Street life: the fourth Berlin Biennial drew on the complex history of a single street, and on art of the past 30 years, to provide a rich context for new work by an international roster of artists

Art in America, Oct, 2006 by Richard Kalina

It would be safe to say that Berlin is not a city that wears its modern history lightly. Ghosts linger everywhere--from the Nazi period and the war years to be sure, but also from the hardscrabble early postwar period. Just as important is the grim Cold War era, which not only divided the city internally but walled off West Berlin, leaving it an island deep in the center of East Germany--or, as it was then known, the German Democratic Republic. The fourth Berlin Biennial (organized by the artist Maurizio Cattelan and the critics and curators Massimiliano Gioni and All Subotnick, and held under the auspices of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art) took the challenge of the city's historical and emotional character seriously.

Called "Of Mice and Men," after the popular but melancholy and upsetting 1937 John Steinbeck novel, whose title in turn was drawn from the not entirely sanguine 1785 Robert Burns poem "To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plow," this Berlin Biennial was not your typical high-profile, international "white box" showcase. There were, to be sure, neutral, museumlike components--the KW Institute for Contemporary Art (formerly Kunstwerke), one of the exhibition's two major venues, has the slightly scruffy look of the low-budget but very serious kunsthalle. The Biennial's real curatorial charge, however, came from the choice to set virtually the entire exhibition on the few blocks that comprise Auguststrasse, the street on which the KW is located. (There was a satellite venue around the corner at Oranienburger Strasse 65--the Diesel Wall, a billboard space supported by the Diesel Corporation and dedicated to the ongoing presentation of work by young artists. The Canadian artist Steven Shearer used it for a huge two-panel word piece in sans serif caps. I'm not entirely clear what it means, but the first two lines give the flavor of it pretty accurately: "VOICELESS ALTARS OF FLESH/NAILED IN UNHOLY MISERY." While off the Biennial's main street, this work was emotionally of a piece with the rest of the show.)

Auguststrasse is an extremely heterogeneous street with a variety of small to midsized buildings, including a former margarine factory (the KW building), a school, apartment buildings of different ages and ranging from elegant to shabby, a dance hall, galleries, low-rise offices and a row of former post office stables. There is also a playground and an empty lot; bracketing the street are a church at one end and a cemetery at the other. Twelve venues were used by the Biennial, including the church and the cemetery. Even a small covered shipping container was put to use, by the Dutch artist Erik van Lieshout, who fitted it out as a miniature (and rather claustrophobic) theater where he showed a video of his bicycle trip from Holland to Germany. Given the variety of the sites, decisions about which artist to put where presented more curatorial challenges and opportunities than usual.

Located in the former East Berlin, Auguststrasse runs through the traditionally diverse and by many accounts raffish Spandauer Vorstadt neighborhood of the Mitte sector. The East, at least its more central precincts, has been thoroughly woven into the fabric of prosperous West Berlin, and at first you don't notice that there is really any difference between East and West at all. Mitte is now a lively part of town, literally in the middle--just the sort of place that would attract the culturally inclined. But Auguststrasse, small as it is, is steeped in history, some of it very disturbing. The nondescript apartment building at Auguststrasse 17, for example, houses Bremen-based painter Norbert Schwontkowski's Berlin studio, where the public was permitted to view his groupings of small, moody figurative paintings as well as his rather austere personal possessions. (The artist was not present when I visited, and the studio looked as if he had just left to do some shopping and would be back shortly; the sense of stepping into someone else's life was part of the installation's rationale.) Unremarkable as it looks now, Number 17 has a past. Built in 1865, it was used by the Jewish community for a number of functions, including a nurses' residence, a social service center and a shelter for women and girls. In 1942 it became a collection point for the concentration camps where many of the local residents met their deaths. After the war it housed Soviet military administrative offices, and in 1949 it was converted into rental apartments, currently administered by the Jewish Claims Conference. With this knowledge in mind, the viewer cannot help experiencing Schwontkowski's paintings differently than if they were nicely centered on a gallery wall. Sandsturm (Sandstorm), 2005, for example, a small, seemingly casually painted canvas, shows four faceless, isolated, black-clad women, carrying white bags and trudging along in a featureless gray and brown space. Their isolation, fatigue and sense of displacement are palpable.