“The 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art”

The first days of June in Berlin were met with a flash flood of artists, curators and cultural thinkers from all parts of the globe, congregating for the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. It is perhaps the first time in its history that the Biennale has opened itself to artistic sensibilities not constrained by Eurocentrism. This 10th iteration assembled 46 artists under the defiant curatorial hand of Gabi Ngcobo and her team, consisting of Yvette Mutumba, Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Serubiri Moses and Thiago de Paula Souza. Titled after Tina Turner’s 1985 song “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” this year’s Biennale is a polemic statement addressing the international contemporary art world in a way that refuses having one coherent position from which to encounter the works. Some critics have read this as a liberating move—freeing the works from the constraints of a curatorial theme or premise—while others read it as withholding and unforthcoming. Yet even without any particular thematic or curatorial framework to guide viewers, the gathering of these artists and their creative reflections cannot be read outside the conditions enmeshed in global capitalism.

Stretched across five venues, a significant number of works are housed in Akademie der Künste, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art and the Centre for Art and Urbanistics (ZK/U), with the exception of Keleketla! Library and Las Nietas de Nono, which occupied the HAU and the Volksbühne, respectively. On the whole, the works presented are modest in production, devoid of the post-Internet aesthetics and spectacularity found in the previous biennial Biennial curated by DIS. Rather, a sense of earnestness permeates this Biennial.

The first work you see in the KW— the one that leaves the most lasting impression (perhaps owing to its scale and materiality)—is Dineo Seshee Bopape’s Untitled (Of Occult instability) [Feelings], 2016–18. It is an installation comprised of a myriad of sounds all bathed in an abyss of orange. Among the debris, videos and suspended cardboard construction, it is the repeated single projection of Justice For … against a white t-shirt that resonated most with me. The sharp, repeated click of Lachell Workman’s slide projector is a symbolic reminder of the ongoing pursuit of justice for Black lives, whether in South Africa or the United States.

The Akademie der Künst hosts Sara Haq’s delicate, yet unassuming, installation of reeds, an intricate series of Belkis Ayon’s collographs from the early and late 1990s and Mimi Cherono Ng’ok’s photographic images of tropical foliage captured in various European and African cities. Juxtaposed with this is Mario Pfeifer’s politically charged and suspense-inducing two-channel video installation Again/ Noch einmal, which re-examines a more recent case of xenophobia in the state of Saxony, where the right-wing party, Alternative for Germany, has a strong following. Pfeifer’s fictional re-enactment of this case employs the visual register of a television show, broadcast to offer multivalent and conflicting positions surrounding the case.

The quest to find the most compelling body of work in this Biennale ends in the basement of the ZK/U. Here you find Tony Cokes, an artist whose precise mastery for sampling and his acute skill of complicating ways of reading continue to leave visitors in awe. And rightfully so. This composite installation of 14 video works produced between 1998 and 2016 reveals his commitment to the conceptual repositioning of how truth claims are made, but also disrupted. Intimating the character of a club, visitors circulate across TV monitors that are intermittently placed within the space. Cokes’s animated text and solid-colour slides puncture the darkness of the basement with tints of reds and blues. His “Evil” series, 2001–present, turns to investigate the era of post-9/11 United States through a selection of animated quotes from government testimonies, speeches and pop lyrics, accompanied by sound. The only audio filling the basement emanates from the projection of Mikrohaus, or the black Atlantic, 2006–08. This video animation examines the relationship between minimal techno and house tropes in early 21st-century electronic music, and in particular how Black cultural forms are redeployed. Quotes from cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, together with interview excerpts from Detroit techno artists and German music producers such as Derrick May, Jan Jelinek and Juan Atkins are overlaid with a selection of minimal techno tracks.

Cokes has been working since the 1980s, re-encoding media that functions intertextually with verbal, musical and visual registers. These lectures–conversations–tracks create new conditions for reading and for critique. Arguably, this showcase of Cokes’s work is also a moment of reckoning with the contemporary art world, its institutions and agents, foregrounding their negligent, often prejudicial, oversight of artists such as Cokes.

Of significance, this Biennale throws up a mirror to Eurocentric legacies of discourse, marking its failures to think and learn in non-colonial terms, or terms that allow for the existence of a different political imagination. Who is to make sense of this world entrapped in global capitalist modernity? The curatorial tactic of negation and withholding is probing, and invites critical reflections on the Eurocentric desire to collect, understand, own and control (everything). This desire has been an historically violent enterprise supported by simultaneously xenophilic and xenophobic responses, lest we forget that Europe’s history is grounded in the exploitation and denigrations of people and their cultures. Germany, in particular, is undergoing a moment of postcolonial reckoning, revisiting and grappling with its historical actions and atrocities (often only through vapid inclusions, visible in the exhibition “Hello World!” at the Hamburger Bahnhof). These are contexts to which the curators are supposedly responding.

The strategy of evasion is a position that Ngcobo and her team have forthrightly stated from the outset, as evidenced by the title of its public programming, “I’m Not Who You Think I’m Not,” not least in the militant camouflage CI design of pinks and greys. In the opening text of the Biennale brochure, the curators explicitly state that the exhibition is an exploration of the “political potential of the act of self-preservation.” Sure, this is an attempt to evade the persisting expectations of Black cultural workers to simultaneously forgive, speak for a populace and teach the wilfully ignorant. And let us not underestimate the intellectual and emotional labour this requires.

It is Boaventura de Sousa Santos who argues for the failure of the global North to make sense of the world through its general theories and universalism. What a paradox that after centuries of paternalism, of ‘teaching’ the world, Euro-North America seems to be losing its capacity to learn from other histories and orientations. Following this thinking, if the global North is to learn from the South, whose responsibility is it to teach, to fix, to rectify? I want to believe that this Biennial is asking us to think historically in the present; inviting us to look closely and listen a little more attentively, to observe the way we observe and to be humbler to learning. But perhaps this is asking too much of a Biennale today. ❚

The 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art was held June 9 to September 9, 2018, at various venues in Berlin.

Bhavisha Panchia is a curator and researcher of audio and visual culture, currently based in Johannesburg, South Africa.