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‘We decided to map the different situations in Europe and beyond; the problematic places on the political map, where art responds in a performative way to those situations. We started our research like journalists, for instance going to right-wing Hungary and Iceland after the financial collapse. Our starting point for the Berlin Biennale was very simple: How can art work in the real world? Can it be a true partner in local politics or social movements? And in 2011 the world situation was already providing the answers. Practice was faster than the theory. The exhibition is actually just a part of that what we want to produce. What it’s all about is doing substantial things with art. We have a feeling that this is already starting to work out.’

‘Absolutely, there has been a lot of talk about that. The project generated a great deal of resistance and also had enormous impact in non-art circles. There were even hate-mails and a demonstration against “Book Burning 2.0”.’

: ‘Sometimes it’s a kind of fight with the artists. There have been tough discussions. Yet I was able to convince some of them to do something special or change their approach a little. For example, we had a conversation with Olafur Eliasson about the masterly way he has of working with physical phenomena like light, liquids, climate and landscape. We talked about certain political issues and how he could apply his expertise to deal with them. In the end, his reaction to this discussion was a performative, quite invisible project. He created a scholarship so that a politician could participate in a seminar at the research institute Eliasson founded in Berlin.’

‘Yes, I didn’t expect so many answers. This means that it’s possible to change the atmosphere around such questions.’

‘Without optimism, it’s impossible to go deal with these kinds of issues. We are trying to show that you can take this tool called art and use it. It’s about something really essential, the question of how we shape reality.’

‘Many of our artists not only address the biennale audience but also very different groups which are completely outside of art. Like Marina Naprushkina from Belarus, who is the editor of independent newspapers with daring economic and social proposals. She is thinking about how to lead the country smoothly into democracy so that it doesn’t walk into the neoliberalist trap the way Poland did. These newspapers are distributed widely in Minsk with the help of local activists. That way, the residents of Minsk become an invisible audience of the biennale. Artists can have the symbolic power to start a kind of snowball effect, which finally reaches totally different groups.’

‘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.’

‘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.’

‘Of course we are part of this system, but we try not to contribute to the “biennalization” of the world. We simply try to initiate some processes with this symbolic power which was given to us. Some people describe our position as romantic. That might be a bit true but maybe only a project like the Berlin Biennale could allow such postures to be treated seriously in this post-ideological and transparent society, in this great and relaxed city, which at the same time creates a lot of passive tolerance for one and all.’