Focus Workshop with Arootin Mirzakhani

The Focus Workshops are closely related to the Focus Tours and place an emphasis on deeper engagement with selected themes, artistic works, or questions raised by the 13th Berlin Biennial. They invite participants to consciously take more time to explore specific areas of focus.

Stories about new beginnings, guilt, order and identity—told by states, written in images, laws and archives. After 1945, Germany created narratives of denazification and democracy—not only formally through official documents, but also through cultural rewritings in television, schoolbooks, architecture, and language. These narratives only become reality when they are collectively embodied, believed, and reinforced through repetition. Bodies carry these narratives, consciously or unconsciously, across generations, as attitudes, as silence, as knowledge. What happens when we begin to look back and retell these facts in reverse?

Instituting, the creation of order through repetition and assertion, is a central practice of state power. Fictions are used to generate conditions that are meant to be natural. History becomes narrative; narrative becomes norm. Are rules, order, and law in Germany themselves a form of artistic state practice? How can our understanding of art as a field of aesthetics shift into being a means to create the make-up of our political reality?

Arootin Mirzakhani, also known as miss certainly, lives and works with art as a thinking system to make hegemonic structures tangible in acts of coming together. Engaging with one's own (un)freedom and human relationships within their social, cultural, and collective contexts is central to this practice. Complex relations between the gaze, emotions, cultural hegemony, social power, and fiction form key elements that are explored performatively through various forms.