Like most 21st-century biennials, the 2025 Berlin Biennale – curated by Turin-based Zasha Colah – feels as though it’s walking an unsteady tightrope between current global issues and the city’s local context. The works collected under this year’s theme – ‘passing the fugitive on’ – feel strangely muted in the context of a Berlin that has, over the past 16 months, been the centre of intense political turmoil. Colah conceived the theme of her biennial before the people of Berlin took to the streets to protest against the massive cuts threatening to decimate the city’s cultural sector; before Strike Germany saw artists boycotting institutions aligned with the government’s hardline stance on the war in Gaza; before the widespread censorship and cancellation of exhibitions in the city. As such, the biennial as a whole ends up feeling slightly belated. Even though many of its individual works are still politically urgent, the dramatically altered context into which they arrive dampens their effect.
Few of the biennial’s other works match the energy of this piece. Even referencing Dada – a fugitive movement par excellence – fails to ignite a spark. Also on display at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Hannah Höch’s understated acrylic painting of flowers, Im Park (In the Park, 1945), seems to have been chosen less for its calming effect than for the artist’s credentials as a master of the Dada photomontage. Elsewhere, at a former courthouse in the city’s Moabit region, Simon Wachsmuth’s Dada-inspired film, From Heaven High (2025), reimagines a 1920 work by artists John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter, which presented a floating pig in a military uniform (Prussian Archangel). Wachsmuth’s film revolves around the 1920 trial of Heartfield and Schlichter – who were accused of defaming the army – with a pig using nonsensical language games to confound the judge. Yet the measured, AI-like tone used by the film’s actors falls flat, and the whole piece seems far removed from the anarchic energy of Prussian Archangel’s 1920 presentation.
Displaying works in a former courthouse imposes on this biennial the somber spectre of punitive laws. In contrast to this sense of legislative control, Colah features works that exhibit examples of illegality. Artcom Platform presents The Song of Lake Balkhash (2025), a film both honouring the nomadic communities that thrive around the lake and revolting against the building of a nuclear plant on its shores. Meanwhile, Anna Scalfi Eghenter’s Die Komödie! (The Comedy!, 2025) is centred on the 1916 trial of the socialist organizer Karl Liebknecht, which took place at the Moabit courthouse. In Eghenter’s piece, red political pamphlets flutter in the air, propelled by several large fans – the whirlwind of red evoking a state of upheaval in harmony with Liebknecht’s political methods. Yet the rest of Eghenter’s installation (a pen and toy-soldiers here, a Comnunista neon sign there) feels oddly static, failing to do justice to the story of Liebknecht’s passionate anti-militarism and later assassination by right-wing militia. Meanwhile, Milica Tomić’s films – in which scholars give Lacanian explanations of the war in Serbia – are so discursive, I ended up feeling lost in the maze of S-diagrams. In this dense lexical soup, any sense of subversive resourcefulness is lost.
The days of dirt-cheap rents in Berlin are long gone. Depending on who has been in charge, past biennials have channeled the city’s anarchic spirit, reanimating neglected spaces. Yet there is always the risk that redeveloping abandoned buildings in this way will contribute to the gentrification of areas where artists have clung on to low-rent studios and apartments. Even the most politically conscious events struggle to extricate themselves from the workings of economic power. The Moabit courthouse used for the 2025 Berlin Biennale stands in the middle of a region being reshaped by homogenous luxury sites.
It’s heartening that the biennial has this year included a sister organization, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, which ran a successful public fundraising campaign after nearly losing all its state funding to budget cuts. Unbowed, the venue is screening a programme, ‘Fugitive Traces: Challenging Power Structures and Narratives’. To really convey fugitivity, however, would require the Berlin Biennale to imagine how art across this city may outfox regressive politicians – and not just in the past.
The 13th Berlin Biennale is on view until 14 September