8th Berlin Biennale – How are we Curating the Curators?

The 8^th Berlin Biennale has once again come and gone, the biennale circus has now left town and all the articles and reviews have been long published. I must admit, I quite enjoyed this biennale: the use of three of Berlin’s distinct, and very different, cultural spaces; the selection of artists; and the refreshing lack of video art (for a biennale, that is). This biennale’s curator Juan A. Gaitàn responded thoughtfully to the city, drawing from the loaded histories of each building and creating meaningful connections between them and the artists chosen to exhibit. Incorporating references to non-art related disciplines such as post-colonial history, ethnography and science into his main curatorial thesis could have resulted in a kind of unwieldy presentation of chaotic thought processes. However, his constant questioning of how we (re)present our own cultural heritage, especially within a city that is so concerned with its own identity, seemed to hold the whole biennale together. Perhaps the juxtaposition of cultural heritage and museums with contemporary art appealed to me so as these were my two main focuses of my studies at university.

But I don’t want to review the 8^th Berlin Biennale – no, there is quite enough of that already. What I want to do, and what I think is more useful for the discourse of contemporary art biennales (and perhaps all kinds of triennials, quintennials and other forms of large-scale contemporary arts festivals) is to use the example of the 8^th Berlin Biennale to explore the selection process inherent in appointing a biennale curator.

Biennale press attention is, as always in the lead up to and shortly after the opening celebrations of a biennale, very much focussed on the curator. And, in a way this is justified given the way in which many biennales have become a platform for curators to conceive of, develop and realise a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk of their own. While many biennales were indeed formed with the intent to introduce artists to new audiences in other parts of the world, to rejuvenate or indeed create new arts infrastructures, as city branding exercises or to deal with particular political themes, there is no escaping the fact that with the rise in number of biennales, curating courses and celebrity curators worldwide, the role of the curator has shifted. It is no longer simply enough to curate an exhibition that presents the outcome of existing curatorial research within an institution; rather, we now live in an age where curatorial statements are made in order to connect existing and new curatorial research with whole cities and the people that inhabit them. Thus, if the role of the curator within today’s biennials are charged with such tasks (and dare I say, such responsibility) why is there not more written about the ways in which particular curators for certain biennales are selected? And furthermore, can these processes themselves be considered “curatorial” or are they merely political?

How and why was Juan A. Gaitàn appointed at this time in the Berlin Biennale’s history? Aside from the acknowledgement on the Berlin Biennale website and in the guidebook that a biennale International Selection Committee exists, there is no literature publically available on how curators such as Gaitàn are appointed, nor how such committees arrive at their decisions. At least from this year’s Berlin Biennale guidebook we can ascertain that it was a unanimous decision, one made by Sergio Edelsztein, Cao Fei, Susanne Gaensheimer, Koyo Kouoh, Matthias Mühling, Bisi Silva and Patricia Sloane in September 2012.

Gaining insight into the rationale behind the committee’s decision to appoint Gaitàn is just as difficult, although reading between the lines of the biennale guidebook, we can fathom a bit more of an idea. Kunstwerke (Berlin Biennale founding organisation and main host venue) Director Gabriele Horn believes the appointment was:

 “…a move that opened up an unmistakably cosmopolitan matrix. Gaitàn’s vocation, his enthusiasm, his confidence in the ability of curators, artists, and thinkers, to work together, as well as his interest in political change, transgressing borders, and transcultural concerns have allowed him – even before, and particularly, during the preparation of this year’s Berlin Biennale – to open up the exhibition to many global forays.” (Horn, Gabriele, p.23)

Now, it’s fairly obvious and unsurprising that Gaitàn was selected for his curatorial vocational abilities, however what I find intriguing is his “interests” that Horn speaks of. She make a point of Gaitàn’s previous “global excursions” to areas once under European colonial rule (p.24) and later on his selection of over fifty artists “many of whom are not from Europe” invited to participate in the biennale (p.27). Perhaps Germany’s Minister for Culture and Media Monika Grütters sums up Gaitàn’s appeal better in her own introduction, citing him as a “world citizen” (p. 10).

What does it mean then, when a “world citizen” curates the 8^th Berlin Biennale? Having downplayed questions regarding his potential selection of artists from underrepresented parts of the world such as Latin America (http://artreview.com/previews/the_biennial_questionnaire_juan_a_gaitan/), would the International Selection Committee have known in advance what his curatorial choices or approaches would be? Why was it deemed important to appoint a curator with such a “global” perspective and why now? Could the 8^th Berlin Biennale International Selection Committee have known in advance, his plans for using particular buildings that would result in a poignant response to the city and its history? Does it take a world citizen to respond to the city in such a way?

Horn makes no secret of the external pressure on the biennale, such as the increasing development of Berlin’s urban space, that has led to a lack of space within Berlin’s Mitte area (where KW is situated) once available for the biennale (p.24). Perhaps Horn is alluding to the fact that Gaitàn’s proposal presented not only a sound curatorial proposal for Berlin’s peripheral spaces, but also one that would solve many practical problems.

And so, from one practical problem to another – it’s all very well for me to surmise what I can about the selection process and appointment of this biennale curator from the scraps of information given in the biennale guidebook, but when it comes to critical biennale discourse, shouldn’t there be a higher level of transparency of how curators – often the very lynchpins of biennales – are selected? When I was working in Scotland, I was surprised (and somewhat pleased) to discover that under the Freedom of Information Act, publicly funded arts institutions were obliged to answer questions members of the public put forth about the procedures and decision making they made. Surely, with the amounts of state funding awarded to the production of biennials, we can do the same in this field of cultural production too.

References
Gabriele Horn, Monika Grütters, Juan A.Gaitàn,  8^th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art Guidebook, 2014