10th Berlin Biennale, 9.6.–9.9.2018; Keleketla! Library, The Allure of Gold and Other Solidarity Stories, 2018; installation view; photo: Timo Ohler
10th Berlin Biennale, 9.6.–9.9.2018; Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth, Admiring Elaine Sturtevant, The Razzle-Dazzle of Thinking, 2015; courtesy Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth; photo: Smina Bluth
10th Berlin Biennale, 9.6.–9.9.2018; Mario Pfeifer, Again / Noch einmal, 2018; courtesy Mario Pfeifer; KOW, Berlin; film still; © 2018 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
10th Berlin Biennale, 9.6.–9.9.2018; Las Nietas de Nonó, Ilustraciones de la Mecánica, 2016–18; courtesy Las Nietas de Nonó; performance documentation; photo: Timo Ohler
10th Berlin Biennale, 9.6.–9.9.2018; Fabiana Faleiros, Mastur Bar, 2015–18; courtesy Fabiana Faleiros, photo: Timo Ohler
10th Berlin Biennale, 9.6.–9.9.2018; Dineo Seshee Bopape, Untitled (Of Occult Instability) [Feelings], 2016–18; courtesy Dineo Seshee Bopape, Jabu Arnell, Lachell Workman, Mo Laudi, Robert Rhee, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut; installation view; photo: Timo Ohler
10th Berlin Biennale, 9.6.–9.9.2018; Thierry Oussou, Impossible Is Nothing, 2016; excavation, Allada (Benin); photo: Thierry Oussou
10th Berlin Biennale, 9.6.–9.9.2018; Belkis Ayón, La consagración, 1991; © Estate de Belkis Ayón, Havana; photo: Jose A. Figueroa
Curated by Gabi Ngcobo with a curatorial team composed of Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Yvette Mutumba, Serubiri Moses, and Thiago de Paula Souza, We don’t need another hero confronted the incessant anxieties perpetuated by a willful disregard for complex subjectivities. Thinking and acting beyond art, the contributors did not provide a coherent reading of histories or the present of any kind in the biennial. Like the Tina Turner song which the title references, the 10th Berlin Biennale rejected the seduction of savior narratives. Instead, it explored the political potential of the act of self-preservation, refusing to be seduced by unyielding knowledge systems and historical narratives that contribute to the creation of toxic subjectivities.
The 10th Berlin Biennale took place at four permanent exhibition venues: Akademie der Künste at Hanseatenweg, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Volksbühne Pavilion, and ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics. Through a coproduction with HAU Hebbel am Ufer, HAU2 served as a site for two performances as well as a multi-day exhibition project with discursive events and seminars. The exhibition venues were chosen not only because of their historic relevance but also because of what they represent today.
The public program of the 10th Berlin Biennale, I’m Not Who You Think I’m Not, was launched one year before the opening and set the tone in a first event in July 2017 that took place in collaboration with the independent educational initiative Each One Teach One (EOTO) e. V. This was followed by further events—not only in Berlin, but also in Johannesburg, ZA, and Nairobi, KE. In the various formats within the framework of the public program, the 10th Berlin Biennale disavowed assumed beingness and know-hows and proposed a refreshed grammar for facing the present.
A special focus of this edition of the Berlin Biennale was the wide-ranging mediation program, which created opportunities for encounter, exchange, and uncertainty. Organized in experimental and engaging formats, the mediation program offered a space for processes of learning and unlearning and for addressing blind spots. Artistic and participatory methods were the tools used to foster interaction between participants, works of art, the curatorial team, and exhibiting artists as well as the neighborhoods surrounding the venues. There were numerous cooperations with social and educational organizations in Berlin and beyond.
Two curatorial projects were initiated within the framework of the 10th Berlin Biennale: Strange Attractors—a curatorial publication project by Nomaduma Rosa Masilela with a specially designed reading room at KW—united artist contributions and archival material. The contributions engaged with notions of cosmology, relationality, and scale. The School of Anxiety, conceived by Serubiri Moses, took the form of workshops with public presentations in Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Berlin. It was an unteaching environment focusing on subjective anxieties.
10th Berlin Biennale, 9.6.–9.9.2018; curatorial team, from left to right, Thiago de Paula Souza, Gabi Ngcobo, Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Yvette Mutumba, Serubiri Moses; photo: F. Anthea Schaap
Graphic Design
Maziyar Pahlevan
"DEAR HISTORY THIS REVOLUTION HAS WOMEN, GAYS, QUEERS & TRANS. REMEMBER THAT #RHODESMUSTFALL."
A photograph of a protest banner with these words is one of several iconic images associated with the Fallists—a South African student group that emerged out of the recent #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protest movements. Among these images, the most striking shows the removal of the statue of imperialist Cecil John Rhodes from the grounds of the University of Cape Town on April 9, 2015, exactly a month after the beginning of the protests. Also visible in this image is a placard reading “WE ARE NOT DONE YET”.
What has remained evocative for my curatorial thinking—beyond the images plastered across the internet—is an image inscribed in my mind, that of the vacant concrete plinth where Rhodes sat contemplatively for more than eighty years. What future possibility does this open space hold or enable us to foretell?
Addressing history in the present is to speak to a future unknown. Belonging to the generation of the current moment, we cannot immediately understand, in relative opacity, how the events of the present will affect our futures. This unknowing, however, should not stop us from undoing what has become obsolete.
The dazzle camouflage that is our visual identity for the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art references camouflaged warships from the First World War, which were painted with patterns meant to obscure the intentions, direction, speed, and size of the ships. Clad in this camouflage, the 10th Berlin Biennale is not a platform for superfluous obscurities but rather carves a space from which we can keep and recover our collective distances from overly simplified notions of beingness. Our camouflage is imagined in shades of grey and pink—respectively denoting, at least in our fiction, the color of history and the color of the future.
Titled We don’t need another hero, the 10th Berlin Biennale has been a journey of inhabiting a grammar towards the unknown. Our journey begins twenty years into the existence of the Berlin Biennale, now in its tenth version, placing us at a historical crossroads. This intersection demands that we tread carefully before crossing over, or turning. To be at this crucial point, right now, also demands an introspective approach. Here, things may collide and create a state of disarray. Here, too, we can still change our attitudes to the world and the people we share it with.
A number of artists invited to the 10th Berlin Biennale took up residencies in cooperation with partners in different parts of the world: in Johannesburg, South Africa; Salvador de Bahia, Brazil; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Bangalore, India; Windhoek, Namibia; and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Some artists came to take up residencies in Berlin, coming from Port-au-Prince in Haiti, Allada in Benin and Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago. For us, artist residencies are tools for unsettling cultural creation by expanding our understanding of ourselves in the world, whether this becomes visible as part of the work in the biennial is of little significance. Residencies are platforms for staging a new set of contradictions that may arise from a refreshed understanding of alternative historical configurations.
The public program of the 10th Berlin Biennale I’m Not Who You Think I’m Not was launched a little less than a year before the opening of the exhibition in collaboration with Each One Teach One e. V. (EOTO), an association located in the neighborhood of Berlin-Wedding, where this first event was staged in July 2017. The event featured poets affiliated with EOTO, Philipp Khabo Koepsell and Victor Omere, and participants invited by the 10th Berlin Biennale, cultural theorist George Shire and artists Donna Kukama and Jota Mombaça. The inaugural public program set the tone for an ongoing journey towards the 10th Berlin Biennale and continues as an open space for negotiations and active contradictions that the format of the biennial exhibition may not be able to sustain. The public program disavows assumed beingness and know-hows, perspectives that are often based on existing, constructed social frameworks and their associated speculations about particular subjectivities. [...]
The 10th Berlin Biennale takes place in five venues. KW Institute for Contemporary Art has been the venue of the biennial since its beginning in 1998. It is an institution that has experienced an exciting history engaged in post-Wall Berlin. It provides us a space to contemplate the narratives that have shaped it and its future in the city. At the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg we consider the multiple histories contained in the institution’s vast archives and the lineage of its exclusive membership system, posing questions about the hierarchical nature of historical constructs. In 2008 the 5th Berlin Biennale collaborated with the artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIC, whose project Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum became one of the venues for the biennial. The 10th Berlin Biennale is again working with the collective to collaborate within a space that they have since established in the neighborhood of Moabit. Z/KU – Center for Art and Urbanistics features the works of artists who reflect on the built environment, starting from their own subjectivities and how these subjectivities are performed or interpreted in different parts of the city. A coproduction with HAU Hebbel am Ufer features two evenings of musical production that trace the history of Kwaito, a music genre that emerged from the townships of South Africa during the post-1994 period. The musical journey is accompanied by club events and an interactive space in the HAU2 project space.
We don’t need another hero is a collective dialogue and a space that holds a historical process already in motion, here in Berlin and in many parts of the world. The work of undoing and reconfiguring centuries of repressed vocabularies and their complexities is an undertaking that has thrown us into states of disarray; it “is a program of complete disorder”, to quote Fanon. The 10th Berlin Biennale proposes a plan on how to face a collective madness; it offers a platform for collective dreaming and for action. We don’t need another hero is a message to the future and a command for us to fearlessly heed the present.
We are not undone yet.