The 5th Berlin Biennial, named by its curators as "When Things Cast No Shadow," successfully manages to live up to its title, rather than a poetical reading as I'm sure was intended, I would rather like to think that a nothing has no shadow to cast.

Perhaps a bit harsh for a show that though looking thrown together has undercurrent of undeniable sophistication. In fact I'm not really sure what it's doing if it's doing anything at all. After I conducted a series of interviews with curators, critics and artists, nobody knew what the point of the exhibition was and the curators are no better. Quotes from an article in Der Spiegal:

“There are no overarching themes and no territorial biases,” Szymczyk says, “and there were no real criteria to decide which artists we wanted. It all just sort of developed.”

“We are thinking of this as a big exhibition, rather than as a biennial,” Filipovic says.

Somebody please tell me what the fuck is this exhibition about then?

I spent many hours at the Kunst Werke, the Neu Nationalgallerie, and the Skulpteren Park Berlin_Zentrum, and besides there being no discernible rhyme to the show, except maybe a concentration on European art as opposed to American like the last installment of the Biennial. I do give credit to the curators for commissioning 80% of the works explicitly for the Biennial, but that doesn't make most any of them work.

The catalog, which for us press people was a still stiff 25 euro (at least to me), and excerpts from a few critics I know and, like Brian Dillon, and a few writers on the edge of famous and obscure that I find beautiful like Robert Walser and Henry Green (though I know the latter's work less than the formers).

And I discovered a few artists, some which I think are outright brilliant, others at least very interesting, including Tris Vonna Michell. Ahmet Ögüt, Kohei Yoshiyuki and one piece by Susan Hiller (the other was pretty boring).

Hiller's piece at the Skulpterenpark, a handful of speakers hidden beneath a pile of rubble, played futuristic, minimalist tone rhythms, contrasted the idea of destruction, rubble, redevelopment, the crash at the wall with something altogether new. The ideas behind are thicker than my interpretation, but as a simple experience, the ancient feeling pile of rubble, the modern city skyline, the tones playing from some distant future we're not evolved enough to understand, and the rumble of cars, the bells of bikes, and the chatter of passing locals was the only piece in the entire sculpture garden (during the day at least) that transformed the space in any substantive way. Most of the sculpture park looked like a Robert Smithson tourist park, Disneyland for art dilettantes, where often the trash looked better than the art.

As a caveat, I would like to add that much of the work perhaps considered a context that I simply don't have being a rather provincial Angeleno, but I can't help but feel that perhaps having to buy two books for 5 euro a piece to understand art work is not quite kosher. A few sentences of wall text, though this is more curatorial style than a hard and fast rule, oftentimes work just fine.

I give the Biennial a pass but hardly would encourage you to go there unless you were already in Berlin. It's less of a destination than other Biennials, including earlier incarnations of the Berlin Biennial.

Check out two pieces online, a clever but not terribly incisive one from Bloomberg and a better more critical piece from Spiegal Online.