During the Kosovo War (1998–99), I remember seeing a photograph in the press of a displaced woman with a wheelbarrow. Inside it: a tattered carpet, a framed black-and-white portrait of a man, several books, a calendar, a small keepsake box. I was moved by these objects—not for what they were, but for what they had become. They brimmed with meaning, repositories of a life suspended before the rupture of war.
In the unwanted choreography of forced displacement, such objects preserve layers of humanity otherwise lost. My own family left Spain during the Civil War, carrying with them a few of these accidental relics: an empty tin of eyeliner powder, a pair of cracked binoculars. For me, these things are Borromean knots—entangling the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary registers of our history. They enrich the sparse narrative of exile and squalor we inherited.
There is a thunderstorm outside the courthouse on Lehrter Straße—one of the venues for the 13th Berlin Biennale, titled “passing the fugitive on”—and an orange curtain billows from the open window. I watch it while listening to the story of Cemal Kemal Altun, the Turkish political activist who leapt to his death from the window of another Berlin courthouse in 1983, as an alternative to his imminent extradition.
But I am not only listening to Altun’s story, as told by Merle Kröger in Was fehlt – Eksik olan – What’s missing (2025). I am listening to the story of how that story was told—and how the telling moved through the political landscape of 1980s Germany. The news of his death was reported by Navina Sunderam, the first woman of color to work as a political journalist on German television. Sunderam offered to deliver the news of Altun’s death to his family, and this gesture became part of her report. The public response was visceral: outrage at Germany’s deportation policies fused with anger toward Sunderam herself, who was accused of broadcasting the family’s pain for public consumption.
What is missing? Kröger’s work speaks in a double register. It exposes the brutal policies surrounding asylum in 1980s Germany while tracing the erasure of two immigrant voices: Altun’s, slowly eclipsed by his own image; and Sunderam’s, who was gently but thoroughly pushed into invisibility after her coverage aired. This double register is, for me, a key to this edition of the Berlin Biennale: a collection of stories that are smuggled inside other narratives, or that can only be read by paying attention to the contours of their absence.
There are stories nestled in stories in the positions of the collectives, many of them female-led, participating in the biennale: Artcom Platform’s work looks at the process of industrialization in Kazakhstan’s steppe, and stakes a claim to its ecological future, while Exterra XX presents the documentation of their 1989 occupation of the Stasi Headquarters in the city of Erfurt, and “Panties for Peace” displays their political party strategy to bring down the Myanmar military junta by mailing female panties to superstitious military leaders who believe that their masculine superiority can be damaged if they touch female underwear.
Small flowers crack concrete.
I once dreamt I was a fox. I was digging holes in a park, elated, pawing the wet soil with no purpose but joy. I went on digging, until hunger displaced the digging drive, and I turned to a bird nearby, caught it, ate it. I woke up shortly after, dream-hunger satisfied, still holding onto my fox joy, and with a lingering feeling of feathers sticking to the roof of my mouth.
This biennale takes place against Berlin’s charged political landscape; particularly the German state’s stance on the unfolding horrors of the Israeli war on Gaza, a subject that has occupied the minds and actions of the city’s cultural workers for nearly two years. There’s a spoken and unspoken expectation that the Berlin Biennale should catalyze the sector’s collective anger and grief. I understand this impulse. And yet I find myself grateful for the biennale’s refusal to perform outrage on command. It resists being reduced to this one urgency that Germany’s own political class has created.
At the Kunst-Werke, I ran into an old acquaintance. As we compared impressions, he recalled the 7th Berlin Biennale in 2012, when Artur Żmijewski staged “Occupy Biennale” in the building’s atrium, explicitly putting political action to the service of art. He lamented the absence of a similarly grand gesture in this edition. I was left thinking about political violence, and how it dehumanizes through scale. It flattens human complexity until only suffering remains visible. This biennale declines to amplify that spectacle. Instead, it privileges the quieter, stranger forms of resistance and the myriad strategies by which people refuse to be reduced to their trauma.
Htein Lin’s performance The Fly (Paris) (2008) encapsulates this refusal. Conceived while imprisoned in Myanmar, the piece—low-resolution footage shot in a single handheld take—begins with Lin, naked and tied to a chair, in a scene suggestive of an interrogation room. A fly buzzes around him, and he focuses his energy on catching it, using only the minimal movements allowed by his constraints. When he finally catches and eats the fly, something shifts. An absurd transubstantiation occurs: Lin becomes the fly. He is no longer bound. He has found freedom in the most improbable form.
Holding onto one’s humanity through all means possible is a fugitive act of resistance that recurs through the exhibition: in Shahana Rajani’s intricate knotting of palm fronds (a cipher for the missing, 2022); in Mila Panić’s stand-up comedy routines (Big Mouth, 2025); in Helena Uambembe’s video tutorial on how to make mud cakes (How To Make a Mud Cake, 2021/25); in Han Bing’s absurdist solidarity walks with a cabbage (Walking the Cabbage in Berlin, 2020/25); in the “floral flowers” room at Kunst-Werke, where eight botanical studies, many created in exile or hiding, coalesce into a quiet garden; and in Margherita Moscardini’s maneuver of donation and counter-donation of 561 stones. The stones are assembled into a staircase which—because of the legal process at the center of the work—much like an embassy, distances itself from geographical/national allegiance to the territory where it is placed, but unlike an embassy, has no other national allegiance, so it ends up “stateless”: a staircase that belongs only to itself.
Encountering the Berlin fox always feels like a gift. I’ve seen her in gardens and parks, crossing the streets of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, always with purpose. We look at each other: the terms of our encounter are unclear. She is not lost, not tame, not a pest. She has her own relationship with the city, and for a moment, I am invited into it. We share something brief and uncertain. I keep thinking about the ease with which the fox moves between worlds, and about how she inhabits the space between domesticity and otherness, as a cipher for all that cannot be owned. This Berlin Biennale moves a little like her. It does not ask for permission. It does not perform domestication. Instead, it humanizes the narratives of political violence to which we have grown desensitized. It digs, quietly, toward another possibility, where resistance can be strange and small, where care can be wild, and where all beings, ungoverned and unforgotten, might yet have a future.
To mark the final week of the 13th Berlin Biennale, Julieta Aranda will be discussing "the stakes of belonging" with Catrin Lorch, Jörg Heiser, and Zasha Colah, at KW Studio on September 11. The event will begin at 0900 CEST and be live streamed via:
https://13.berlinbiennale.de/en/program/calendar
https://www.instagram.com/berlinbiennale/
