It must be two years now that I have been receiving emails from the Berlin Biennial on a regular basis. Invitations to events all over the city with different curators and artists, or that is what I think it was. This Berlin Biennial has been dragging on for so long, it has lost any form to me. Now I received an email about an "epilogue", which finally seems to be taken the form of a "real" exhibition, although that is still a guess. Apparently this Berlin Biennial doesn't want to be an alien space ship landing on the city for the summer, but a process-based and locally-made event. Well intended but one advantage of the alien space ship is that it brings along excitement. This current Berlin Biennial does not.
I did get excited about something else locally. It was in front of my house. I have always enjoyed the brutalist fountain on the Tempelhofer "esplanade". But it wasn't until lockdown that I could be bothered to look up the name of the artist. It took me a while on Google to find him, Gerhard Schultze-Seehof. And searching a bit further about his sculptural work, I discovered he also made the wall relief in the fire station in the Wienerstraße in Kreuzberg. I used to live in front of that building for a few years in the 2000s. So for most of my time in Berlin, I have been living in front of the work of Gerhard Schultze-Seehof. Coincidence? The law of attraction? It must mean something... I'm still figuring out what.