I finally made it to the 10th Berlin Biennale curated by Gabi Ngcobo and her curatorial team. I had such a busy summer that I even only made it once to a lake. I started the Berlin Biennale at the Akademie der Künste because somebody told me it was well curated. I like the title of the Biennale: "We Don't Need Another Hero," named after the 1985 Tina Turner song. So first thing I did was to focus my attention on the curatorial text. I got a bit annoyed there by the "artists and contributors who think and act beyond art" part - which art isn't about the "beyond-art"? I dislike when things sound revolutionary and they're just nonsense. But I rather liked how the wall text sounded manifesto like: No heroes, no saviours, no participation in "unyielding knowledge systems and historical narratives", but "different configurations of knowledge and power that enable contradictions and complications."
I expected to see this anarchy to be visible in what would follow in the exhibition but things got immediately very "nice" at Akademie der Künste, all quite agreeable. I have no lasting impression of it now, the day after. The only work that was in sync with the weight of the curatorial text was the one by Oscar Murillo. I also remember a huge screening of an annoying documentary/art video about refugees in Germany. For the rest, the art might have been good (except then for the nylon piece - ugh to nylons) but it didn't become clear why they were positioned in this Biennale or even next to each other. And there was no text of the curators to help the spectators along. I guess because a text would create the wrong kind of knowledge since language, as Marcel Duchamp said, is the biggest mistake of humankind. "Insipid," my friend A. texted me when I wrote him to complain about my viewing experience. I had to google the word: "lacking flavour." That nailed it down indeed.
I made it over to the second part of the Biennale at KW, where I saw the best piece. Downstairs was a huge installation by Dineo Seshee Bopape, inviting her friend artists Jabu Arnell, Lacteal Workman, Robert Rhee along. I think you could call it immersive art and I liked it nevertheless: water dropping in buckets, ruins of brick, Nina Simone performing Feelings in 1976, the orange light. It just worked. Suddenly there was also a curatorial text to the work and I liked what it said: "Bopape explores thinking through literature and sound." Next to this great piece was a video piece by Grada Kilomba, which I found terrible - just the way she filmed herself on a separate small screen, depicting herself as the storyteller of what is happening on the big screen, while sitting on stairs and acting as if she's reading to kids... I had to run out.
I saw a few other pieces that were good but the thing is that in the end I still didn't get what the curators wanted to transmit. There is something lacking in this Biennale. I would almost call it "content" if that wouldn't sound so horrible. And although I'm a minimalist, this Biennale made me wish for a curatorial narrative that keeps the pieces together, that let's them communicate. I got so little from this show that I didn't feel the need any longer to make it all the way to ZKU, the Biennale's third location in Moabit. I doubted that the curators would give me more there. And I guess that was their aim - no narrative, etc. but it went out the wrong way: the Biennale might not confirm "configurations of knowledge or power," at least with its selection of artists, but it also didn't manage to create different ways of thinking "complex subjectivities." My friend and I already drank a coffee at AdK but we felt that we needed another source of energy so we went for a matcha latte at the Japanese shop next-door.