June 13, 2025
The 13th Berlin Biennale, curated by Zasha Colah, opens today under the title ‘passing the fugitive on.’ We attended the press preview—spanning the four venues, KW Institute, Hamburger Bahnhof, Sophiensæle and the former courthouse on Lehrterstraße—with anticipation, knowing that some details would remain hidden until opening day.
Amol K Pati, 2025, video, installation view at Sophiensaele, 13th Berlin Biennale, 2025 // Photo by Berlin Art Link
Notably, the Biennale’s public strategy has deliberately withheld both the list of participating artists and the program itself, enacting a curatorial opacity that leans heavily on the theme, over any individual artist’s identity or star power. Until yesterday, the “artists” section on the official website led only to a cluster of cartoon foxes. This gesture of “foxing”—a sly, evasive move—signals one of the exhibition’s aims, which is to resist easy legibility or identity ascriptions. This initial withholding affords a confrontation with the works on their own terms, unmediated by the ballast of reputation, résumé or prior political coding. It explicitly invites visitors to engage with the Biennale’s guarded illegibility as a necessary entry into the exhibition’s logic that feels increasingly pointed in the context of a cultural field where, over the past two years, certain forms of dissent have had to find more oblique routes of expression. Amid heightened scrutiny and accelerated institutional gatekeeping, the refusal to pre-announce names at first appeared as a protective gesture, meant to preserve space for the work to appear before it is judged, or foreclosed.
When Colah devised the theme in 2022, she was focused on repressive tendencies in her home country, India, and neighboring Myanmar, where she has worked extensively with the artistic community. Similarly, many of the participating artists reflect their own contexts, while also speaking to a universal experience of oppression and state violence that reverberates far beyond borders.
Margherita Moscardini: ‘The Stairway,’ 2025, installation view at KW, 13th Berlin Biennale, 2025 // Photo by Berlin Art Link
On the ground floor of Sophiensaele, we encounter works by Amol K Patil, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Luzie Meyer and Major Nom. Patil’s interventions in the space deal directly with the history of Sophiensaele as the headquarters of the Berlin Craftsmen’s Association. In a humorous gesture (the kind that runs throughout the Biennale), Patil displays a radio on a table under a lone spotlight. It plays fiery speeches, then suddenly combusts in a cloud of smoke. Meanwhile, the artist has adorned the walls with charcoal drawings alluding to figures like Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, who once spoke in the rooms of the building. Nearby, Berlin-based artist Luzie Meyer is one of the few to speak to the city’s present. Her six-channel sound installation—entitled ‘Berlin Piece for Voice and Tap Dance’ (2025)—is drawn from notes she took in her daily life over the past few months, reflecting poetically on memories of political gatherings, exhibition openings, Senate debates and engagements with German and international media, and accompanied by a rhythmic recording of a tap dance as the foundation of the piece.
The four floors of the Biennale’s main venue, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, are packed with works, the artists on each floor coming from diverse perspectives but seeming to converge on certain key points, aesthetics or modes of address. Entering the central underground space at KW, one must walk down a stairwell, marked by a warning to proceed at one’s own risk. ‘The Stairway’ is a “walkable sculpture” by Margherita Moscardini, with each of its 561 stones engraved with an number. The artist displays a series of certificates on the adjacent wall, attesting to the legal authenticity of each stone, which she has gifted to various stateless, supranational and extraterritorial organizations and nations, and which they have in turn donated back to the artist for use in the exhibition. The piece is a thought experiment in national law, asking how “neutral” objects can be created in art institutions, objects that do not belong to the state or territory they occupy.
Panties for Peace, sticker: Panties for Peace Emblems, 2010/25; videos: The Party they don’t want you to know! LPP Pantidates | Burma election 2010, installation view, 13th Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2025 // Courtesy Panties for Peace, photo by Marvin Systerman
Upstairs, the transnational activist network Panties for Peace’s colorful installation displays different output from their campaigns against Myanmar’s military junta, playing on the Burmese trope that men’s hpoun (a concept of superior masculine power and honor) can be destroyed if it comes into contact with women’s sarongs or underwear. On the opposite end of the room, Austrian artist Gernot Wieland’s small-scale sculptures and video work—entitled ‘Family Constellation with a Fox’—speak to intergenerational trauma, through the lens of psychoanalysis and the legacy of male-dominated, colonial Western art history.
Gernot Wieland: ‘Family Constellation with a Fox,’ 2025, video still // © Gernot Wieland
At Hamburger Bahnhof, the scale of works is pared down once more, with only five artists occupying the east wing of the museum. In a darkened space, Larissa Araz’s chalk drawings of Anatolian and Mesopotamian landscapes, inhabited by foxes unhindered by political geography, stand out against the black-painted walls. Argentinian artist Gabriel Alarcon’s banner is the first thing to catch the eye when entering the space, held by two encased hands and reading: “We can all see that the colonizer is naked.” A series of retablos (devotional folk altars) go on to reimagine symbols of colonial power from a contemporary perspective.
Gabriel Alarcón, 2025, installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof, 13th Berlin Biennale, 2025 // Photo by Berlin Art Link
Nearby, the former courthouse on Lehrterstraße is one of the more refreshing additions to the Biennale—as a repurposed, ad hoc venue, it makes space for a less polished approach. Many video works fill the individual rooms of this former administrative building, the architecture and interior design of which repositions us within the theme of legality. A quartet of videos by Canadian professor of legal studies, Stacy Douglas, highlight the trope of describing legal absurdity as “Kafkaesque,” asking whether this fetishizes the law as something that is always right and only exceptionally experiences errors (as in Kafka’s ‘The Trial,’ in which the protagonist one day unexpectedly wakes up on the “wrong” side of the law). French artist Fredj Moussa’s video work ‘Land of Barbar’ fills the small room in which it’s screened with brightly colored fabrics and landscapes that contrast with the drab interior of the courthouse. In it, he comically critiques the use of the term “Barbarian,” revealing its racist origins.
Fredj Moussa: ‘ لاد البربر [Land of Barbar],’ 2025, video still // © Fredj Moussa
Beyond the exhibition, many works in this year’s Berlin Biennale will be performative, intended to engage audiences directly. The Biennale is envisioned as a durational happening, expected to cast a site of dissentient, decelerated storytelling, pitting comedy against crisis and carnival against critique.
Throughout the preview we saw that many of this year’s contributions effectively work against the production of static spectacle, emphasizing the body, time and voice as primary media. As such, the program will be punctuated by performances, readings, spoken-word events, live walks and other enactments where meaning is carried by miscellaneous encounters.
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
