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Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

The 9th Berlin Biennale presents “Art that doesn’t look like art” at various places in the capital

29.08.2016
© dpa/Britta Pedersen - Berlin Biennale

A running track on desert sand, in the middle of which stands a mother with her child in traditional Arab costume. Positive Pathways (+) is the title of the installation of the artist collective GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) from Dubai, which is being exhibited on the first floor of a Berlin business school as part of the 9th Berlin Biennale. A steamship on the Spree River in turn is the venue of a work by Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic: in the ship’s interior the two artists have built a dark burrow complete with video installation. Under the motto “The Present in Drag”, the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art is showing at many places in Berlin and till mid-September 2016 works, installations and “art that doesn’t look like art”, in the words of its website.

A biennale that is different

The biennale is curated this year for the first time by a website, DIS Magazine, a platform for art, music, fashion and reflections on the modern world. The founders of the site, a New York artists collective named “DIS”, went to Berlin for two years for the preparations. There in the German capital Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro have created a biennale that has been lauded by all critics as “different”. The collective DIS comes to grips with digital conditions, advertising aesthetics and paradoxes: “the virtual as the real, nations as markets, people as data, culture as capital, wellness as politics, happiness as gross domestic product and so on”, as they themselves comment on the biennale’s themes.

The works of the Berlin Biennale are on display at the Academy of Arts, the ESMT European School of Management and Technology, the Feuerle Collection, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art and on the passenger ship Blue Star of the Riedel shipping company. The Berlin Biennale has been sponsored since 2004 by the German Federal Cultural Foundation as a leading cultural institution. It takes place every two years.

9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, till 18 September2016

http://bb9.berlinbiennale.de/de/

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