by Alison Hugill // May 23, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Legality.
The 13th Berlin Biennale, which brings together over 60 artists and presents more than 170 works, will open on June 13th at four venues across the city—KW, Hamburger Bahnhof, Sophiensaele and a former courthouse in Moabit. Biennale curator, Zasha Colah—assisted by Valentina Viviani—has just announced the title of this year’s show: ‘passing the fugitive on.’ With it, she references “art’s ability to define its own laws in the face of lawful violence in unjust systems and to assert itself even under conditions of persecution and militarization—sending messages that can be passed on.” While the title and venues are public knowledge, the participating artists will not be announced until the Biennale’s opening day.
Initially conceived under the theme “foxing”—the animal becoming a verb to encompass its sly-ness and characteristic fugitivity—this Biennale foregrounds artworks that assume different kinds of transmissibility, especially those that engage the body and orality. Hoping to incite a complicity between artwork and audience, Colah highlights works that speak directly—including but not limited to theatrical stagings, performances, reading groups, tribunals, commemorative walks and stand-up comedy. We spoke to Colah about the urgency of highlighting these kinds of works in Berlin today and the importance, in her curatorial practice, of “restorative laughter”—especially when there is no justice to be found.
Zasha Colah and Valentina Viviani, Curator and Assistant Curator of the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art // Photo by Raisa Galofre
Alison Hugill: The theme for this Biennale is “foxing”—a concept of fugitivity or illegality. How did you arrive at this theme and why do you think it’s important in this particular moment?
Zasha Colah: I think it’s important to say that when I started thinking through the concept, I got a lot of reactions from artists who asked “but what does that have to do with Berlin?” I explained that in India things were getting more and more restricted, as well as in Myanmar, where I am really close to the artist community. Many of my friends were in prison. It was terrifying. For one year, I didn’t curate anything. It left me in a kind of paralysis. The topic of fugitivity was something I crept back into. It was very much a survival instinct, for me. One thing I can say, which is very unfortunate, is that nobody asks me anymore what this theme has to do with Berlin. The times have changed so drastically, that it is no longer irrelevant here. It is, rather, expected.
AH: Unlike most other years, you haven’t announced the participating artists for the Biennale this year. Can you talk about that decision? Are you “foxing” the artists in order to protect them somehow, or is this rather conceived as an instance of “doing away with identity” that you mention in the press release?
ZC: The artists are right on top, if you go to the website. They are very important. But then when you click on it, you just get a bunch of foxes. I’ve had extreme reactions [to the decision not to announce the artists]—some people say “yes!” while others ask “what are you doing?”
Being against identity politics is something I talk about in the premise of the show. In it, I ask people to resist any preconceived idea of “what an artwork is, where it may take place, and under what conditions” but rather to rely on “its illegibility, taking our illiteracy as a starting point, even for artworks arising from familiar imaginaries.” This relates to the curatorial claim that I’m suggesting, that artists sometimes make works outside of the institution or recognizable framing, and this is difficult to recognize. When they act outside of the institution, there’s an artistic language that they bring to that as well.
Prabhakar Pachpute: ‘Canary in a Coalmine,’ 2012, first solo exhibition, Clark House, Bombay, curated by Zasha Colah & Sumesh Sharma // Copyright Clark House Initiative
AH: What does this “illegibility” or “illiteracy” mean for you as a curator? How do you aim to create those conditions for your audience?
ZC: What I mean is that each of us should notice that we don’t always have the language for every artwork, and that we have to learn the language. If we don’t have that approach, then we are unaware of our blind spots. The idea that we are illiterate in front of an artwork is something that has been my curatorial approach for a long time and it’s very useful, especially for the kind of art that I have been drawn to.
As I mentioned, some places that I work in don’t have institutional framing, so artists use other ways of designating something as an artwork. A lot of my writing has had to do with the invisible ways that artists frame things—they can be very ephemeral, especially in places where you have huge military presence and repressive tendencies, even in democracies. I find in those cases artists make statements, artistically, but they have to be read. Most often, we only write art history about the things that have photo documentation or that took place in the museum or gallery, that are framed or pedestalled. We’re missing all the artworks made in prison, all the artworks made for the street or for the marketplace. I will be the last one to say that those are not the really important works of art history. They come down to us through orality, when they are talked about again and again. I’ve been trying to follow those particular histories of art for a long time. This is what I mean by “illiteracy.”
AH: Your wider curatorial practice often centers around ideas of oppression, disobedience and rebelliousness that resonate with the theme of this year’s Biennale, but also the idea of “restorative laughter” and humor. How do you connect these seemingly disparate themes?
ZC: Yes, every single work in this Biennale is hilarious. Except maybe one. It’s a kind of dark humor, that is a way in which to confront reality. I can’t deal with tragedy honestly, I guess. [laughs] Going back to Myanmar—it comes from seeing artists really in the docks, who have to make decisions like “do I go to the forest and become a guerrilla fighter or get conscripted by the army? Or do I go to jail?” Those are the kinds of decisions people under 35 are making there. They are in this situation, but they are so funny and have so much to give the world in terms of wisdom and thinking through violence and non-violence.
There’s a book by Elaine Scarry from the 1980s, called ‘The Body in Pain,’ where she talks about torture in particular and about pain, on one side, and imagination, on the other side. She says that pain will break down thinking processes and that’s why you cannot take down anything as evidence that was said under torture. Imagination, to her, is something that creates the world anew. For me, it’s imagination combined with humor that I see in many of the artworks. Even in the moment of torture, these artists are using strategies of humor to remain whole and to keep thinking. The thinking body is the need of our times. We are getting disintegrated by everything, so to actually have a thought is the most difficult thing. Dark humor, in particular, is not just a panacea that makes you survive pain, but is something that allows the thinking body to keep working.
Sophiensaele, 2025 // Photo by Raisa Galofre
AH: Unlike the artists, the venues for the Biennale have been announced: there are two large institutions, KW and Hamburger Bahnhof, as well as the Sophiensaele and a former courthouse in Moabit. Can you talk about the significance of these spaces for the overall exhibition?
ZC: I was interested in Sophiensaele as a venue because I was looking at different theater spaces, since I was thinking about orality. I was looking for the tiny ones, the really fugitive ones. But then Jochen Sandig introduced me to Jörg Bittner, the lighting designer at Radialsystem, who told me about his thesis on the Sophiensaele, and how the building holds all the traces of Berlin over the last 100 years. It was a forced labor camp; an incredibly fiery place for speech-making and cabarets; a Yiddish theater and then, boom, in 1933 it was almost immediately shut down because of its communist affiliations. They had a newspaper, a journal, a library. I had this very romantic vision of an artists’ or artisans’ union, of what this place had been. And I was really interested in this year, 1933, and the way from one moment to the next something can be outlawed or banned. That’s what alarms me about history. I am looking to Sudan in 2023 and I speak to artists who tell me Khartoum was buzzing, the artist scene was great and then, one day, there’s a coup, and the museum is used as a barrack and the archives have been looted. All of their national heritage is being lost. This has happened so many times and I’m always intrigued by how long it takes to build that kind of cultural vibrancy, how many people need to be in the same place for that magic to happen and then, just like that, it’s ashes. The Sophiensaele was apparently bombed by the Allies, though that has not been verified, but the ceiling is all burnt out. They just left it that way. There were plans to renovate it that never happened, and then it went into private hands. Then it was part of the GDR, so it has a similar story to KW—artists really reclaimed these spaces. The whole 90s story is very beautiful as well, when they occupied these buildings.
The use of the courthouse was also whispered to my colleague, now director of Bethanien, Antje Weitzel, when someone mentioned to her that there was an amazing building that was empty, and would eventually go to the art community. At first, we heard it would be the adjoining former prison, and I was not so keen on that because I didn’t feel like taking works that had come out of a prison and putting them back into a prison. Metaphorically, it was too much! But then, when they offered the courthouse, that fit well, because illegality was already there in the concepts of fugitivity and the foxing, and the idea of an artwork setting its own laws. And it is eventually going to the art community, so it also represents a re-commoning of this space in the center of the city.
Former Courthouse Lehrter Straße, 2025 // Photo by Raisa Galofre
AH: The Berlin Biennale bills itself as offering curators a chance to take on “bold artistic / political approaches beyond the market.” What responsibility does this entail for you, as the curator?
ZC: That mandate was not given to me directly in any way, but I can say that they do give a carte blanche to the curator each time and I think that, for me, is what has made each Berlin Biennale so unique. It doesn’t have one homogenous plan—you never know what to expect with each biennial and I think that’s what makes me want to come to see it each time. I really feel like I am in a very thought-through process that has not been tampered with too much, and I think that is what is special about the Berlin Biennale compared to many others. You get to make the website, make the book, even to some extent the communications and the mediation. You really get to create a small world; it’s a bit of world-making. That’s a great honor and undertaking, and a lot of responsibility as it is taxpayers’ money. There’s a great artistic value in that ethos.
Zasha Colah, Curator of the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art // Photo by Moritz Haase
AH: Can you talk about how this Biennale forms an extension of your practice around legality and how those specific concerns have translated into the German context?
ZC: It’s very interesting in Germany right now. Even before I began, there were people who had been trying to save the Constitution—there were think-tanks like verfassungsblog.de and The Thuringia Project, where legal scholars were trying to save the German Constitution, as if it were under threat! [laughs] Then we found out that actually, it is under threat. For instance, when the infamous November 2023 gathering in Potsdam was revealed. Here AfD politicians, neo-Nazi and right wing organization members and businessmen reportedly discussed a “strategic plan” for mass deportations, termed “re-immigration.” Constitutional lawyers already had a sense of attacks to come, because of Hungary and what was happening under a “perfectly democratic EU nation,” what kind of constitutional changes were being made. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán visited Trump in the U.S. multiple times in 2024, in the lead up to elections. The Hungarian model was and remains a genuine source of concern here. In the German Constitution, Article 5 [on freedom of expression] is amazing. And there are a lot of directives that want to become constitutional, but are not yet because they are too abstract, they don’t have the legal basis to turn them into law, but they are directives. Who turns them into law?
AH: Yes, there was an attempt to add the IHRA definition of anti-semitism into the artists’ funding applications for the Senate in 2023, which was met with a lot of pushback because of its imprecision. It reminds me: I recently read an article by James Bridle about their refusal of a prize from a big German foundation and they wrote about their reasons for doing so. They referenced the term “hysterical obedience,” which I thought was quite apt—there is a certain level of obedient self-censorship at work in Germany these days.
ZC: My friend tells me there is a word in German for “preemptive obedience,” that precedes legality. There is no censorship, I would say, in Germany. Not legally. The obedience is not related to the Constitution, but to something else which is illegal. For hate crimes or anti-semitism, there are already very good laws that are part of the criminal code, and on the other hand there’s a very abstract ambiguity in the way the IHRA definition of antisemitism is formulated. It exceeds what law can do. Law cannot put into writing something that is inexact, excessive or ambiguous. Obedience to something else, then.
AH: So it is a time when perhaps this kind of “foxing” is more necessary than ever.
ZC: Yes. But foxing is also something dangerous. Trump is foxing, as well. Are we willing to abandon the law? I would say no. I am in this unfixed terrain, looking at people like Trump who are foxing all the time, and looking at artists who are foxing as a means of survival, and trying not to pronounce any moral judgment yet. I want to suspend moral judgment, but to think about these things together in this expectant present.
Additional Info
13th Berlin Biennale
Group Show: ‘passing the fugitive on’
Opening Reception: Friday, June 13; 7pm
Exhibition: June 14–Sept. 14, 2025
Admission: € 16 (reduced € 8)
13.berlinbiennale.de
Various Venues
