It looks like the seventh edition of the Berlin Biennale, which opens on April 27, will turn out to be the most activist of them all.
Several times already during the run-up to the exhibition, the Polish curator and artist Artur Zmijewski and his co-curator Joanna Warsza have stirred up a ruckus. How is this going to end? Johannes Wendland speaks with the curators about their approach to the biennial in Metropolis M no. 2 -2012.
Johannes Wendland:
How can art be political?
Joanna Warsza:
‘If you claim to do a political show as a curator, you shouldn’t think of yourself as a kind of gatekeeper of a certain point of view. You have to disregard your own engagement and try to open the field for different positions with which you might totally disagree. We have seen a lot of biennials which claimed to be political but were very one-sided and lacking in confrontations. You can’t speak of democracy when you don’t have a full spectrum of opinions and ideas.’
Johannes Wendland:
Where do you show such standpoints in the biennale?
Artur Zmijewski:
‘We asked ourselves who might be the state artists of today. These people are somehow ignored by the contemporary art world but often their art is much more influential than ours in the leftist niche. We tried to integrate these other positions in the exhibition.’
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Read the full interview in Metropolis M no. 2 - 2012. Now available in our webshop.
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