Review: Magical works and pillows of shame at the Berlin Biennale

“Exile is hard work.” The words are written in red letters in several different languages ​​on top of a collage of black and white posters with photographs of women who have fled. Egyptian-Turkish-French artist Nil Yalter’s work sits on a window facing the street.

Extremely Berlinish! The city’s art scene is more critical and political than any other. Yalter’s photo wall is so similar to the widespread media activism in the cityscape that the work would have gone unnoticed if it had not been marked out on the Berlin Biennale’s map.

It’s political, but is it good art?

I get that question reason to stand several times during the three days when I graze on dozens of hours of often substandardly filmed, single-channel documentary video art and obscure objects in the five different exhibition spaces that host the twelfth edition of the biennial.

The artist and curator Kader Attia has his themes. It is about healing the wounds that a Western modernity, also known as a colonial and patriarchal predatory capitalism, has caused to humans and the rest of the earth.

He has chosen art with a concentration on environmental issues, decolonization and overseas feminism. Acutely important and interesting topics, even if it is not the first time they are dealt with in contemporary art. It’s nice to see so many unknown artists, otherwise it’s often the same name that rolls around the international spaces.

I understand that the curatorial team sees the biennial as a conversation that will deepen knowledge to achieve change. But most visitors will not attend seminars, they go to see the exhibitions. And there many mediocre works become dutiful illustrations of the curator’s laudable intentions.

Like when an artist has to symbolize frozen time through a horizontal hourglass. Magplask. Another questions monuments to white powerful men by sculpting their own naked female bodies in life size. Too simple. A third has made cow dung nuts and embroidered a poem that begins “Oh women, I am your vagina, Are you ashamed of me?” Yes. Shame pillow. A fourth has photographed Dalits’ experienced feet and exhibited their wooden slippers next to them. A document of impropriety is not enough.

A fifth artist has completely sonic took the abusive images from the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 where American soldiers sexually torture Iraqi prisoners, inflated them in giant format and built a labyrinth that the visitor is forced to get through. Speculative and counterproductive. Some girls perform an ecofeminist meditation in a Swedish primeval forest by rubbing themselves against a mossy rock. Involuntary humor. Another has taken black and white conventional portraits of Nigerian women describing experiences of rape on notes posted next to them. Painful exploitation.

What all these examples have in common is that they are literal illustrations, worn-out metaphors for violence and injustice. Are we back in the 70’s? Does the purpose sanctify the funds now? Should art join trauma porn and misery voyeurism?

Who wants to be written on the nose of art without either complexity or design? These works do not highlight problems, they instead stand in the way of our view of them. It does not help to have an exhausted grip at this point; to contextualize by presenting stands with radical literature. The visitor can not even flip through the books.

The title “Still present!” has at least a hopeful tone of voice. Attia wants art to wake us from the slumber of digital capitalism. And sometimes it does happen.

The magic is found in two moving video works by Tuan Andrew Nguyen. In the four-channel “The Specter of Ancestors Becoming”, he cinematically and rhythmically depicts the complex postcolonial legacy, in the suites of West African soldiers fighting for France in the Vietnam War and having children with Vietnamese women. Three family destinies are woven together in a half-documentary, half-dream story that painfully depicts how colonialism tore apart families and conditioned love for generations. The tenderness in the execution of the work gives comfort and hope for healing.

Nguyen’s other video work “My ailing beliefs can cure your wretched desires” is about all animals that are exterminated, locked up in zoos, stopped, forced into circus arts or hunted for consumption. The Vietnamese treat the animals the way the French and Chinese treated them, states the narrator, belonging to an extinct rhino. It is a desperate song about the subject’s desperate lack of opportunities to escape the capricious torture of the powerful.

In addition to this, Forensic Architecture outclasses most things, as usual, here with the work “Cloud studies”. They seem to have formed a trend recently, because there are more statistics-based works here. It is a mathematician who has done one of the Berlin Biennale’s most interesting works. The Frenchman David Chavalarias shapes his research on how populism and right-wing extremism grow on Twitter in a complicated network graphic that stretches over an entire wall. Similarly, in the enormously long digital painting “Air conditioning”, Lawrence Abu Hamdan has given shape to how the Israeli military has harassed Lebanon via military aircraft for fifteen years.

Susan Schuppli, som also worked with Forensic Architecture for several years, shows three video works that are part of the project “Cold cases”. She describes how Canada colonizes the ice in the Arctic, while cooling down protesting activists at Standing Rock with water cannons in sub-zero temperatures. She documents how Canadian police used to murder obnoxious people from the same group for them by driving them to remote places in double-digit minus degrees and dumping them there. It is a shocking document, clearly and coolly designed with graphs of geography and temperatures.

Hasan Özgür Top runs in the video essay “The fall of a hero” with hypermasculinity and connects the aesthetics of IS execution videos with big movies about the Roman Empire and pictures of how dictators wanted to portray themselves, like Mussolini with a sword. Sitting in the museum halls of the nasty Stasi complex and laughing at this fleetingly made video about male power ambitions is a relief.

Jihan El-Tahri asks what is missing in his video essay about the former French colonies. What are there no pictures of? She tells how the colonized peoples during the French Empire did not have the right to film themselves. French cinematography changes meaning in the shadow of violence in depriving someone of the right to portray their own experience. El-Tahri is now looking for clues in the men’s pictures, and visiting archives in West African countries where piles of film reels fade away because there are no resources to take care of them.

Here the invisible really becomes painfully visible. As Kader Attia wanted.

The above mentioned artists and some others save me from existential anxiety over the state of art and society. In their work I see sorrow, struggle and restoration.