KW Institute for Contemporary Art

KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin

foxing

Two attitudes open the exhibition: two moving image works-in the form of burlesque and grotesque flies—and a section called flowers. As part of this prologue, a negotiation table draws us simultaneously to written codification, law-making, and accord writing. In its sight-line, a stairway leading down into an open ground stages a claim: that this walkable sculpture is an international commons in the making, a legislative hole in the national fabric. At the other end of the open ground, non-violent acts of nighttime gardening fugitively reclaim a site of torture and death as a public space for the commons through artistic means. Both acts of foxing—converting one’s adverse circumstances—are separated by a trajectory of sunlight. In this central ground or square, one must pass through a threshold of sculptures made of speech and voice, instrumentation, call and response.

Artists’ Street

Five levels, vertically stacked like a tower, form one section of the biennale, named after the art actions by artists, comedians, and theater professionals in the days and months following the military coup in February 2021 in Myanmar. The artists had declared the street outside Yangon's courthouse as “Artists’ Street," performing a feminist cabaret-style queering of the street.

This attitude of carnivalesque gaiety resonates not only with intergenerational women-driven humor against militarism, but also with the escraches—performative street acts with absurd, surreal imaginaries, staged in front of the homes of collaborators with Argentina's last dictatorship to expose them. In proximity, artworks from diverse geographies thread together other inter-generational art histories.

The attitude of the Brazilian dramatist, Augusto Boals Joker or Difficultator, emerges in artistic languages that do not articulate simple answers, but rather, push ideas toward complexity. The artists difficultate ideas of critical imagination—and its deficiency—as well as interplanetary extractivism via a protest on Mars, a menu of global arms sales as the slavery of our times and the black humor of a comedy club.

History of the building

The Berlin Biennale was founded in 1996, emerging from Kunst-Werke—now KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Since its first edition in 1998, the Berlin Biennale has consistently presented a large part of its program at KW. Established in 1991 in a dilapidated margarine factory, KW has since become a home for progressive artistic practices. It played a crucial role in positioning Berlin as an internationally relevant location for contemporary art following the fall of the Berlin Wall. KW’s work is driven by the urgent questions of our time, shaping its approach to the production, presentation, and mediation of contemporary art. Without a permanent collection, KW maintains the flexibility and openness to respond to the present and to develop a program attuned to contemporary realities. While internationally recognized, KW remains deeply rooted in its local context.