8th Berlin Biennale For Contemporary Art

29.5. – 3.8.2014

curated by Juan A. Gaitán

On Sunday, August 3, 2014, the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art came to a close after a successful two-month run with a wide range of responses. 75.000 people visited the exhibition during the whole running time. Especially the venues in Berlin’s Southwest were well received by the audience.

Monika Grütters, German Minister of State for Culture and the Media, opened the 8th Berlin Biennale, which is notably funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation), on May 28, 2014 at Museen Dahlem – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in presence of numerous embassadors and cultural politicians,among them the Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs of Berlin Tim Renner.

With this Berlin Biennale, the curator, Juan A. Gaitán, wanted to keep the curatorial approach to Berlin on a tentative level, while focusing on the unstable relationship between experienced history and scientific historiography. Thus, this edition focussed on the artwork as a propositional gesture that offers different readings of history and the mechanisms of its current representation.

58 artists from all over the world were invited to mark and investigate history and its fragments. The exhibition referred to the historization that can be noticed in Berlin and in other cities. Berlin can be considered representative for a larger tendency of incorporating biased historical narratives in the contemporary city, through its architecture, urban planning, monuments, and spatial distribution of tourism, commerce, and cultural capital.

The Berlin Biennale has the continuous ambition to examine the parameters of the city of Berlin. Heightened urban centrality and rapid socio-political and municipal recreation of Berlin’s inner city lead this edition of the Berlin Biennale to stir away from Berlin Mitte towards the art and culture institutions Museen Dahlem and Haus am Waldsee. This curatorial decision bridged KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin Mitte, Berlin Biennale’s traditional venue, by drawing renewed attention on these significant places of cultural production that waned attention in the course of the political and geographic redefinition of Berlin. The works of the 8th Berlin Biennale were exhibited in already existing cultural institutions,also because this strengthened Berlin’s present cultural infrastructure and brought these practices to the attention to a broader spectrum citizens as well as visitors of the city. Several artists used this as occasion to deal with institutions directly by intervening with and reacting to their approach to collections and forms of presentation.

In the preparations for the 8th Berlin Biennale Juan A. Gaitán invited Tarek Atoui, Natasha Ginwala, Catalina Lozano, Mariana Munguía, Olaf Nicolai, and Danh Vo into his Artistic Team. Its members not only worked alongside Juan Gaitán in conceiving the 8th Berlin Biennale but also developed their own projects: Tarek Atoui, Olaf Nicolai, and Danh Vo exhibited their own practice and Natasha Ginwala presented her research project Double Lives. Mariana Munguía’s publication Excursus – produced in collaboration with Maricris Herrera – assembled a selection of visual contributions from all participating artists and Catalina Lozano developed a program of events at the Crash Pad c/o KW. Additionally, each member of the Artistic Team made a contribution to the shortguide.

The Crash Pad, a room installation with a library conceived by Andreas Angelidakis at KW’s front house, opened already in January 2014 as the first venue of the 8th Berlin Biennale. Throughout the duration of the Berlin Biennale – inspired by the idea of a 19th century salon – it offered an intimate location for half public, half private cultural and discursive events, discussions, and other forms of exchange.

Two other artistic statements provided a forecast to this edition’s direction: Agatha Gothe-Snape created slogans as a pseudo copywriter for the splash page and print products of the 8th Berlin Biennale and Zachary Cahill's exhibition USSA Wellness Center explored the intersections of art therapy and the idea of “wellness” in times of the worldwide financial collapse for three days in May 2014 at KW.

The 8th Berlin Biennale was accompanied by a total of 50 events and over 87 artists and cultural producers dispersed through out all venues. Many of the events took place at Crash Pad c/o KW and included lectures, talks, concerts, screenings, performances, and dinner lectures. Among other things, writer Beatriz Colomina presented her book Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies together with Nikolaus Hirsch; architecture historian Spyros Papapetros hold a conversation with artist Olaf Nicolai. Artist Pedro G. Romero gave a cultural-historical presentation on Flamenco, overlaid with intermittent musical interventions.

At the Museen Dahlem site-specific events such as the Dahlem Sessions, a concert series conceived by Tarek Atoui, and a performance on the opening night by Danh Vo and Xiu Xiu, other events such as the play: Preparatory Notes for a Chicago Comedy by Goshka Macuga and a concert by Julieta Aranda in collaboration with Tisha Mukarji entitled: The perspective of perspective: A world mediated by a faulty image of the world were staged.

At Haus am Waldsee, Carla Zaccagnini staged the ballet and concert Le Quintuor des Nègres, encore. Furthermore, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc conceived a series of four panel discussions as part of his work Crawling Doubles. Colonial Collecting and Affect. Also, the world premiere of Shahryar Nashat’s film Parade took place at Delphi Filmpalast am Zoo.

The visual appearance of the 8th Berlin Biennale was developed together with the design office Zak Group; this included among other things the shortguide to the exhibition, the website, and a range of promotional material such as flyers and posters.

Eleven artist of the Berlin Biennale created posters for the limited edition 9+1.

This is the fifth time that the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art has invited emerging curators to the Young Curators Workshop to exchange ideas and discuss questions of the curatorial discourse and practice. In the framework of The Exhibition: Metamorphosis of a Concept – organized by María Inés Rodríguez – 13 young curators from 11 different countries met a range of guests: curators and experts from other disciplines. Similar to the preceding editions, the Young Curators Workshop was supported by the Allianz Cultural Foundation, Berlin, BMW, Munich; and Goethe-Institut, Munich. The participation of two young French curators was made possible by the program Jeunes Commissaires des Bureau des arts plastiques of the Institut français.

For the workshop Dialogues, conceived by Lidia Rossner, students from the M.A. Program in Visual and Media Anthropology at Free University Berlin created videos portraying artists and their projects at the 8th Berlin Biennale. The videos can be watched at the Berlin Biennale website.

The curator of the 8th Berlin Biennale

Juan A. Gaitán

Juan A. Gaitán has invited the following persons to collaborate with him as core members and advisors in his Artistic Team:

Tarek Atoui

Natasha Ginwala

Catalina Lozano

Mariana Munguía

Olaf Nicolai

Danh Vo

Graphic Design

Zak Group

Complete team of the 8th Berlin Biennale

ENTER WEBSITE OF THE 8TH BERLIN BIENNALE