The 13th Berlin Biennale, which runs through mid-September, may not be the most expansive or intricately structured edition to date. With a relatively concise list of artists only revealed on opening day, it unfolds as a choreography of concentrated, potent messages across four venues, free of grandiose production. That spareness is likely the result of budget constraints, though more than half of the sixty contributions are newly commissioned works.
Titled “passing the fugitive on,” the Biennale channels curator Zasha Colah’s research focus, offering deep dives into narratives largely emerging from the global south, particularly South and Southeast Asia. Its real strength, however, lies in how many of the works feel uncannily timely, even as they are rooted in ancestral knowledge, local traditions and postcolonial political events. These stories echo with striking resonance in today’s United States and a once-dominant Europe, where liberal rights and freedoms once assumed to be stable now appear intensely fragile, increasingly endangered by rising authoritarian and nationalist extremism. The violent repression of protests in Myanmar, for instance, registers as a chillingly familiar image.
SEE ALSO: Antonia Ruder On the Role of Gallery Weekend Berlin in a Changing Art Market
This year, the Berlin Biennale centers on alternative oralities and stripped-down ways of transmitting stories, knowledge and messages—practices that function as acts of resistance and creative expression within repressive or precarious contexts. It explores a language that resists not only oppression but also reductive critique, drawing power from poetry and humor as counternarrative forms. “Orality is tactile knowledge, like the act of knotting histories with threads from trauma, or that of growing living bridges by shaping the roots of trees over hundreds of years,” writes Colah about her concept. “Orality has the capacity for fugitivity.”
In this spirit, the Biennale offers a series of encounters with fugitives, exploring how messages can be embedded within symbols, images or multimedia forms that enable their transmission across borders—even in the face of surveillance or censorship. Art becomes a medium for concealment and passage, often drawing on humor, archetypal symbolism and layered analogy to carry meaning discreetly, gently and resiliently.
Gentle humor and coded dissent at KW
At the Biennale’s historic main venue, KW, visitors are welcomed by Armin Linke’s photographic installation reflecting on the long-term geopolitical consequences of the 1878 Berlin Congress. Chaired by Otto von Bismarck, the Congress restructured the Balkans, curtailed Russian influence and set a precedent for drawing territorial boundaries with little regard for ethnic or national identities—divisions whose legacy still reverberates today.
Yet upon entering the first room, viewers encounter a seemingly simple yet resonant sequence: a line of flower representations by artists from diverse regions and historical moments. These include works by major figures such as Steve McQueen, with his Caribbean Grenada flowers, and Hannah Höch, whose photo collages were created during her self-imposed exile in Berlin’s Tegel Forest in 1939, as Nazi repression escalated. Together, these works form an intercultural and intergenerational garden. While arranged in a line, they branch in many directions, as vegetal life becomes a vessel for divergent narratives of displacement, colonial extraction and capitalist exploitation.
Often made in conditions of exile or concealment, these floral works serve as symbols of gentle resistance and quiet resilience, while also standing as witnesses to the complex, interwoven histories they have endured. This theme of subtle defiance continues in the work of Iris Yingzen, who documents the guerrilla gardening practices of Indigenous communities in India. As resistance to the violence of rapid modernization and state repression, Yingzen began guerrilla gardening in 2005 at the site of an old electric post once used for torture. In the Biennale, she translates this act into Garden of Hope, a series of six large-scale paintings commemorating the endurance, resistance and renewal of an entire community.
Adopting a similar strategy of gentle poetry, Chinese artist Han Bing has long performed subtle acts of resistance by walking through territories of repression carrying a cabbage. First enacted in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 2000 and reperformed during the Biennale’s opening, Walking the Cabbage has since traveled to politically charged sites like Kashmir and Cairo. In this absurdist gesture, Bing moves like a fugitive with her belongings, challenging the logic of normalized yet unjustified violence and creating a personal ritual of solidarity. This apparent nonsense allows the act to slip past repression and censorship, transforming the mundane into quiet defiance.
Throughout the exhibition, forms of nonviolent resistance recur—subversive, creative and transformative. Several works focus on the ongoing, tragic and largely underreported multi-front civil war in Myanmar, drawing attention to its enduring toll amid global media silence.
As founder of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) network, Nge Nöma presents an installation made of mud, water and plants resembling a trench or shelter that commemorates the resistance of Myanmar’s younger generation, known as “Generation Lee,” still fighting for a different future. Similarly, Htein Lin’s video performance Scorched Fly confronts the regime’s brutality, referencing the military’s “scorched-earth” tactics following the 2021 coup, during which civilians were burned alive. As the artist was also imprisoned for a while after the coup, the work stands as a powerful act of artistic perseverance and resilience under extreme repression.
Rituals of resistance continue throughout KW, often with a more humorous and playful tone. Several artists draw on the ancient Greek notion of eironeia—irony not merely as sarcasm, but as a philosophical and rhetorical strategy. Here, irony becomes a tool to expose contradictions, plant seeds of doubt and suggest alternative truths, allowing art to question dominant narratives with wit, subversion and subtle defiance.
Setting up an entire cabaret downstairs in Big Mouth, Bosnian artist Mila Panic takes the stage in a series of performances that satirize the public’s indifference to the existential crises faced by migrants. Drawing both humor and emotional weight from her own childhood in the political contradictions of post-Soviet Bosnia in the 1990s, Panic doesn’t trivialize pain. Instead, she reclaims authorship of the narrative, turning stand-up comedy into a potent tool of counternarrative, training collective consciousness through the most spontaneous and unfiltered act of empathy: laughter.
On the upper floors, humor continues to function as a strategy of subversion, undermining the seemingly untouchable authority of law and power through coded acts of dissent. One both visually and conceptually engaging example is the installation by Panties for Peace: an arsenal of underwear lining the walls, confronting and playfully dismantling the binary of man-ship and warship. In Burmese cultural belief, a man’s hpoun—his masculine power and honor—is thought to be compromised if it comes into contact with women’s sarongs or underwear. Between 2007 and 2010, the Lanna Action Network weaponized this superstition by flooding Burmese embassies with packages of women’s panties addressed to Myanmar’s top military officials, mocking their authority and symbolically stripping their so-called power.
An army of colorful fabric puppets by Myanmar artist Chaw Ei Thein fills the room, restaging protests and demonstrations that have followed the coup. These figures affirm the power of collective performance to resist oppression and authoritarian rule, underscoring the importance of shared action and community in shaping reality and pushing for change. “Marry someone who hates military coup,” reads one of the signs held by a couple in traditional wedding clothes.
On the same floor hangs an enormous bra by Argentine collective Kiki Roca—a defiantly feminine object that confronts the post-dictatorship order while challenging patriarchal power. The work riffs on a former provincial governor’s boast that “we have to put out our chests,” with the artists’ oversized reply. In this gesture, the absent female body itself becomes a political emblem, especially potent in Córdoba, a city with a deep history of activism.
Meanwhile, Italian artist Piero Gilardi’s carnivalesque papier-mâché puppets offer a sharp, exaggerated take on the absurd spectacle of power performed by the new despots of our time as they attempt to steer global society and the economy. At the center, visible from all floors, hangs a giant caricature of Donald Trump, framed by the phrase “Vento di Destra” (“Right Wind”), alongside a dragon dressed in a vest labeled BCE (European Central Bank), a satirical nod to Mario Draghi’s role in trying to stabilize Europe’s economy. Irreverent yet incisive, these playful puppets wage their own anti-capitalist battle. Created in 2023, they speak to a world that has only grown more unhinged in the short time since.
Political resistance and awakening at Sophiensaele
Nearby, in the cavernous space of Sophiensaele, a focused group of works by two artists emerges like diaphanous apparitions from dimly lit rooms, subtly reactivating the building’s layered and turbulent history. Once the headquarters of the Berlin Craftsmen’s Association, later a venue for Yiddish theater and eventually co-opted by the Nazis as a site of repression and erasure, the space itself becomes part of the narrative. Sound and video take center stage in a meditation on the oral power of propaganda and radio, invoking the memory of long-silenced workers’ movements. Here, art becomes a conduit for burning speeches, rekindled voices in a world already forgetting the struggles our grandfathers once waged. The question lingers: “Are they scared that our songs will awaken more hearts?”—a poignant challenge in an era of rising political repression, extremism and widespread disenfranchisement that increasingly allows for the erosion of hard-won democratic rights and freedoms.
Amol K. Patil engages with Sophiensaele’s past as a site of political and cultural ferment through a series of restrained yet resonant gestures that invite reflection and reignite a call for political awareness. Drawing on personal history—his father was a factory workers’ union member and wrote experimental plays performed for union members in the 1980s—Patil threads those formative influences into the fabric of his practice. In his installation, a radio emitting fragments of fiery speeches is suddenly interrupted by smoke, suggesting disruption, oppression or dysfunction. Meanwhile, on a video displayed atop a table, a typewriter clatters ceaselessly. Is it a Failure to Fail Life? reads the title, suggesting that retreating into the safe refuge of writing is not enough—that real social change also requires active engagement and collective action.
Next door, Luzie Meyer’s sound installation transforms poetry and rhythm into a hypnotic ballad contemplating a dystopian present and looming future. Her piece probes how language and propaganda suspend and shape belief, manipulate perception and construct entire frameworks of reality, reminding us how power operates through sound as much as silence.
The arbitrariness of legality and illegality at the former courthouse
At the former courthouse, not far from Hamburger Bahnhof, artists more openly engage with the question of legality and illegality, and who gets to define or instrumentalize it. Punctured by holes that reveal its history of surveillance and bureaucratic abuse, the raw and largely abandoned building is occupied by improvised, often precarious or immaterial interventions. Orality returns to the foreground, as artists attempt to break the cycle and transform these rooms into spaces of dignity and acknowledgment, resurrecting suppressed or long-erased truths.
Even here, the presentation opens with a seemingly playful, coded intervention: red paper sheets flutter and fly in Anna Scalf Eghenter’s ground-floor installation. Through a flurry of reprinted pamphlets, the artist evokes the “comedy” of the 1916 trial against Karl Liebknecht, co-founder of the revolutionary Spartacus group (later Spartacus League), which took place in this very building. Reimagining Liebknecht’s plea for workers to unite and the futility of that call in the face of staged justice, Eghenter shifts the battleground to today’s financial markets, where higher powers exert absurd control over powerless lives. In the final room, holes in the floor reveal additional audio and visual material related to Liebknecht. Through the windows, the word COMUNISTA is visible, reversing the historical moment in which Liebknecht could be glimpsed from outside by supporters locked out of the courthouse.
Throughout the building, various worker struggles and the experiences of marginalized groups—often victims of oppressive systems both in Germany and globally—are commemorated by numerous artist collectives. One such contribution features material from Exterra XX, a collective that emerged in divided Germany. Started as a regular gathering of women artists sharing ideas, it evolved into a group of around twenty-seven artists active in the GDR until 1994, foregrounding pioneering practices that combined performance, Super‑8 film, fashion-object shows, poetry and music carried out with bold disregard for state surveillance. In what they described as their “greatest performance,” Exterra XX occupied the Stasi headquarters in Erfurt, threatening to burn its archives and striking a symbolic blow against years of control at the dawn of reunification.
In a video, artist Merle Kröger recounts the harrowing story of Turkish activist Cemal Kemal Altun, who in 1983 leapt to his death from the windows of the courthouse after months of fighting extradition from Germany. Drawing on journalist Navina Sundaram’s original coverage—including footage of Altun’s family being informed of his death on camera—Kröger’s work explores the broader implications of his suicide within the context of Germany’s anti-immigrant rhetoric since the 1980s, while indicting the absurd media spectacularization of such human tragedies.
SEE ALSO: Moffat Takadiwa Weaves Hope from Trash in the Heart of Zimbabwe
Other artists at the courthouse draw instead from ancestral traditions and communal wisdom to resist cultural erasure, reclaim agency and protect both ties with the land and shared collective imagination.
One striking example is the women-led collective Artcom Platform, composed of artists and researchers who ground their practice in the semi-nomadic tradition of Qazaqlïq “steppe democracy.” Drawing from this heritage, they develop tactics to care for and preserve the fragile ecosystem of Kazakhstan’s Lake Balkhash, the world’s largest lake, now threatened by capitalist-driven extraction and climate change. The collective is also behind a large-scale textile piece hanging in the stairwell—a fragile yet poetic counter-monument that rejects solemnity in favor of sensoriality and vulnerability. It commemorates the lives lost during the collective uprising known as “Bloody January” in Kazakhstan.
In materially layered, symbolically dense collages, Zambian artist Isaac Kalambata examines the historical stigmatization of witches as a tool of colonial control, referencing Zambia’s 1914 Witchcraft Act to critique how colonial legislation suppressed Indigenous spiritual practices. At the courthouse, Kalambata interweaves archival materials with depictions of an excommunicated archbishop, two healers and a prophetess—exploring the symbolic erasure of mystical knowledge as part of a broader strategy to eliminate magical traditions and erase cultural identity.
Ancestral rituals as resistance at Hamburger Bahnhof
The dimension of ancestral memory, archetypal imagery and spirituality is at the heart of the one-room Berlin Biennale section at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. Here, moving multitudes, symbolic fragments and fugitive struggles are staged “from individual cunning to collective imaginary,” as the curatorial text states—gestures that seek to break, subvert and foreground alternatives to unjust customary laws, beginning from the shared collective imaginary and passed wisdom.
It is also here that the fox—central to the Biennale’s curatorial metaphor—first appeared, having taken up residence on the museum grounds. The fox becomes a symbol of fugitive knowledge, of hiding in order to preserve and carry forward alternative value systems and epistemologies that resist and expose the failure of the dominant worldview.
In a series of elaborated altars, Indian artist Vikrant Bhise celebrates the sacrality of water as a shared and endangered resource, particularly in Mumbai, where access is often limited and potable water lines are frequently contaminated by sewage leaks by the time they reach the slums. In a large-scale work, men and women march toward a massive pipe that appears to engulf the crowd—a contemporary image that echoes the historic 1927 Mahad Satyagraha led by B. R. Ambedkar, a landmark act of civil disobedience in which Dalits and others defied caste segregation by drinking from a public tank. In a poignant composition, Dalits honors the power of collective nonviolent resistance and the moral imperative to treat water as a communal right free from social hierarchies and policies.
Matriarchal rituals and ancestral wisdom lie at the core of Jane Jin Kaisen’s work, guiding viewers into the symbolic depths of the earth—specifically, the sacred Snake Cave on Korea’s Jeju Island, a site associated with healing and eternity. Her four video works, presented in a darkened room, conjure a mythical space of spiritual reconnection with the natural world, reviving shamanic knowledge through the language of new media. A long, narrow strip of cotton—traditionally used in shamanic rites of passage—hangs in the space as Knots and Folds, transforming the installation into a sacred site of memory and renewal while celebrating the power of feminine solidarity.
Larissa Araz’s haunting charcoal wall drawings share the same room, evoking an Anatolian-Mesopotamian landscape and commemorating the disappearance of the Kurdish red fox. Once classified as Vulpes vulpes kurdistanica, the animal was renamed Vulpes vulpes after Turkish authorities deemed the original designation a threat to national unity. This act of erasure, intended to suppress ethnic identity, has neither protected the fox’s habitat nor eased political tensions. Instead, the fox becomes a potent symbol of displacement for humans and non-humans caught in the crossfire of absurd and violent nationalist politics.
Bringing movement and gravity to the space is Zamthingla Ruivah Shimray’s red textile work, an elegy woven in the form of a kashan (the woolen sarong worn by women in India’s Naga Hills). Luingamla Kashan commemorates Luingamla Muinao, a young woman murdered in 1986 by Indian army officers after they attempted to rape her. Shielded by the colonial-era Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the perpetrators were initially protected from civil prosecution. But after years of protest by student groups and women’s organizations, the case was finally brought to court and won. Shimray’s textile traces the path to justice, carrying Luingamla’s story through living memory and communal song. She also presents two new kachons—large ceremonial shawls—responding to the violence that erupted in Manipur, India, between 2023 and 2024.
Textile as testimony and embodiment of collective struggles and carrier of shared beliefs also appears in Gabriel Alarcón’s retablos. The Mountains Know What They Did is a commemorative gesture honoring Indigenous resistance and the long march across the Andes to reclaim ancestral lands. Woven into fabric and matter, these retablos function not only as witnesses but as repositories of collective memory and agency, preserving the energy of a movement rooted in land, struggle and spiritual continuity. Here, textile becomes both a political document and a sacred object, carrying the force of collective action and the quiet endurance of lived resistance.
Zasha Colah has succeeded in creating a show that doesn’t feel overly extensive or overwhelming, but instead allows visitors to weave its many threads into a coherent final picture. By the end, it becomes clear how the central metaphor of the fox operates as a curatorial strategy: “foxing” enables artworks to set their own rules in the face of repression and violence, challenging the authority that defines what is legal or illegal. These works offer alternatives to imposed truths, using thought, humor and imagination to resist blind obedience to power and lawmaking. At the same time, the Biennale succeeds in engaging with the complex political histories of the places it touches, confronting recurring cycles of upheaval while offering a platform for critical reflection.
As old worldviews collapse under the weight of polarization and overlapping political, ecological and human crises, this edition of the Berlin Biennale—like other recent biennials—points to the possibility of anchoring in both memory and imagination as the only forces still capable of stirring resilience and creativity. As a remedy for rising brutality and the misuse of power, these works ground contemporary tragedy within a continuous loop of historical recurrence, offering pathways to navigate a moment of radical transformation across culture and nature while still holding space for hope and the imagining of alternative futures.
The 13th Berlin Biennale runs through September 14, 2025, at several locations around the city.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
