
Like most Twenty first-century biennials, the 2025 Berlin Biennale – curated by Turin-based Zasha Colah – feels as if it’s strolling an unsteady tightrope between present world points and town’s native context. The works collected below this 12 months’s theme – ‘passing the fugitive on’ – really feel surprisingly muted within the context of a Berlin that has, over the previous 16 months, been the centre of intense political turmoil. Colah conceived the theme of her biennial earlier than the individuals of Berlin took to the streets to protest in opposition to the huge cuts threatening to decimate town’s cultural sector; earlier than Strike Germany noticed artists boycotting establishments aligned with the federal government’s hardline stance on the struggle in Gaza; earlier than the widespread censorship and cancellation of exhibitions within the metropolis. As such, the biennial as an entire finally ends up feeling barely belated. Regardless that lots of its particular person works are nonetheless politically pressing, the dramatically altered context into which they arrive dampens their impact.
There are, nevertheless, nonetheless moments of resistance. On the biennial’s press convention, Colah spoke of the artist Htein Lin’s contagious laughter in courtroom as he was sentenced below false expenses, for conspiring to overthrow the Myanmar authorities. For Colah, this serves because the occasion’s arch metaphor: Lin’s laughter uncovered the grotesqueness of the nation’s unjust prosecution of dissent, whereas his defiance ignited others to endure and resist. Offered on the KW Institute for Modern Artwork, a movie of the artist’s jail efficiency, The Fly (restaged in 2008), is each hypnotic and paroxysmic. The low-fi movie exhibits Lin sitting bare in a chair, his fingers behind his again as if sure, whereas keeping off an imaginary fly. He finally catches the fly and eats it, earlier than starting to convulse. In the direction of the tip of this antagonistic efficiency Lin addresses the viewers, asking: ‘Why are you silent?’

Few of the biennial’s different works match the vitality of this piece. Even referencing Dada – a fugitive motion par excellence – fails to ignite a spark. Additionally on show at KW Institute for Modern Artwork, Hannah Höch’s understated acrylic portray of flowers, Im Park (Within the Park, 1945), appears to have been chosen much less for its calming impact than for the artist’s credentials as a grasp of the Dada photomontage. Elsewhere, at a former courthouse within the metropolis’s Moabit area, Simon Wachsmuth’s Dada-inspired movie, From Heaven Excessive (2025), reimagines a 1920 work by artists John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter, which introduced a floating pig in a navy uniform (Prussian Archangel). Wachsmuth’s movie revolves across the 1920 trial of Heartfield and Schlichter – who had been accused of defaming the military – with a pig utilizing nonsensical language video games to confound the choose. But the measured, AI-like tone utilized by the movie’s actors falls flat, and the entire piece appears far faraway from the anarchic vitality of Prussian Archangel’s 1920 presentation.
Regardless that most of the biennial’s particular person works are nonetheless politically pressing, the dramatically altered context into which they arrive dampens their impact.
Displaying works in a former courthouse imposes on this biennial the somber spectre of punitive legal guidelines. In distinction to this sense of legislative management, Colah options works that exhibit examples of illegality. Artcom Platform presents The Tune of Lake Balkhash (2025), a movie each honouring the nomadic communities that thrive across the lake and revolting in opposition to the constructing of a nuclear plant on its shores. In the meantime, Anna Scalfi Eghenter’s Die Komödie! (The Comedy!, 2025) is centred on the 1916 trial of the socialist organizer Karl Liebknecht, which befell on the Moabit courthouse. In Eghenter’s piece, pink political pamphlets flutter within the air, propelled by a number of giant followers – the whirlwind of pink evoking a state of upheaval in concord with Liebknecht’s political strategies. But the remainder of Eghenter’s set up (a pen and toy-soldiers right here, a Comnunista neon signal there) feels oddly static, failing to do justice to the story of Liebknecht’s passionate anti-militarism and later assassination by right-wing militia. In the meantime, Milica Tomić’s movies – through which students give Lacanian explanations of the struggle in Serbia – are so discursive, I ended up feeling misplaced within the maze of S-diagrams. On this dense lexical soup, any sense of subversive resourcefulness is misplaced.

The times of dirt-cheap rents in Berlin are lengthy gone. Relying on who has been in cost, previous biennials have channeled town’s anarchic spirit, reanimating uncared for areas. But there’s all the time the danger that redeveloping deserted buildings on this manner will contribute to the gentrification of areas the place artists have clung on to low-rent studios and flats. Even probably the most politically aware occasions wrestle to extricate themselves from the workings of financial energy. The Moabit courthouse used for the 2025 Berlin Biennale stands in the course of a area being reshaped by homogenous luxurious websites.

It’s heartening that the biennial has this 12 months included a sister group, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, which ran a profitable public fundraising marketing campaign after almost dropping all its state funding to finances cuts. Unbowed, the venue is screening a programme, ‘Fugitive Traces: Difficult Energy Buildings and Narratives’. To actually convey fugitivity, nevertheless, would require the Berlin Biennale to think about how artwork throughout this metropolis might outfox regressive politicians – and never simply prior to now.
The thirteenth Berlin Biennale is on view till 14 September
Essential picture: Simon Wachsmuth, From Heaven Above, 2022, video nonetheless. Courtesy: © Simon Wachsmuth and Zilberman, Istanbul and Berlin