6th Berlin Biennale

By Oliver Basciano

It was hot in the city over the opening weekend of the 6th Berlin Biennale. It was the kind of heat that fries the brain and sends the senses to a standstill. This, together with a strange, near constant stream of cotton blossom showering down throughout the city, gave the proceedings an unworldly feel at odds with curator Kathrin Rohmberg’s professed investigation into art’s relationship with reality. Rohmberg’s reality is one of a constant gritty fight against the political injustices of the world; a reality that is fought and won on the streets and where art is a weapon for influence. Though the heavily installation and videocentric artist list could have done with a tighter edit, with the tendency towards durational documentary based work getting a bit leaden, there were some standouts that made the sweaty slog of blacked out video rooms, in the end, worth it. 

Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir, Beyond Guilt #1, 2003, from the video trilogy Beyond Guilt (2003-2005), DVD, color, sound, 9'30'', Courtesy the artists, Copyright the artists

Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir’s Beyond Guilt #1 (2003) saw the filmmakers hanging out in a series of Israeli club and bar toilets, baiting the patrons into sexual acts, all the time interweaving the flirtatious banter with sharp, political, questions on the Palestinian conflict. The Foucaultian equation of sex and violence, virility and arrogance is best summed up in a scene when, having made a male subject come seconds previously, one of the artists asks “Have you shot your guns? How did it feel? Did it give you trauma?” By being instigators and manipulators Sela and Amir do not raise themselves on a moral pedestal over their subjects, bequeathing the work an engaging honesty.

Mark Boulos, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 2008, 2-channel installation, HDV, colour, sound, 14' 20'', Courtesy the artist. Copyright the artist.

Something that that cannot be said of Mark Boulos's slick, but painfully moralising All that is solid melts into air (2008). A two-channel projection situated in the KW Institute, in which an interview with a Nigerian terrorist-activist, who proclaims his protest against the exploitation of the country by western oil-driven interests; is juxtaposed against a video portrait of an American stock exchange trading floor. Subtle, it isn’t, with its almost arrogant assuredness.

John Smith, Frozen War (Hotel Diaries #1), 2001, DVD, color, sound, 11', Courtesy the artist; Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin. Copyright the artist

There’s no such certainty in John Smith’s Frozen War (Hotel Diaries #1), and its a much more realistic attitude to crisis – fear, ignorance, an inability to gauge a magnitude of experienced events – that makes the work successful. Smith slowly pans over a frozen television picture in a hotel room, situated far from the artist’s London home. On returning from a night out – the night after the invasion of Iraq by coalition forces – to his room, the artist found the BBC News channel (or perhaps just the hotel’s set) experiencing a technical fault, causing it to freeze on an interviewee mid sentence. The artist’s narrative voices his wandering thoughts as to the possible causes of the problem: something prosaic? A terrorist attack on TV centre? A weapon of mass destruction? Is there a world beyond this anonymous hotel room left?  It’s chilling – with a dash of morbid humour – and highly affective. 

Sebastian Stumpf, Tiefgaragen, 2008, Video projection; HDV, color, sound, 12' 36'' Courtesy the artist; Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig. Copyright the artist

Also employing humour to commendable result is Fehrat Ozgur’s Metamorphosis Chat (2010). On the surface the film has an obvious subject matter, but the subjects – the artist’s mother, who dresses in a traditionally Turkish manner, including wearing a headscarf, and a more western orientated friend, with whom she swaps clothes with on camera – are so charming, that the charged feminist subject of symbolism in clothing traditions never seems dry or preaching. “Gosh Pakize, how many pants are you wearing?!” one of the ladies decries at one point. Again there’s a successful lightness of touch within Sebastien Stumpf’s Tiefgaragen (2008). The artist raises questions on the legitimacy of borders, property and the preciense of timing, through a film montage of garage doors as they mechanically close. Interrupting the steady mechanism a man runs in from off frame and rolls under the doors just in time, 1970s cop-style. It proves a hypnotic spectator sport, and one that allows the viewer space to mediate on the work’s theoretical possibilities. 

George Kuchar, SeaSideShow, 2008, DVD, color, sound, 21', Courtesy the artist; Video Data Base, Chicago

The biennale succeeds only when it treads lightly with its post-capitalist politicising: the majority of the works (Ron Tran’s Thank You (2010), Avi Mograbi’s Details 2 & 3 (2004), Nir Evron’s Echo (2008) all as example) seem to present reality as a singularly fraught existence, which seems a very tight reading to a very big world. As such George Kuchar’s almost retrospective-scale install of durational films at a former garage in the Mehringdamm district is refreshing, and consequently the standout feature to the entire jamboree. The viewer does not have to marathon through all the videos by any means: the artist mixes footage and repeats motifs to such a degree that colours and forms resonate across the multiples screens’ visual spillage. Kuchar is obsessed with the nowhere space of motels and acquaintance’s homes, specifically those in Oklahoma, specifically during unsettled weather conditions. At first the artist seems an outsider quack, but then it dawns the joke is on the viewer. Through his well crafted, tightly edited, though superficially low-fi, films; Kuchar disturbs our hankering for space and place, mirroring these vested requirements back though his travelogues, the result being a challenge to the status quo of our lived conscious that is far more affective than any video diatribe could ever succeed in.


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Video impressions of this year's Berlin Biennial taken by the ArtReview team.