Encounters

To encounter implies the unforeseen quality of the meeting between two, between many. It stops us in our tracks, even if briefly, delaying time. Like when we encounter a fox in the city at dawn. We observe carefully, we listen to the fox moving, to the surroundings. We may walk alongside her, side-glancing to see which way she follows, or we may stay still and try to make the encounter last as long as we can. Are we both different afterward? I like to believe that we carry the traces of this encounter.

Throughout the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, the artists propose encounters intrinsic to their own works, generated by the claims they present us with: from reading groups, scientific lectures, tribunals, and collective commemorative walks in the city to small enacted jokes or comedy nights. Together, these events form the Encounters series. Some are conceived as fugitive acts, being unexpected, or of an ephemeral nature, focusing on orality and bare forms of transmission.

What do we mean today when we say orality? What are the practices we could identify as such if we move away from an anthropological lens? The 13th Berlin Biennale brings together the many contemporary forms of orality and discursivity in current use as art languages to emphasize the conceptual, humorous, and artistic registers.

Works and projects shown in the 13th Berlin Biennale reflect on the act of transmission and passing something on. They consider how messages are concealed in signs or double-meanings that allow them to pass through borders, through mechanisms of surveillance or censorship in unjust states, to then be read in multiple ways. Sometimes, the works have clear interlocutors, sometimes they initiate a movement of transmission without knowing whether the message will be received nor by whom or when. Open-ended in interpretations, the conviction we work with is that this message must move, reverberate, and pass on. The stories, premises, and questions take different forms or degrees of “hiding.” Many speak in inventive ways, in the path of the fox-as-trickster. More or less opaque, they unfold in the work of artists who understand transmission as something that will always be shape-shifting to avoid capture, but also for thinking not to become stifled.

At first sight, these artistic actions might seem innocuous or familiar (hence not threatening or disorienting), but by looking with attention, tuning in to them, we can glimpse the freedoms they smuggle in and out. You, the audience, become complicit in these encounters. As when you are told a joke, and you laugh because you get the reference, you can read in-between lines, you are in on the joke. Laughter here works as a response, as if saying “I hear you, I’m with you.” It is acknowledging that there is something being passed on to you. Take the joke, keep passing it on, make others laugh and find in them new accomplices.

Text: Valentina Viviani