On the occasion of the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, titled STILL PRESENT!, artists from around the globe engage with the legacies of modernity and the resulting state of planetary emergency. In addition to their works, the exhibition features historical documents, including political and activist publications from the Archiv der Avantgarden – Egidio Marzona (AdA). The contributions reveal connections between colonialism, fascism, and imperialism, and propose decolonial strategies for the future, oriented around a set of
questions: How can a decolonial ecology be shaped? What role can non- Western feminist movements play in the reappropriation of historical narratives? How can the debate on restitution be reinvented beyond the return of plundered goods? Can the field of emotion be reclaimed through art?
“As diverse and varied as the worlds that comprise our current human reality are, they subsist amid the waste and cacophony that traverse globa capitalism’s frantic and destructive race toward production. Since the onset of modernity, our planet has endured successive and ruinous changes that have accelerated alarmingly from the start of the third millennium. The place to which we have arrived today is not by chance: it is the result of historical formations constructed over centuries. In their egoism, modern Western societies have taken their own liberal character for granted, falsely assuming that the balance between free trade and universal suffrage guarantees a self-regulating system of universal democratic values. The dystopian society we have inherited from this utopian promise produces chaos but denies responsibility for it. In fact, the present world is the way it is because it carries all of the wounds accumulated throughout the history of Western modernity. Unrepaired, they continue to haunt our societies.
We must beware of the consequences of the capitalist logic of modernity/coloniality and its capacity to depoliticize the subject. The social worlds we inhabit today are articulated through cross-linked networked environments that interact in ways that are not immediately visible. More than ever before, algorithmic governance has taken over our present moment; it has become a field of unprecedented economic struggle over behavioral data extraction, which is such a powerful economic model that we feel powerless to free our present from its clutches. We project ourselves daily onto the future or past, while believing that we constantly act in the present. How do we reclaim our present? By reclaiming our attention. Art offers a present that is protracted and, above all, free. Inherent to emotion, consciousness is movement in the present: as emotional, interpretive beings, we are totally unpredictable in the present, and this allows us to escape the technologies of capitalist behavioral manipulation and imperialist governance that colludes with it. So more than ever, we must remain present!”
WALKING ON THE ROOF OF HELL, 2016
10 archival prints | 21 × 29.7 cm (each) | 5 edition
WALKING ON THE ROOF OF HELL, 2016
Wooden sandals (Khadau) | diameter 152.4 cm
WALKING ON THE ROOF OF HELL(2016) consists of thirty pairs of wooden khadau sandals that these workers use when treading the brick kilns to endure their extreme heat. After years of exposure, their feet become numb and hard like the bricks themselves.
ERASED FACES, 2015
Thumbprints of workers on archival prints | 6 each 29.7 × 35.9 cm | 5 edition
In India, a country where 287 million people are illiterate and form a marginalized demography, a thumbprint is a proof of identity that acts as the signature of those incapable of reading the binding documents they are signing. For ERASED FACES (2015), the conceptual sculptor Birender Yadav asked brick kiln workers in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, subjected to the lethal working conditions of India’s insatiable construction industry, to stamp their thumbprints onto their portraits. The promise of modernity in India has often been linked to industry as an engine to lift the country out of poverty. Sadly, the very industry that this political utopia is based on is entrenched in exploitative practices. Typically, brick workers are landless bonded laborers from Indigenous groups who were displaced by the British colonizers and live nomadically as seasonal workers in the farming and construction industries. Due to their lack of permanent addresses, they are ineligible for basic identity documents to prove their existence.
DONKEY WORKER, 2015
Thumbprints of workers on Canson paper | 101.6 × 152.4 cm
DONKEYWORKER (2015) depicts a donkey made with the thumbprints of migrant workers in Delhi from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The son of migrant workers himself, Yadav connects to their popular culture and living stories; his works are a form of personal history writing that documents the subaltern lives often forgotten when we talk about present-day India.
–Sumesh-Manoj-Sharma
PRESS :
Maria Adelaide Marchesoni | “Berlin Biennale: Healing the Wounds of the Past to Reinvent the World” | 24 Arteconomy | 17th Sep, 2022
Siddhartha Mitter | ” Berlin Biennale Wrestles With Big Issues (and Itself)” | The New York Times | 22nd July, 2022
Marta Orsola Sironi | “BERLIN – BASEL : A KIND OF A GRAND TOUR” | Made in Mind Magazine | 21st July, 2022
Philippe Dagen | “Twelfth Berlin Biennale confronts wounds from the past” | Le Monde | 20th July, 2022
Caroline Lillelund | “Now the lowest castes are making their mark in Indian contemporary art” | Globalnyt | 12th July, 2022
Ben Davis | “In Pictures: See Practically Every Single Artwork in the Sprawling 2022 Berlin Biennale, Organized by Artist Kader Attia” | Artnet | 14th June, 2022
Fabian Maier-Bode | “12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art: Still Present!” | E – Flux | 11th Jun, 2022
Fabian Maier-Bode | “12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art: Still Present!” | E – FlStephanie Bailey | “12th Berlin Biennale: Still Present! ” | Art Papersux | 11th Jun, 2022
“Photos of works, part 1. Berlin Biennale 2022” | Universes in Universe