Saskia Bos interviewed by Annie Fletcher, catalogue of the 2nd Berlin Biennale

I think this focusing on relationality, on concern and connectedness, which you feel with many artists in this show, was a way of establishing a countour for the art of today. And establishing that contour was necessary to avoid on the one hand the ‘anything goes’ approach that many Biennales have, where you put anything that’s new and surprising in the show. And on the other hand, I didn’t want to be trapped by a thematic starting point.

Because I think thematic shows are reductive in the end; you tend to illustrate your own theory while you have to allow for new art practices to develop, new and experimental works, which you might not even fully understand to be shown. There are works here that are being made as we speak, where I trust the artist and only know about the outline of the project. So, there is this paradox between how open can you allow your show to be, while you at the same time have to legitimize your choices and you want to give it a focus. I wanted to make a few historical links. To maybe give a context to the many younger artists who are participating: (...)

The art space is a free space, allowing people to reflect but not to solve the problem right there and then.

And maybe the aim of many of these artists, be they humorous or mainly philosophical, or reflective, is that even if they would like to change something in the real world, they wouldn’t do it themselves, they want people to realize that art can offer this relationality. Art is popular, everybody wants to be with art as an object of design more than desire. But the biennale is also a creative practice, a laboratory, an opportunity for the production of meaning. For a biennale it is important to present other possibilities of art to the audience, thus implying that the idea of the object, the market, and all the connections that are associated with art nowadays is not so much at its origin and never it source of inspiration:  (...)

I do think there is another role for the artist, generated by that ‘Institutional Critique’ and by historical avant-garde art in general, where the criticality of the artist is not only allowed for, or even wished for by the curators, but almost turns against the organisation itself, when they say ‘Hang on, where are we here, in the middle of a power system?’ And I think all those elements are necessary links to the reality of the show.