fugitivity —

On the second level of the courthouse, in the final room of the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art—if the route is followed—there is a window covered in overgrown, thick green vines. Vegetal life and dappled light pierce the monotony of the hallways and labyrinthine rooms of the courthouse and prison that have lain in their own atomic white dust for thirteen years.

Three works from nonadjacent places and times speak to each other as a way to end the biennial. In one work, a Creole spoken-word sound work by Daniella Bastien plays intermittently. In the 1700s and early 1800s, Mauritius island was uninhabited. It became a stopover for slave ships from the African mainland, Madagascar, India, and Southeast Asia. Le Morne Brabant—a 556-meter-tall mountain that juts out into the Indian Ocean—became known as the Maroon Republic due to the protection mountainous caves and thick forest provided fugitive enclaves. Their acts of resistance inspired Maroon settlements in other regions. The details of the following story are uncertain, yet these facts are clear: women, men, and children saw no other way to escape than to leap together from the mountain as officers were ascending. Bastien draws on Creole oraliture passed down in songs through generations to compose a new work about the expulsion—or synchronized leap—of perhaps hundreds of Maroons. Bastien’s voice sounds out the jump into the air and the fatal fall of bodies from the summit.

Shift to Camerhogne, the Indigenous name for Grenada, an island country in the Atlantic Ocean. The farming Arawak and maritime Carib peoples—from whom the Caribbean Sea gets its name—fought against the theft and ethnic cleansing of their lands. In 1651, the last resisting Carib families climbed up the forty-meter cliff on the northern end of the island. Called Caribs’ Leap, the cliff marks a tragic, synchronized jump of forty men, women, and children from the summit down into the Atlantic Ocean. Grenada was repopulated by slave labor from Africa to work in plantations. Recalling this story, a work by Steve McQueen shows flowers photographed in the same Grenadian mountainscape. The series title, Bounty, signals the historical extraction of vital forces—of the land and its cosmologies, of the runaway, fugitive slaves—and the exchange and recompense for their recapture.

A more recent history is recorded in abstract strokes, by ☂️M. M. Thein, 44th St. Fallen Heroes. It depicts the leap into the void, from the fourth floor of a building, by five activists of the Civil Disobedience Movement—a nonviolent uprising of strikes and creative acts of resistance in Myanmar in 2021—to avoid being captured by the military junta who had found their place of hiding. The act of jumping out toward something, resonating eerily with Yves Klein’s famous Leap Into the Void (1960), is in real life a fatal gesture of freedom by one’s own means.

Instances of leaving the building reappear through artworks and historical anecdotes of the former Lehrter Straße prison and courthouse, for instance by abseiling down tied bedsheets as a member of the Red Army Faction did in 1976. Sometimes it is one’s artworks that can leave the building, smuggled out with the complicity of the guards (Htein Lin, 1998–2004). One also leaves the building by saying it has been enough, as in the tragic 1980s history of Cemal Kemal Altun. Falsely accused of treason by the Turkish government, he was deceived by the West German judicial system. Instead of insisting on his recognition as an asylum seeker, the court gave in to the political pressure for extradition. At yet another hearing of his case, he took his own life, leaping out of a Berlin courthouse through a window (Merle Kröger, 2025).

A radical way of transforming one’s circumstances is through the act of refusal—deserting, ditching, abandoning, or marooning oneself from life. Considering acts of leaving the building with a steel-nibbed pen, this biennial as a whole delves into the many ways of converting adverse circumstances through the means available: through acts of humor, burlesque, fugitivity, gratuitous giving, or meaning-giving. Perhaps one of the most radical acts of gratuitous giving is giving one’s life for another. In existential thought, we live absurdly, neither choosing our circumstances, nor choosing to be born. The idea that we may have agency only over our death gives strength to the act of living. Milica Tomić’s ambiguous title—Is There Anything in This World You Would Be Ready to Give Your Life For?—seems to not only ask for what one would give one’s life up, but also what one would devote one’s life for.

Leaps are also performed by the mind, as in the utopian stairway by Margherita Moscardini. Or as artist Memory Biwa has shared: as the fleeing Nama looked back along the !Garib or Orange River route to their homeland, their bodies transformed into Namibian plants called halfmens. Perhaps the utmost act of converting one’s circumstances is the imaginative leap, layering the earth with meanings that tie us back to the earth. Were that leap to be performed collectively?

Text: Zasha Colah and Valentina Viviani