Biting the hand that feeds them
Activists turn “human zoo” into Occupy-style working group
By Christian Viveros-Fauné. News, Issue 237, July-August
2012
Published online: 04 July 2012
What initially began as a
disagreement over the curator Artur Zmijewski’s decision to put global
activists on display during the 7th Berlin Biennale blossomed into an
out-and-out political revolt, just before the closing of the international
exhibition on 1 July.
Reacting to what members of Occupy
and M15 (the Spanish protest movement) characterised as a curatorial framework
that penned them into “a human zoo with a viewing platform where viewers
watch[ed] activists eat, assemble, fight and sleep,” the activists issued the
biennial’s authorities with a set of ultimatums. These demands included, among
others, dismantling “the hierarchical structure of the biennial” and replacing
it with an Occupy-style “working group”. These radical proposals were accepted
by Zmijewski and the associate curator, Joanna Warsza, Berlin
According to a statement posted on
the biennial’s website, “the invited global movements have challenged the
hierarchical structure of the biennial” to “loosen the assumptions of cultural,
institutional, and economic hierarchy and bring the 7th Berlin Biennale into
line with the stated claims to ‘present art that actually works, makes its mark
on reality, and opens a space where politics can be performed’”. The recent
“decentring of power” that took place at the biennial meant that all
curatorial, administrative, communications and budgetary decisions were made
collectively at bi-weekly assemblies. Additionally, the curators were no longer
called curators but “former curators”.
Zmijewski, a curator and artist
known for commenting on the institutionalisation of art, first raised
suspicions among key activists for making curatorial choices they said tended
to “anthropologise and humiliate global movements”. A month into the
two-month-long exhibition, speculation was rampant as to whether the
artist/curator might be using the protest movements as part of his own
meta-work of art. According to the Occupy Wall Street member Noah Singer, the
activists risked becoming “the butt of jokes all over Berlin
and maybe Europe ”.
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