So we’ve returned from the Berlin Biennale wholly satisfied by what we experienced. There were a huge number of artists involved showing all number of works. We started off with Amelia Ulman and her Snapchat stories; unable to tell what imagery is genuine happenstance and what is fabricated coincidence the audience is taken on a bite sized journey of documentation-worthy happenings. We also see familiar content such as memes and fashion label ads’ restaged and re-filmed by Ulman.
Next was Cécile B. Evans’ monumental, hour long, film, commissioned for the exact purpose. Viewers were invited onto a platform surrounded by water with a giant projection of ‘What the heart Wants’ in front of them. Its beautiful CGI and bizarre non-linear, story line reduce the hour to what feels like a few moments and continues to stun the audience with lines such as, ‘most of the future hasn't happened yet’.
Heading down into what felt, very appropriately, like a bunker of sorts, we came across Josh Kline’s film, ‘Crying Games’. We’re faced with a number of individuals all weeping into their hands saying phrases such as ‘I can’t believe it’ or ‘so many people’. They look similar to people we recognise but with a slight twist; using open source software Kline has swapped the faces of the actors whom originally performed the role with alleged war criminals such as George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.
‘Everything #5.1’ is a tombstone-shaped section of wall that has been removed. It’s a work by Adrian Piper. Covering the resultant cavity, a transparent sheet of plexiglass reads, ‘Everything Will Be Taken Away.’ A demonstration of a negative understanding of freedom, the equivalent of having ‘nothing left to lose.’ It is the liberty that results once the weight of signage, markers, and labels is removed.
Camille Henrot, responsible for the amazing film ‘Grosse Fatigue’, was exhibiting emails from a number of environmental charity organisations, printed onto rubber, along side her proposed responses and 11 large-scale paintings of animals. It felt slightly cruel to almost target these organisations with her ostentatious replies; they’re only trying to provide help to things are people that need it. If these had been from banks or network providers it would’ve been slightly clichés but it would have been more understandable. The paintings felt unnecessary also, obviously these animals are ones which show affection and the idea of paintings has this romanticism associated with it but the style was very particular and there didn’t seem to be any known reason for it.
Throughout the transitional spaces, stairwells and corridors, Puppies Puppies invited visitors to make use of the Purell hand sanitiser dispensers that he has placed around. A sneaky intervention that could easily have gone unnoticed and probably did by many. He also is creating a video everyday that the biennale is on.
‘Blockchain Visionaries’ is the work being shown by Simon Denny, which showcases three real companies – Ethereum, 21, Inc, and Digital Asset Holdings – at the forefront of digital monetary platforms and the application of the blockchain, a decentralised transaction database technology that is the backbone of the denationalised cryptocurrency BitCoin. Denny has created a trade-fair-like information booth and a postage stamp for each company, which individually embody a future direction in blockchain technology.
An idea, which we hope to eventually directly steal, is having a viewing of a film on a boat; no one can leave, there’s nothing else to do, you’re on a boat. All these points were clearly on the minds of Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic whose futuristic/dystopian film took on the form of an installation on board a boat. Another idea present in this work that was reinforced during the entirety of the biennale was that if you’re showing a film that’s more than 2 minutes, provide comfy seating.
It was very exciting to be able to encounter another of Jon Rafman’s VR pieces. It involved huge amounts of destruction, falling through and into things, whilst being visually stunning too. He also had some of the subject of his previous films, deferent animals of different sizes consuming each other, turned into sculptures. These weren’t to our liking at first; it looked as if he was merely capitalising on previous success in a different medium – O.K but not that interesting. Once we started the Oculus piece however, we learned they were props for what was happening within the world he had created.
Will Benedict’s music video for ‘Wolf Eyes’ had a pretty incredible an alien/sea creature main character and when combined with the lyric ‘I burn my dreams just to stay warm’ was enough to keep us amused for the duration.
Slightly disappointed with Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Finch but perhaps that’s because we’ve seen quite a few of their works now and they are very similar in their insanity and nonsensicalness. Obviously that is the entire point of them but staying for the whole hour is a rather herculean task. Saying that, there was a rather poetic line in one of them – "who's time are we wasting?" – suggesting that if it was one persons time and not someone else’s they could merely be refunded by another.
Simon Fujiwara had worked with his brother (who works in ‘happiness economics’) to create ‘The Happiness Museum’. Creating a portrait of Germany through products and collections that nod towards what we call ‘happiness’.
After seeing Hito Steyerl’s astonishing film, ‘Factory of the Sun’, in Venice last year we were initially slightly let down by the stripped back aesthetic of the setting for ‘The Tower’ and ‘ExtraSpaceCraft’. Nevertheless, both films did prove to be well told stories, with ‘ExtraSpaceCraft’ shot at the actual site of the former National Observatory of Iraq, now in the territory of the Kurdistan Regional Government, proving quite an exception.
That's it for the Berlin Biennale highlights but we gave ourselves an extra day to see what else Berlin had to offer. One of these things was a show containing 50 works, and 150 poems by Carl Andre. It’s always fun to be able to walk on excessively expensive art so the floor works were greatly enjoyed. We haven’t really seen much of his poems before so it was interesting to be able to see so many at once. Most of them involve singular words repeated. Was a lovely connection between the text pieces and those of a tangible nature; they’re both true to the 'material' in question. There is nothing else present but the things itself and in this case the word is all that is required, pure and unadulterated. There was also an interview with Andre himself were he spoke about how people think his scatter works are very different from his more systematic, precise ones. He was suggesting that, on the contrary, there is a ‘generalised irregularity’ of his scatter works making them just as uniform or irregular as the other pieces.
In the same institution was Marcel Brodhauser’s film ‘The Rain (Project for a Text)’. In the film Brodhauser is trying to write while the rain constantly washes away the ink. In the final scene, the artist gives up and drops his pen concluding the exercise in futility.
In the grounds there was another piece very similar to the ideas we’re hoping to put into production soon; ‘The Right To Be Lazy’ - John Knight is an intervention into the existing architectural, social and political fabric of the place. The formal agreement between the institution and the artist was that the rondel, the circular lawn in front of the entrance to the building, was never to be tended and left to grow naturally by the command of the seasons.
Erwin Wurm also had an exhibition, which we couldn’t miss. ‘Narrow house’ is a to-scale model of his childhood home, a building typical of Austria’s post-war suburban architecture, only the sculpture has been shrunk to 1m width. This goes along with his whole ‘alter the everyday perspective’ thing which he uses in a all number of mediums. There was great attention to detail inside the house, even photos and fridge magnets had been stretched/squashed. It also succeeded in making us feel overly oppressed.
His famous ‘One Minute Sculptures’ were also present in a way…the viewers were given objects that had been used previously to perform these sculptures and were invited to reenact them themselves. This was great fun to interact with whilst also watching others.
His beautiful instructional diagrams were on display too. His new sculptures had a similar theme; large scale domestic items such as a soap dispenser or a phone appeared to have been destroyed by use, buttons pushed in too far etc., but this was due to the fact the weren’t made of their original materials but a far softer one.
A funny/bizarre painting we saw, that we just couldn't not share, depicted 2 cigarette butts sitting in an ashtray smoking a matchstick. It will be our background to all our electronic devices for quite some time.
The final thing we saw whilst in Berlin was a fairly gloomy albeit remarkable film, made using exquisite architectural models, of what the Nazis wanted to build over Germany. The scale of it was incredible – fountains and statues 30 meters into the air. When it cut to the map and it was revealed that what was being bulldozed to erect these new structures was hundreds of domestic properties. This film is also not available anywhere online but feel free to give it a search if you want – it’s called ‘Word of Stone’ and was made by a guy called Kurt Rüpil.