Joker in the City

Kasia Sobczak

The first Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art was organized at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in 1996 by Klaus Biesenchof and since then, has changed along with the city. In contrast to the national pavilion model of the Venice Biennale, in Berlin, elements of exhibition unfold across the city, inhabiting partner institutions and unexpected venues. It’s also not about national representations or pavilions, but is more strongly connected to political voices and opinion-making in its history and character. At its heart lies the idea of engaging the city, and commenting on contemporary social and geopolitical issues. This year’s biennale, passing the fugitive on, embraces the figure of the fox—a trickster, a symbol of survival, an agent in transit. The fox becomes an allegorical companion through the exhibition, embodying evasion, resistance, and the sly navigation of systems that seek to capture or contain. The curatorial narrative pivots around the transmission of survival tactics and resistance strategies, making it a kind of collection of manuals on navigating the contemporary—through humor, foxing, and oral storytelling. In her curatorial notes, Zasha Colah offers The Joker’s Address; here, a fragment:

(…)

The exhibition is not thematic.

It is propositional.

(…) 

The exhibition

moves like a city fox,

sinuous, sulfur-eyed.

It collects orality objects—

bone fragments of speech,

snatches of breath caught in spring thickets.

(…) 

The 13th edition of the biennale unfolds across four venues: Hamburger Bahnhof—National Galerie der Gegenwart, Sophiensæle, the former courthouse on Lehrter Strasse in Berlin-Moabit, and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Colah, and assistant curator Valentina Viviani, together with the biennale team, invited visitors to experience works by more than 60 artists, a majority of which are from South and Southeast Asia – regions central to Colah’s research and curatorial inquiry. These works resonate through Berlin’s charged present, drawing subtle, and at times dissonant, parallels between distant histories and the local terrain. In the artist list, revealed the day before the opening, there are no big names of art world superstars. 

I began my two-day visit to the biennale – though it could easily have been condensed into one—with a visit to the chapter of the exhibition at Lehrter Strasse, so against the suggested route. It’s a former courthouse that has been sealed off for years. It has a dark history, and is the site of the 1916 trial of Karl Liebknecht – German socialist organizer and collaborator of Rosa Luxemburg. In this part of the exhibition, the visitor enters a hushed gray, slightly destroyed space with missing elements of the ceiling and scratched walls. The exhibition continues across two floors of small office rooms and presents over 19 artworks. The artists in this venue operate under the theme of legality, illegality, and the artist’s claim. 

Two works have emerged as critical anchors within this chapter: From Heaven High by German artist Simon Wachsmuth, and a haunting series, Prison Paintings, by Myanmarese artist Htein Lin. Wachsmuth’s piece revisits the First International Dada Fair in 1920 where artists John Heartfield and Rudolf Slichter faced charges of defaming the German military by presenting Prussian Archangel, a dummy of a pig-faced military officer. This grotesque mannequin was the artists’ unequivocal anti-war gesture.

Htein Lin’s works – paintings made during his six-year incarceration in a Myanmar prison –  were created on scraps of cotton then smuggled out. These images, in various sizes, function as both visual testimony and spiritual resistance. They are emblematic images of humanity and a reflection of the cruelty of the prison system. In the cold room of the Lehrter Strasse courthouse, they strike with rawness, and at the same time have intense sensuality and direct reception. A few rooms further, we are confronted with work by Akhran artist Busui Ajaw – The Military State’s Oppression of the Peoples – a searing series of acrylics unveiling the violent displacement of her people, driven from the highlands of Myanmar into exile in Thailand. The canvases reconnect with Akhan mythology, vanishing traditions, and spirituality associated with the land in a charged visual language. 

On the ground floor, tucked at the end of a dim corridor, South African artist Helena Uambembe stages a quietly powerful installation. Her video work, How to Make a Mud Cake and series of prints on kitchen rags, speaks to the inheritance of collective trauma shaped by colonialism, domesticity, and estrangement. Through the character of a disarming social media persona – both humorous and unsettling – Uambembe captures the tensions of survival, memory, and the absurdities of inherited pain. Her work balances irony with gravity, creating a space where laughter and discomfort exist in tandem. Other works at the courthouse, such as Sudanese artist Elshafe Mukhtar’s wall drawing confronting the ongoing war in Sudan, and Serbian artist Milica Tomić’s installation dealing with the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, extend the biennale’s reach, mapping a cartography of political violence and legal abandonment, globally.  

The next chapter of the biennale that I visited was at Hamburger Bahnhof, which featured five artists under the title Moving Multitudes and the Conscience of Art. Here the fox appears in a chalk mural with a story of migratory crossings between Armenia and Kurdistan by Turkish artist Larissa Araz. The work, inspired in part by the presence of a fox family who regularly visits the institution’s garden, is a direct reference to fugitivity not only as a condition, but as an ontological state of being, woven around the profound interdependence between humans and other-than-humans. 

The second day led me to Mitte, with a particular anticipation to finally visit the famed Sophiensæle. The building itself has over 100 years of fascinating history of shifting identities: it was once home to radical thinkers, cultural organizations, a Yiddish theater, a workers’ sports club, and more darkly, a forced labor printing facility. Today, it is one of the most important independent performing arts centers in Germany. In the context of the biennale, the Sophiensæle hosts four artists, including Daniel Gustav Cramer, a German artist who presents Fox & Coyote at the entrance to ground floor hall. Affixed directly to the architecture itself, Fox & Coyote brings wildlife to Berlin by spreading images of coyotes citywide. It’s a modest and symbolic gesture connecting California’s Death Valley with the host city, and speaks of survival across landscapes and of crossing boundaries with instinct and stealth. 

Tucked at the far end of the exhibition space stands a modest living room-like arrangement of two armchairs facing a TV screen, presenting the video work The Beggars’ Convention by Major Nom – a queer and female-identifying performance collective from Yangon. The group restages the original work from 1987, Beggars’ National Convention, by Zarganar – beloved Burmese comedian and junta critic. Humor in this context is used as an amor, a social and political commentary performed with satire and dynamic dialogues. The original piece led to the arrest of the performing actors. Four decades later, the work returns as both a historical echo and a call to action, now mobilized to support Myanmar’s Civil Disobedience Movement in the aftermath of the 2021 coup. A recurring motif throughout the biennale is the role of laughter and humor as a strategy of resistance; a method of survival in the face of oppression. Humor emerges as a counter-narrative, a tool for disarming power, and a vehicle for truths that cannot always be spoken directly. What threads through both the curatorial framework and the methodologies of many participating artists is the importance of oral storytelling and political agency, which is also noticeable in the public program Encounters. 

The final stop on my biennale tour is the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Here, the chapter titled foxing opens with The Fly (Paris) by Htein Lin. Shot in a single take and first performed while in prison, the artist is in a dimly lit space, fixated on a droning fly. His body and movement synchronize with the fly, embodying the entrapment, as both captor and captive. Eventually, Lin catches and eats the fly. He adapts to his freedom and embraces liberation. The work has been restaged multiple times since, including a 2022 performance by his long-time collaborator, Myanmarese artist Chaw Ei Thein, which occurred during Lin’s re-arrest on political grounds.  

Just beyond, directly confronting visitors at the entrance to the ground floor, hang six monumental canvases by Tuensangian artist Iris Yingzen. Her series, Garden of Hope, pays tribute to women of Nagaland, who endured conflict, grief, and loss in the region which has suffered decades of violence at the hands of the Indian army. Its victims, often unable to survive after imprisonment, struggle along with their relatives. Her response to firsthand experiences and observations led her to guerrilla gardening. In 2005, she began by planting flowers at a former site of torture located in front of her home, which had become a neglected garbage dumping site. 

Outside, at the rear of the KW exhibition space, is a work by Myanmarese Nge Nom. A recreated backyard ditch evokes the very site where the artist once survived a military attack on young protesters, who were shielded by the unexpected solidarity of elderly residents from the area. The installation gestures toward the complexities of intergenerational relationships in times of crisis, highlighting the friction between the typically apolitical stances of older generations and the urgency embodied by youth-led resistance. After the 2021 coup, Nge Nom launched a Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) by fundraising for striking workers. The strikes escalated into civil war, leading to mass displacements and deaths, which continue to this day. 

The remaining floors of KW Institute are populated by a wide-ranging selection of artwork from different generations and political positions. Potknięcie, a work by Polish group Akademia Ruchu depicts people stumbling on the street, the interactive Mars-landing installation LIBERATE MARS by Etcétera reframes interplanetary conquest as a metaphor for the ongoing plunder of Indigenous lands and resources. The last floor of the building is occupied entirely with an installation by Burmese artist Sawangwongse Yawnghwe; it’s a joker’s lair overlooking the city, including the biennale. His hideout is dense with documents: lists of arms manufacturers, global military funders, art-world patrons tangled in opaque networks of power. It’s a bittersweet commentary where broken childhood dreams collide with the brutal mechanics of empire and influence. It’s also the last installation space I visited on my route through the biennale, which from here, feels like an ideal narrative link to everything I experienced before. From this vantage point, going against the recommended order of venues no longer feels like a deviation, but a strategy. 

The 13th Berlin Biennale unfolds with a quiet, almost tender lyricism despite the weight of the histories and violences with which it engages. The selection of artists is a conjunction of representatives of several methodologies and geographies and yet, for all its poignancy, the experience remains curiously ephemeral. The curatorial proposal and set of tools delivered through the invited art is one of answers to the forthcoming socio-political reality. But is such a strategy – subtle, dispersed, suggestive – adequate to the scale of a biennale? Can it truly be translated into action by individuals? What can a biennale like this, in a Western capital of one of Europe’s wealthiest nations, truly teach us, a largely European viewership? 

Among visitors and critics alike, one silence echoes loudly – the omission of Palestinian artists and direct narratives on the genocide currently occurring in Gaza. At the press conference, the difficulties of narration around this issue were direct and the curator and directors offered little. The German unease with articulating this genocide, and the broader Palestinian–Israeli war, is complicated by Germany’s own history. For me, Palestine haunts the biennale in its undertones. It is present in the stories of other countries and regions, which have experienced ethnic and political conflicts over the decades. The complex relations are shown indirectly in a multitude of artworks drawing on fragile borders, displacement, historic and long-lasting neglect, and struggle. These echoes form a mosaic of unresolved trauma and contested geographies. They ask the viewer to read diagonally, but is it enough at this moment? 

The Strike Germany movement has different opinions. They – along with a number of German art workers – have boycotted this edition of the biennale, and criticize the organizers for not taking a clear stand. The current situation in Berlin’s cultural scene is tense; The current situation in Berlin’s cultural scenes is tense; critics of the government and its policies are experiencing serious funding cuts, rising political pressures, and institutional censorship. This is a moment of asking critically, about the role of a biennale such as this one, and of artists’ voices. What path does this pave for the next months and years? When the world fractures before our eyes, what responsibilities do such platforms bear? What the 13th Berlin Biennale offers is, on the one hand, a multiperspective landscape of ethical complexities in a broad universe of geographies, often invisible from the European perspective outside of the art context. Yet on the other hand, its failure to clearly make a statement leaves me with more questions about what we miss, exclude, dilute, and ignore, in such spaces.