metropolis m

At the press conference for the 9th Berlin Biennale New York based collective DIS (Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro) said that it was the first and the last biennial that they have ever curated. Taking place in a four venues around the iconic Parisier Platz in the city of Berlin – KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Akademie der Künste, ESMT European School of Management and Technology, The Feuerle Collection – the exhibition faces up to the fear hidden behind the terms such as “Anthropocene”, “big data”, “post-internet”. It introduces the world of today where the present is incomprehensible and the future is closer to fiction than plans and forecasts.

Participating artists were invited to take an active part in this reality. Presented works (many of them where especially created for the ocasion) submit to building of the alternative here and now – materializing the paradoxes that make up the world in 2016: the virtual as the real, nations as brands, people as data, culture as capital, wellness as politics and so on. “Let’s give a body to the problems of the present where they occur so as to make a matter of agency – not spectatorship” – says DIS. It’s up to the viewers’ whether they want to perceive the present as a drag.