Last week the 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art startet with a lot of media buzz. Until June 15th, there will be many exhibitions and events throughout the city (well, mostly Berlin Mitte) and, making use of the weekend, I went to one of the venues yesterday, the KW Institute of Contemporary Art. Maybe I was expecting a little too much (my visit to the Palazzo Grassi in 2006 in mind) but at the end I wasn’t completely impressed. Yes, some exhibits were truly captivating, but I found the others to be, well, merely interesting to put it nicely, especially as part of an exhibition of the alleged art event of the year. Maybe it would have been different if I knew a little more about the current art scene or if I had bought the catalogue to be able to read what the artists wanted to express.
But maybe it’s got also something to do with me being too stressed out at the moment to handle the stimuli satiation that is a contemporary art exhibition. My favorite exhibit was ‘Ground Control’, the white and black asphalt room by Ahmet Ögüt (go to f&art to see a beautiful picture of it). Clean, minimalistic, spacious, calm; very powerful in its simplicity. Although it has got a totally different meaning after I got to read the explanation to the exhibit:
In Turkey, asphalt laying was a means of homogenizing the country in its rapid quest to modernize, metaphorically covering over some of its diverse history in the process. [...] Asphalt thus becomes a political tool for the demonstration of government power. Öğüt transfers this inscription of power in public space onto the exhibition hall, highlighting the political dimension of a seemingly innocuous substance like asphalt and raising awareness of how power is displayed and maintained.
Maybe I should give the Biennale another chance (and read up on the exhibits before). After all, there are still nine weeks to change my mind.