Berlin Biennale 5.

When Things Cast no Shadow, or the exhibition as nothing in particular

Valentina Ravaglia

In photography, the light reflected by an object casts an image onto some photosensitive material, an image that refers to very specific coordinates of time and space: that particular frame, as exposed for a given duration. As with direct eyesight, it's the modulation of highlights and shadows recorded by the camera that allows for the visual recognition of an object as reproduced on a bi-dimensional surface through this process. There is a point, though, when the given object is no longer discernible, when an overly long exposure turns the image into a more or less even light flare. Shadow is an essentially time-specific element, as sundials unmistakably testify. When things are considered for an extended duration, the shadow they cast loses its temporal specificity, but they retain their immanence; the heideggerian thingness of the thing remains. Only, our phenomenological perception of what these things are, and of our experience of such things, is stretched in time. The 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art was as much about things as it was about time. As a matter of fact, When Things Cast No Shadow was about no-thing in particular. As curators Elena Filipovic and Adam Szymczyk explain in the afterword to the publication that accompanied the Biennale (calling it catalogue doesn't do it justice, as it is a project of its own, a gathering-within-the-gathering):
Engaging critically in the conceptual part of the artists' working process, we understood our task as that of making possible the articulation of diverse artworks within a group show. A more common procedure might have involved selecting pieces that fit one or another preconceived idea or strategic assumption, or that could be used as examples to bring an existing model of exhibitionmaking into reality and in order to support an argument. But a number of questions kept troubling us in the process: [... ]Would it not be a reductive formalization to consider an artwork only to the extent that it corresponds to a set curatorial agenda [...]? Is any overarching theme or category a sufficient reason for bringing an artwork into a biennial, or are these mostly just alibis that secure the curator's supreme position over the tangle of meanings generated by a show? 1 Filipovic, Elena and Szymczyk, Adam, 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art - When Things Cast No Shadow, exhibition catalogue, Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2008, p. 590.
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Valentina Ravaglia March 2009

When Things Cast No Shadow, or the exhibition as nothing in particular

In many ways, When Things Cast No Shadow addressed the concept of exhibition-as-thing in the first place, with the firm intention of testing its limits and playing with its mundane dimensions. It is in fact with ill-concealed amusement that the curators organized two distinct openings for the Biennial, with the "official" one scheduled two weeks after the first segment of a program of rotating satellite exhibitions opened at the Schinkel Pavilion. The explicit intention of this sort of sophisticated prank was to trick the art world and the press, the private view people and the VIPs, so to speak. Similarly, the last artist-curated exhibition held in the Schinkel Pavilion's octagonal room (odd GDR pastiche whose atmosphere added yet another shade of randomness to the whole operation) nonchalantly closed two weeks after the Biennale ended. Subtle as this operation was, its function certainly wasn't that of marketing the event of the Biennale through a flash of wit. Possibly, what Filipovic and Szymczyk wanted to tackle with it was the question of the possibility of a complete, unitary, linear experience of the art show - of any art show. And more than a theme, this question was declinated throughout the Biennale in a number of different shades. It was implicit in its ambiguous beginning, and consistently reinstated through the night program, conceived as an exhibition in its own right and titled Mes Nuits Sont Plus Belles

Que Vos Jours: six nights out of seven, the Biennale assumed a different form, migrating to a
different venue with different artists and for a different public. This way no one, not even the curators, could experience the Biennale, the exhibition as a whole. Elena Filipovic has shown a similar interest in the temporal dimension of artworks and of their experience (the "exhibition") since her early show Let Everything be Temporary, or Where is the Exhibition?, held at Apex Art in New York in 1997. Through unstable, self-destroying and everchanging works, Filipovic points at the intangibility of our experience of the art object and asserts the ungraspable, performative nature of the exhibition as expanded/expanding event. Some also considered the choice of the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum slightly sadistic, as many early visitors, not knowing exactly what to expect, were forced to trek around that muddy, overgrown wasteland in their party heels and designer clothes, frowning at the site map while trying to discern genuine urban debris and spontaneous vegetation from transplanted trees from the roof of the Palast der Republik (Ulrike Mohr's Neue Nachbarn) and anti-monumental scaffolding structures (such as Ania Molska's Untitled, complementary to her videos shown at the KunstWerke, key pieces to read the exhibition's multi-layered take on things). With its melancholic, understated ambiance, the Skulturenpark (existing independently from the Berlin Biennale and run by the KUNSTrePUBLIK e.V. collective) was possibly the most successful, as well as the most overlooked, 2 Valentina Ravaglia 28 March 2009

When Things Cast No Shadow, or the exhibition as nothing in particular

of all four venues. Even Katerina Seda's Over and Over was deceitfully playful, yet imbued with a sense of nostalgia and hopelessness, as the entropy of things made the trespassing props gradually collapse or disappear. This is a place where the spatial and temporal boundaries of the exhibition can really be tested and eroded, effectively abolishing any distance between aesthetical experience and life. The duchampian process of recontextualization of everyday objects is here daringly reversed, so that the matter of art and that of our daily existence can merge and turn absolute aesthetical indifference into an amplification of our experiences of the world. This may well sound as a high-flown statement, but despite the historical and political resonances of the site, there is no pretentiousness to be found here. The rawness of the place feels genuine and brutal, even excessively so, making the experience of the exhibition necessarily and crucially

unpleasant. Some of the works here are movingly trivial and annoyingly honest as only reality can
be, without any artifice or grand claim. Only in a context like this a piece like Cyprien Gaillard's

The Arena and the Wasteland appears romantic, uncanny and truly epiphanic without any forced
rhetorics, its meaning reinforced by the discursive space of the exhibition plot (pun very intended). Other elements seem to confirm the hypothesis that the Biennale had a strong element of self-irony, as the public of art professionals was ironically addressed and teased more than once throughout the exhibition. At the entrance of the KunstWerke - main venue and Biennale headquarter - a pirate-like strongbox provided by Superflex invited the public to submit the coupons that were circulated in the four venues of the so-called Grand Tour of summer 2007 (Kassel, Basel, Venice and Muenster). "Collect all four to win a trip to Zanzibar", the coupons said, without announcing when and how the competition would take place. No need to, as whoever got all four coupons probably went to Berlin as well, only to realize they had been participating to a tongue-in-cheek "art draw" orchestrated by Superflex. Significantly, the actual drawing was the mock-final night event of the Biennale - a unique opportunity for whoever missed the 6th Caribbean Biennial...2 As the strongbox welcomed KW visitors while checking their things in the cloakroom, the very infrastructure of Mies' Neue Nationalgalerie was subverted with a simple, yet strikingly bold gesture: the two austere kiosks near the entrance, intended to be used as checkrooms, hosted the two-part specular installation Eileen Gray, the Jewel and Troubled Water by Susanne M. Winterling, a reflection on Mies' building as thing and more in general on architectural intrusions, while Gabriel Kuri's bright yellow shapes of Items in Care of Items became props in an ongoing impromptu
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Maurizio Cattelan, Jens Hoffmann and Bettina Funcke, 6th Caribbean Biennial: A Project by Maurizio Cattelan, Dijon: Les Presses du Rel / Janvier, 2001.

Valentina Ravaglia 28 March 2009

When Things Cast No Shadow, or the exhibition as nothing in particular

performative piece that the visitors were invited (or forced) to constantly modify by adding and subtracting (that is, dropping and later collecting) their own things. Again, the material of art and that of life converge and overlap in the collective activity of creative DIY coatchecking. The exhibition in Mies' glass hall variously plays with its own iconic container and its various connotations - museum, architectural landmark, historical trace, showcase, political token... - at once transparent and opaque, flexible and rigid. Some works took the form of museums-in-themuseum, like Susanne Winterling's mentioned intervention, Haris Epaminonda's untitled cabinet of curiosities and the hauntingly enigmatic Pygmalion by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer.This may be read as a witty reference to Documenta 5 and its "museums-by-artists", but Szeeman's systematic obsession and compulsion to control could only be used here in a negative dialectical form. And as the dissection of the Neue Nationalgalerie's glass hall can be interpreted as a critique of exhibition spaces, museums and institutions at large, the four venues of the Biennial configure themselves as four curatorial Exercises in Style, each venue a different type of experiment in asystematic exhibition making as a narrative form. We can conclude that the 5th Berlin Biennial started as a pointless narrative, with no theme and no direction, no real beginning and no clear conclusion, no clear separation between fact and fiction. It is the story of its own making, a Calvinian metanarrative or an unreliable-therefore-true journal a la Pessoa. It is an unfolding of possibilities. The curators themselves pointed at the Heideggerian concept of Zuhandenheit ("readiness-to-hand") as a hermeneutical key to their project: it is only through the everyday, worldly experience of things that we can begin to understand our Being-in-the-World.3 This could be a return to a new found relevance for Biennales as surveys of contemporary practices, as well as of contemporary experiences. Back to square one, then: the thing (no-thing in particular) and our experience of it, and our experience of ourselves experiencing such things over time...

Valentina Ravaglia London, 28 March 2009

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, par. 1.3, section 22, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962-78, pp. 135-138 [orig. Sein und Zeit, 1927].
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Valentina Ravaglia 28 March 2009