As diverse and varied as the worlds that comprise our current human reality are, they subsist amid the waste and cacophony that traverse global capitalism’s frantic and destructive race toward production. Since the onset of modernity, our planet has endured successive and ruinous changes that have accelerated alarmingly from the start of the third millennium. The place to which we have arrived today is not by chance: it is the result of historical formations constructed over centuries. In fact, the present world is the way it is because it carries all of the wounds accumulated throughout the history of Western modernity. Unrepaired, they continue to haunt our societies.
On the occasion of the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, artists from around the globe engage with the legacies of modernity and the resulting state of planetary emergency. They map the world with its ruptures and contradictions, create counter-trajectories to the colonial narrative, and propose decolonial strategies for the future. How can a decolonial ecology be shaped? What role can non Western feminist movements play in the reappropriation of history? How can the debate on restitution be reinvented beyond the return of plundered goods? Can the field of emotion be reclaimed through art?
12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
until September 18, 2022