dance. The typical movements of a sexual encounter between a young man and woman are exaggerated and prolonged for the benefit of the viewers, who move between thick marble columns to get a better view. |  |
Uncomfortable Moments and Unfinished Histories – Anna Altman
On the grandiose and mirrored second floor of the Ballhaus Mitte, two performers enact an erotic dance. The typical movements of a sexual encounter between a young man and woman are exaggerated and prolonged for the benefit of the viewers, who move between thick marble columns to get a better view.
The both delicious and uncomfortable sense of voyeurism that is most apparent in Tino Sehgal’s performance piece on display in this grand space repeats itself again and again throughout the 4th Berlin Biennale, which opened March 25th and continued until May 28th. The Biennale’s most unusual characteristic its location, in 12 public and private exhibition spaces along Berlin’s Auguststrasse, reiterated this initial sense of intrusion, interruption and intimacy first encountered in the Mirrored Ballroom. Visitors to the Biennale are offered not only objects of art to scrutinize, but are given the opportunity to peer into the private spaces of artists and of Berlin residents themselves.
Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, the Biennale’s three curators, made the choice to expand the Biennale beyond the walls of Kunst Werke, Berlin’s premier institution for contemporary art, to intensify the effect of the jarring show they had already assembled. The show itself, entitled “Von Mäusen und Menschen / Of Mice and Men,” seeks to document the traumas and pains of human existence. To this end, the exhibition stretches literally from a church to a cemetery, with its location in private apartments and offices as well as within established artistic institutions mixes public and private, offering a microcosm of an entire society.
The society depicted, however, is not a sunny one, but a mirror of the aqueous and often gray Berlin sky and of the drizzle and fog that accompanied the Biennale’s opening. The human condition that the curators explore is “a terrain of fear and subjection, of malaise and revelation, illuminated by spontaneous interludes of beauty.” Works such as Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley’s Burn exemplify the pain, violence and disorientation present in many of the works. The video shows the reactions of a group of people occupying an apartment that has been set on fire by one among them. Many of the apartment’s inhabits remain entirely oblivious to the destruction playing out around them, while those who take note of the danger respond to the fire as a nuisance that impinges such mundane acts as reading the newspaper or communicating with a companion.
The frightening, even nail-biting, absurdity of such reactions become normalized in this setting in which birth, loss, grief and nostalgia transform themselves in the world of fantasy and artistic exaggeration. Throughout the largest exhibition spaces of Kunst Werke and the Former Jewish School for Girls across the street, these moments of desperation, fragility and confusion build into a swirling cacophony of images and noise.
Respites from this generally gloomy and chaotic view, however, are also in attendance. A quieter and more private moment of trauma and fragility is documented in Ján Mancuska’s 20 Minutes After. A text painted in black on the wall is accompanied by three-dimensional letters hung from aluminum wires, the shadows of which are then projected onto the wall, adding words to blank spaces left between words. The substance of the text tells of a phone call that brings news of a relative’s fatal stroke. In response, the woman in the story goes to a flower shop, where she realizes she has just spoken Russian, a language that she has not used in more than 20 years. Thus, layers of language, culture and fluid time are added to the pain of this traumatic moment.
Works that represent life’s spontaneous beauty are much harder to come by. Ulf Aminde’s Das Leben ist kein Wunschkonzert (Life is Not a Listener’s Request Program), which combines the music of 24 different street performers of music on 12 different screens, proves the city dweller’s easy access to beautiful if unsolicited music. But this piece, too, though imbued with more humor and compassion, remains hectic and hard to digest.
Even the documentation of the potentially joyful experience of childbirth in Corey McCorkle’s Spiritual Midwifery Rush becomes violent and voyeuristic. This photographic series unblinkingly depicts the messier side of childbirth so often glossed over in our collective conception. The photographs, well-lit and with bold colors, are unusually direct; close-ups of a baby’s slimy head emerging from a stretched and bleeding vagina spare no details and leave nothing to the imagination. This approach is most apparent in the first photograph of the series, curiously, the only photograph in which both the mother and baby are absent, in which the bloody placenta and umbilical cord, deposited in what appears to be a Tupperware container, are photographed at twice the scale. Perhaps those who seek beauty can find it here, but it seems that McCorkle, as well as many artists represented, seek instead to highlight the grotesque, the uneasy and the uncomfortable.
In searching for the reason or explanation for this glaring and remarkable rawness, it seems appropriate to pose the question of how this Biennale reflects Berlin specifically rather than contemporary art generally. The traumas and pains on display, perhaps evident in any human experience, do in fact correspond particularly if not always obviously to Berlin’s inhabitants and history.
The decisions that have shaped the exhibition, from the use of space to the identities of the curators, reveal certain characteristics and tendencies of Berlin itself, as an electric but scarred capital city.
The clearest evidence of Berlin as subject and influence is the piecemeal location of the exhibition. The Biennale’s disjointed location is not only an artistic choice by the curators, but an approach “loosely inspired by the tendency in Berlin to turn apartments into galleries and use temporary spaces for impromptu exhibitions and events.” The curious use of such abundant empty spaces is not something new in Berlin and though it may be something of a boon to poor artists, it is borne of Berlin’s deeper economic problems.
Indeed the viewer’s access to intimate settings exposes, predictably, the artist, their work and also Berlin’s difficult current economic and social circumstances as well as the painful historical memory of its residences. As the curators clarify in their press release, “many of the places evoke intimacy and reclusive states of mind, where collective history overlaps with personal trauma.” This fusion of public and private is most evident in the use of private apartments as exhibition space or in the office in Plattenbau, where Kai Althoff and Lutz Braun in fact worked to create the art on display there.
But even more fascinating and harrowing is the use of now defunct spaces, such as the Former Jewish School for Girls. Shut down by the Nazis in 1942, the school resumed its identity as a place of learning only after the Second World War. During the regime of the East German Democratic Republic, the school was re-opened only to be closed again in 1996. The peeling wallpaper of the school, its faded posters, murals and graffiti, reveal the ravages that a complex and painful past, as well as the simple passage of time, have wreaked here. The specters of history that continue to haunt Berlin, its residents and its rebirth as a cultural center, are made explicit in this deliberate choice of venue.
The School’s inaugural reopening as a space for contemporary art may, in fact, hold a prophecy for Berlin’s future or at least an explanation of its present state. The city’s increasingly established reputation as a crossroads for artistic exchange and creation may be the force that restores and renews bankrupt, unemployed and historically scarred Berlin.
In some ways, the 4th Berlin Biennale appears caught between the desire to say something definitive about Berlin, to tell a specific, perhaps emblematic story, in an unorthodox and fluid narrative and the urge to probe generally into human existence. It may be that this indecision is the foundation of the exhibit, something that is explored and elaborated both in the content of the works as well as in the various settings. But the layers of time and space that the locations and works evoke make the show feel impenetrable or incomplete. Then again, perhaps this is a perfectly apt reflection of Berlin in 2006. The Biennale, like the city, is not quite finished; it has not yet fully fleshed out its identity, its direction or its solutions.
