Berlin Biennale 2025. Art in Defiance.

Since its first edition in the late 1990s, Berlin Biennale has aimed to create a venue for art that is experimental, bold, political and often overlooked by the art market. Under the title Passing the Fugitive On, this year’s edition continues the established mission. When the laws are unjust, art will make its own rules. And even when the situation seems hopeless, the healing laughter and dark humour can help us survive. Even under persecution, the art continues to share its message – fugitive-style. 

The 13th Berlin Biennale returns to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, which has served as the main venue of the event since its first edition in 1998. Three additional venues have been chosen to complement the themes of this edition, with histories of these buildings becoming part of the Biennale’s narrative, centring on themes of legality, oppression, and disobedience. Sophiensæle, once the clubhouse of the Berlin craftsmen’s association, quickly became a hub for the revolutionary Left before being destroyed by the Nazi regime and repurposed as a forced labour camp for producing propaganda leaflets. Hamburger Bahnhof (Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart), originally built as a railway terminus and later converted into a museum for transport and construction, was abandoned after the war due to its location in the no-man’s-land between East and West Berlin. And finally, the vacant building of the former Courthouse on Lehrter Straße – an extension of the Northern Military Prison – has been adapted for the exhibition without altering the structure of its offices; with the Biennale marking the inauguration of the building’s new function as a space for contemporary art. 

“Three additional venues have been chosen to complement the themes of this edition, with histories of these buildings becoming part of the Biennale’s narrative, centring on themes of legality, oppression, and disobedience.”

“This is how imaginative acts or works are often preserved until they enter art history, carried fugitively in memory and body experience, as its audiences potentially hold, transmit, and transform them”, Zasha Colah, the Biennale’s curator, says. “That passage of transmission has long occupied my work: the unprogrammable, unpredictable moment, when an action of individual imagination becomes collective”. So fugitivity, as highlighted in the framework of the Biennale, is understood as the ability of works of art to set their own laws in the face of lawful violence in unjust systems. 

The exhibition creates space for outsider voices – disobedient and rebellious accounts that defy dominant structures. In the face of persecution and censorship, these voices are transmitted through orality – a fugitive method of passing on information that does not conform to the ruling narrative. “The exhibition title may be read as a missive or instruction piece to the receiver”, Zasha Colah adds. “Some fugitive burning ember escapes, and the audience is now the receiver of this red-hot cultural evidence. Now they must themselves turn fugitive, run with it, pass it on, or keep it in hiding until it is transmissible, sayable”.

As such, some of the presented artworks allude to the history of the venues in which they are placed. Die Komödie! by Anna Scalfi Eghenter refers to the trial of Karl Liebknecht – an anti-militarist, socialist organiser and one of the founders of the Spartacus group – which took place at the courthouse on Lehrter Straße, filling the rooms with floating red political pamphlets.

“The exhibition title may be read as a missive or instruction piece to the receiver”, Zasha Colah adds. “Some fugitive burning ember escapes, and the audience is now the receiver of this red-hot cultural evidence. Now they must themselves turn fugitive, run with it, pass it on, or keep it in hiding until it is transmissible, sayable”.

Other works use subversive humour as a way of addressing political oppression. The Panties for Peace group uses underwear as a tool of fight, playing on Burmese cultural beliefs that suggest a man’s power is diminished when he comes into contact with female sarongs or underwear. The Staircase by Margherita Moscardini was conceived as a legal experiment: the stones that form the walkable installation were gifted by the artist to organisations and stateless nations, who then donated them back to her. Photographs of Anton von Werner’s The Berlin Congress 1878 (1881) in the ballroom of the Berlin Senate Chancellery, taken by Armin Linke, highlight the imbalance between representatives of the Central Powers and the Balkan nations.

Once transmitted, the message requires a recipient. Confronting the Western audience with perspectives proposed by over 60 artists from around the world, representing diverse cultures and reflecting a range of political situations, the Biennale invites visitors to abandon their established viewing habits and preconceived knowledge. It encourages the audience to begin from a place of illiteracy, embracing a state of not-knowing as a starting point for learning the language of the artworks.

The Berlin Biennale is accompanied by a rich programme of events aimed at narrowing the gap between the creator and the public, favouring bare and direct forms of transmission – a process necessary for passing on the fugitive. Encounters are events proposed by participating artists to complement the exhibited works, often taking unexpected forms, including reading groups, lectures, tribunals, walks, and comedy nights. During Focus Tours, visitors are invited to slow down and reflect through open dialogue with a difficultator – a mediator who, rather than simplifying the artworks, challenges the audience with new perspectives and reveals the complexities within each piece. Open Ateliers are family-friendly workshops offering a way to engage with the themes of the exhibition in an intuitive, creative and playful way.

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The 13th Berlinale Biennale for Contemporary Art

Jun 14 – September 14, 2025

Berlin, Germany

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