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THE FIFTH BERLIN BIENNIAL

Photo: Gunvanthi Balaram

Like it? Alaska-based Italian artist Paula Pivi’s installation.

This caption could well sum up the Biennial itself. Titled “When things cast no shadow” and curated by Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic, the biennial is far from insubstantial but stops short of casting a spell.

Lest you think that its title is a curatorial comment, it is not. “We don’t want to say we want things to cast no shadow. We simply want to explore what happens when things cast no shadow,” says Szymczyk, who is director of the Kunsthalle in Basel. Can art cast no shadow? “It is for the viewer to figure that out,” adds Filipovic, an independent curator and art critic.

The young curators have divided their exhibition into halves that they term “Day” and “Night”. “Day” consists of artworks and commissioned projects by 50 artists which are on view (until June 15) at three main venues: the upper (street) level of the Neue Nationalgalerie, a 2,500-sq metre glassed space which blurs the distinction between the inside and outside; the K.W. Institute for Contemporary Art, an old, stately home-turned-margarine factory turned bustling new alternative space on Auguststrasse in the Mitte, the old East Berlin neighbourhood that is now home to a great many galleries; and the artist-run Skulpturenpark Berlin Zentrum, a network of 62 centrally located vacant lots situated in the former “Death Strip” along the Wall.

“Night” is a programme of lectures, performances, workshops, field trips and other presentations that take place at various spots in the city every evening (of the Biennial’s run).

The laconic Szymczyk views “the night programme as a possible subversion or inversion of the ‘Day’: The exhibition is stable, visible, and lasts over two months; the night events are fleeting moments in the dark.” So, if at one moment, you have the neuroscientist Olaf Blanke demonstrating an out-of-body experiment at the encouragement of artist Melville Moti; at another you will have a Nobel Peace Prize prospective, Augusto Boal, the Brazilian founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed, holding a workshop according to his context-sensitive method, at the behest of local performance artists.

The Night’s yet to fall, so I seize the Day. I walk into the K.W. Institute on the biennial’s opening day with a friend and feel as though a vast black carpet has been rolled out for us — artist Ahmet Ögüt has smoothly layered the floor of the main hall with several tonnes of black tarmac. A man (not the artist but a visitor) is standing in the centre of what looks like a parking lot, but he casts no shadow. However, the work, called “Ground Control”, suggests that the shadow of globalisation looms large over Ögüt’s native Turkey. The country will soon be tarred with the black stuff.

A few metres up the stairs from this wall-to-wall asphalt carpet, we come face-to-face with a set of extraordinary photographs: Japanese commercial artist Kohei Yoshiyuki’s 1970s black and white photographs of nightlife in a Tokyo park. The pictures are explicit. No fudging here. The lens eye seeks out people cruising among the trees, couples having sex, voyeurs creeping up on the unwary lovers. And, along with the artist (who worked in tandem with the voyeurs), I am startled to discover that I have become an unhesitant voyeur, too.

We move on to a multi-media installation by Romanian artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor. Titled “Appointment with History”; it consists of a set of attractive, small watercolour paintings rendered in the style of 19th-century landscape painting and a loudspeaker playing lines from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto of 1848. The paintings depict events such as a protest march in Basel, jubilation at (the nearby Alexanderplatz) at the fall of the Wall, and scenes from the artists’ youth in Communist Romania: people queuing up before a supermarket; a worker contemplating his plight. As you soak in the visuals, the solemn words wash over you, evoking at once a sense of foreboding and of hope.

Nearby are a few darkened booths in which video films are showing. We watch four. There’s an interesting one by New York-based Korean artist Sung Hwan Kim called “Summer Days in Keijo — written in 1937”. The film shows Kim going in search of locations in the city of Seoul (Keijo under Japanese colonial rule) mentioned by the Swedish zoologist and explorer Sven Bergman in his 1938 book, In Korean Wilds and Villages. But 70 years on, the artist finds that the city that was continually destroyed, rebuilt and resettled in the 20th century, no longer tallies with Bergman’s text. As Kim points out, “I cannot see what he saw without what he wrote; he did not write anything I see now.”

Another film, made by Belgian Manon de Boer and entitled “Two Times 4’ 33”, is so intriguing that I watch it twice. I understand it better the second time. The film has the artist’s camera recording a live performance in Brussels of John Cage’s famous 1952 silent composition for piano, 4’ 33”. It opens with the pianist sitting down and setting the timer. He remains sitting forever. Condensation fogs the window behind him, but it does not block the sizzling sound of distant traffic on a wet road. After four minutes and 33 seconds, the audience claps. As Cage’s piece is performed a second time, the camera circles the room, bringing the enthralled audience, one by one, into the scene. The soundtrack is left out. The camera swivels slowly to the window. Outside, the winter wind is whipping the bare trees, soundlessly. The silence is so intense it conjures up a storm in my head.

I need a coffee break. In the KW’s garden cafe, we bump into a few journo-buddies from Zurich and London (over 900 media persons are attending the Biennial, they tell me). An Espresso later, we take the press shuttle with them to the Neue Nationalgalerie.

The works here form the most consistent part of the Biennial. Prominent among them is Warsaw-based artist Paulina Olowska’s set of bold, black-and-white paintings based on the work of Zofia Stryjenska, a Polish multi-disciplinary artist of great renown between the two World Wars, whose work was later discredited by the Communist regime because she refused to join a government-run artists’ union. There’s also Susan Hiller’s conversation piece of a video work, “The Last Silent Movie, 2007”, which pairs a black screen with a sound track comprising archival recordings of people speaking various endangered or extinct languages.

The works in the Skulpturenpark are less engaging. The setting affects you more than the works do. But French artist Cyprien Gaillard’s “The Arena and the Wasteland”, is worth a dekko. It’s an ensemble of tall light masts lying in a circular arrangement on the field, which is lit up at night. Gaillard’s work invokes the area’s former function as a hostile, brightly lit Death Strip, and sucks the viewer into the gloom of history.

Among the broken lumps of masonry and rubbish in the field is a shed in which a film, “Berlinmuren” by Norwegian artist Lars Laumann, narrates the story of a Swedish woman who fell in love with the Berlin Wall and is — believe it or not — married to the “Mauer”. The 60-ish Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer has a wedding invitation and photo album of the wedding ceremony to prove it. She lives with her now-retired husband, in the avatar of sundry miniature barbed-wire-topped models of himself, in a village in northern Sweden. She professes to be an “object-sexualist” and says she believes that objects have souls, feelings, desires and thoughts that they share with her telepathically. As such, the object of her love is not, she insists, a ridiculous fetish but an equal partner.

I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry. My friend opts to laugh.

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