4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
“Of Mice and Men”
25.3. – 5.6.2006

Click here to view the website of the 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.

After a strong ten weeks, the 4th Berlin Biennale, entitled “Of Mice and Men,” opened its doors for the last time on Monday, June 5, 2006. Curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, the exhibition was the greatest success to date for KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Works by 76 artists and artist groups were on display at twelve venues along Auguststrasse in Berlin’s Mitte district, attracting more attention from national and international audiences, and media than any previous Berlin Biennale. Another first is that the 4th Berlin Biennale received funding from Germany’s Federal Cultural Foundation. Eighty-three thousand tickets were sold, but since tickets were not checked in every location, this is only a low estimate of the number of visitors who flocked to the 4th Berlin Biennale. More than 800 articles and reviews were published in daily, weekly and specialist publications all over the world, reaching a total circulation of several million, in addition to countless articles on the web.

One of the peculiarities of the 4th Berlin Biennale was that the exhibition was not, as it were, restricted to its ten weeks of opening time. Its was actually launched in March 2005 with a column in the bi-weekly Berlin magazine Zitty and in September with the opening of Gagosian Gallery, Berlin, which presented eight exhibitions of its own. Nor will this Berlin Biennale simply end: it will have an impact reaching far beyond its duration as an exhibition. With the support of Paweł Althamer, Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, Ali Subotnick, KW and others, the Fairy Tale project by Paweł Althamer will continue beyond the June 5th ending of the exhibition (for updates please go to www.kw-berlin.de).

Visitors
The exhibition’s resounding success was heralded by the positive energy and enthusiasm during the opening days from March 24 to 26, 2006. During these few days alone nearly 10.000 guests from Germany and abroad came to see the exhibition, among them renowned museum directors, curators, media representatives, collectors, gallery owners and artists. Taking up an initiative from the Allianz Cultural Foundation and BMW Group, KW in collaboration with the Forum Goethe-Institut, Berlin, organized a highly successful curators’ workshop, whose 21participants from 19 countries talked and debated with such prominent figures as Saskia Bos, Isabel Carlos, Okwui Enwezor, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Tirdad Zolghadr.

Guided tours took numerous groups through the show on the opening days and during the exhibition, such as the Federation of German Industries, the Friends of the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, the Purchases Commission of the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, the Guggenheim Club Berlin, the Friends of the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich and the Friends of the Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum. Other groups came from the Busch Reisinger Museum and Castello di Rivoli, the Hirshhorn Trustees, the International Center of Photography, New York, the Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, the Moore Space in Miami, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Santa Fe SITE Trustees, the Société des Amis du Musée national d’art moderne Centre Pompidou and the Outset Contemporary Art Fund. We were pleased to welcome representatives from the embassies of Canada, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Further visitors came from German and international universities and art academies – from Braunschweig, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Bergen, Boston, Copenhagen, Paris, Vienna and Zurich. The guided tours we offered for members of Berlin’s city government and members of the German parliament were also extremely popular.

Education proved to be an important concern: special tours for teachers from schools in Berlin and tours for high school students were offered. The general guided tours also met with great acclaim, and we were especially pleased to find how mixed the groups were with regard to both age and professional background. Participants in these tours said they were not generally “arty,” and that this was their first visit to a Berlin Biennale.

The Gallery Weekend organized by the Berlin art galleries on April 29 – 30, 2006 and the Easter and Whitsun weekends again attracted a large number of national and international visitors to the 4th Berlin Biennale.

Not only visitor numbers exceeded expectations, the response from art critics and the media was also overwhelmingly positive. While all relevant daily and weekly newspapers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland covered the exhibition, the reactions in the Italian press were particularly extensive – two of the curators, Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni, hail from Italy. Reports were published in La Repubblica, Il Sole 24 Ore, Il messaggero, L'Espresso and Corriere della Sera Magazine.

Numerous articles were published in other international daily newspapers, including The Guardian (UK), the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times (both United States) but also Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), Tageblatt (Luxemburg), The Jakarta Post (Indonesia), The Japan Times, Upsala Nya Tidning (Sweden) and De Volkskrant (Netherlands).

Another measure of the intense media attention raised by the 4th Berlin Biennale is the large number of articles and often highly positive reviews published in national and international art journals. Features appeared in the most important European and U.S. publications such as Artforum International (United States) and Art Monthly (UK), ArtReview and Frieze (both UK), Exit Express (Spain), Flash Art (Italy) and in art – Das Kunstmagazin and Kunstforum (both Germany), as well as in Artist (China), BT (Japan) and Worldart (Russia).

Some excerpts from reviews:

The New York Times, 6.5.2006 (Roberta Smith):
“Berlin’s Biennial brings a new art scene to an old city. (…) They have come up with something that perhaps shouldn’t work but does: an unusually poetic show that forms a kind of rebus about the arc and tumult of life itself. (…) Some of it will never look more substantial. (…) Of Mice and Men is a dark, unpretty show for dark, unpretty times, much like the current Whitney Biennial. It has avoided the something-for-everyone impulse that plagues so many big shows. But its major advantage is a brilliant installation.”

art – Das Kunstmagazin, No. 5, May 2006 (Ute Thon):
„The curators always stressed, that this Biennial has no leitmotif. But a disposedness to the dark, irrational and impermeable is distinctive. And a preference for narrative approaches, for art, which tells its own stories. Secret star of this Biennial is therefore not an artist, but a building. The spellbound rooms of the Former Jewish School for Girls, during the times of the GDR polytechnical secondary school and untenanded since ten years, have such a strong aura, that all art seems to pale beside it.”

Die Wochenzeitung, 30.3.2006 (Andreas Fanizadeh):
“Their aim was to liberate the Berlin Biennial from its sad reputation as a hermetic discourse interesting only for an exclusive coterie. (…) Another exciting aspect is how Of Mice and Men relates spatially to everyday life and history in its urban context. The idea was to leave the well-swept galleries behind. This may come to be a strain on the people who live here, but visitors willing to engage with this concept will gain surprising insights.”

Die Zeit, No. 14, 30.3.2006 (Hanno Rauterberg):
“No Berlin Biennial has ever offered a stage-set comparable to this. It leads us from the sublime to the private, from private space into the museum, from the museum to the scrapheap.”

The Guardian, 28.3.06 (Adrian Searle):
“Of Mice and Men, with its nods to John Steinbeck’s novel and Robert Burns’s poem To a Mouse, is relentlessly downbeat. (…) Of Mice and Men resists art jargon, resists fashion, resists giving us an easy time. (…)  Clearly, the curators have thought about placement as much as they have about selection the right works, not just the right artists. Pathos often turns into banal, vaguely humanistic heavy breathing elsewhere. There’s a lot of Beuysian brown and dirt – easy intimations of the portentous. But the twists and turns keep you looking, and finding artists and works you have either forgotten, or never seen before. (…) Flawed and frequently jarring it may be, but this is an important, timely exhibition. This is no survey show, no feebly themed free-for-all. It is not just another biennial. The curators have attempted to construct if not a narrative, then a journey. They want the things they have chosen to speak, both for themselves, to one another, and to us.”

Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag, 26.3.2006 (Gerhard Mack):
“Rarely has contemporary art revealed its melancholia and insecurity as emphatically as it does here in Berlin.”

die tageszeitung, 25.3.2006 (Harald Fricke):
“Of Mice and Men – the exhibition’s title refers to a tale by John Steinbeck – is ornament above all else. A ‘many-faced monster’ (Gioni) that meanders through countless rooms and apartments. Visually striking, often decorative and with a predilection for private mythologies en miniature. (…) It is long since an exhibition was so keen on effects, since an audience was thus engulfed by obsessive phantasmagorias. (…) Driven by a strangely naïve hunger for the authentic, the  biennial focuses real, genuine, undeniably lived life.”

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25.3.2006 (Niklas Maak):
“The biennial is enormously precise, melancholic and almost disturbingly earnest in its efforts to achieve pathos, shock and catharsis through art. The curators’ are attempting an archaeological exploration of the shaky foundations on which the New Berlin rests, of long-past fates and fortunes, and of the history of the way art is seen and shown.”

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 25.3.2006 (Jörg Heiser):
“The 4th Berlin Biennial is merciless in its consistency. It obstinately sticks to the basic themes of paranoia, the uncanny and depression. And it is clearly structured along specific works rather than oeuvres in general.”

Frankfurter Rundschau, 25.3.2006 (Elke Buhr):
“Narration is everything at this biennial. (…) The result is a highly legible biennial, accessible to mice and men without dumbing down. Perhaps it is a bit too insistent about the uncanny and yes, it owes its charm to the ruins. But it gives the ruins something in exchange, namely, an ear for their history.”

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, No. 11, 19.3.2006 (Peter Richter):
“It is the most poetical exhibition you can imagine. Picture this biennial as a convoluted American saga called Auguststrasse and set in Berlin, with a time frame extending from the 1920s to this day. (…) Storytime, though some episodes are really dark. A biennial in a minor key. Any tendency towards sentimentality is pre-empted by a drastic twist in the story.”

The 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art is organized by KW Institute for Contemporary Art and is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

We would like to thank BMW Group and the Allianz Cultural Foundation for their kind support.

The Gagosian Gallery, Berlin, is realized with the support of the Culture 2000 program of the European Union.

Althamer, Paweł
* 1967 in Warsaw. Lives and works in Warsaw.           

Althoff, Kai and Braun, Lutz
Althoff: * 1966 in Cologne. Lives and works in Cologne.
Braun: * 1976 in Schleswig, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.

Aminde, Ulf
* 1969 in Stuttgart. Lives and works in Berlin.

Assaël, Micol
* 1979 in Rome. Lives and works in Berlin and Rome.

Ballen, Roger
* 1950 in New York. Lives and works in Johannesburg. 

Beutler, Michael
* 1976 in Oldenburg, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.

Borremans, Michaël
* 1963 in Geraardsbergen, Belgium. Lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.

Bouchet
* 1970 in Castro Valley, California. Lives and works in Frankfurt/Main and New York.

Buche, Tobias
* 1978 in Berlin. Lives and works in Berlin.

Burdin, Anthony
Lives and works in California.

Cantor, Mircea
* 1977 in Oradea, Transylvania, Romania. Lives and works in Cluj, Romania, and Paris.

Conner, Bruce
* 1933 in McPherson, Kansas. Lives and works in San Francisco.

Cottam, Benjamin
* 1975. Lives and works in New York.

Creed, Martin
* 1968 in Wakefield, England. Lives and works in London.

Croy, Oliver with Elser, Oliver
Croy: * 1970 in Kitzbühel, Austria. Lives and works in Berlin.
Elser: * 1972 in Rüsselsheim, Germany. Lives and works in Vienna.

Cuoghi, Roberto
* 1973 in Modena, Italy. Lives and works in Milan.

Dean, Tacita
* 1965 in Canterbury. Lives and works in Berlin and London.

Deller, Jeremy
* 1966 in London. Lives and works in London.

Djurberg, Nathalie
* 1978 in Lysekil, Sweden. Lives and works in Berlin.

Donnelly, Trisha
* 1974 in San Francisco. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

van Eeden, Marcel
* 1965 in The Hague. Lives and works in The Hague.

Fletcher, Saul
* 1967 in Barton, England. Lives and works in London and New York.

Flexner, Roland
* 1944 in Nice, France. Lives and works in New York.

Gmelin, Felix
* 1962 in Heidelberg, Germany. Lives and works in Stockholm.

Grzeszykowska, Aneta
* 1974 in Warsaw. Lives and works in Warsaw.

Hammwöhner, Sebastian / Jakob, Dani / Vormstein, Gabriel
Hammwöhner: * 1974 in Frechen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.
Jakob: * 1973 in Freiburg, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.
Vormstein: * 1974 in Konstanz, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.

Ivanov, Pravdoliub
* 1964 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Lives and works in Sofia.

Jensen, Sergej
* 1973 in Maglegaard, Denmark. Lives and works in Berlin.

Jurczak, Dorota
* 1978 in Warsaw. Lives and works in Hamburg.

Kantor, Tadeusz
* 1915 in Wielopole Skrzynskie, Poland. Died 1990 in Krakow.

Kiaer, Ian
* 1971 in London. Lives and works in London.

Knowles, Christopher
* 1959 in New York. Lives and works in New York.

Kuśmirowski, Robert
* 1973 in Łódź, Poland. Lives and works in Lublin, Poland.

van Lieshout, Erik
* 1968 in Deurne, The Netherlands. Lives and works in Rotterdam.

Mančuška, Ján
*  1972 in Bratislava, Slovakia. Lives and works in Berlin and Prague.

Martin, Kris
* 1972 in Kortrijk, Belgium. Lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.

McCarthy, Paul
* 1945 in Salt Lake City, USA. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

McCorkle, Corey

* 1969 in La Crosse, USA. Lives and works in New York.

Monahan, Matthew
* 1972 in Eureka, USA. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Mühl, Otto
* 1925 in Grodnau, Austria. Lives and works in Faro, Portugal.

Nauman, Bruce
* 1941 in Fort Wayne, USA. Lives and works in Galisteo, USA.
 Ortega, Damián
* 1967 in Mexico City. Lives and works in Mexico City.

Perrone, Diego
* 1970 in Asti, Italy. Lives and works in Asti, Berlin, and Milan.

Philipsz, Susan
* 1965 in Glasgow. Lives and works in Belfast und Berlin.

Queiroz, Jorge
* 1966 in Lisbon. Lives and works in Berlin.

Reynolds, Reynold with Jolley, Patrick
Reynolds: * in USA. Lives and works in Berlin and New York.
Jolley: * in Ireland. Lives and works in London.

Roggan, Ricarda
* 1972 in Dresden. Lives and works in Leipzig.

Ruilova, Aïda
* 1974 in Wheeling, USA. Lives and works in New York.

Sala, Anri
* 1974 in Tirana, Albania. Lives and works in Berlin and Paris.

Schinwald, Markus
* 1973 in Salzburg. Lives and works in Vienna.

Schmidt, Michael
* 1945 in Berlin. Lives and works in Berlin.

Schütte, Thomas
* 1954 in Oldenburg, Germany. Lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Schwontkowski, Norbert
* 1949 in Bremen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin and Bremen.

Sehgal, Tino
* 1976 in London. Lives and works in Berlin.

Shahbazi, Shirana
* 1974 in Tehran. Lives and works in Zurich.

Slotawa, Florian
* 1972 in Rosenheim, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.

Soulou, Christiana
* 1961 in Athens. Lives and works in Athens.

Sultan, Larry & Mandel, Mike
Sultan: * 1946 in New York. Lives and works in Northern California.
Mandel: * 1950 in Los Angeles. Lives and works in Watertown, USA.

Toomik, Jaan
* 1961 in Tartu, Estonia. Lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia.

Varga Weisz, Paloma
* 1966 in Mannheim, Germany. Lives and works in Düsseldorf.

von Wedemeyer, Clemens with Schweizer, Maya
von Wedemeyer: * 1974 in Göttingen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.
Schweizer: * 1976 in Maisons-Alfort, France. Lives and works in Berlin.

Wekua, Andro
* 1977 in Sochumi, Georgia. Lives and works in Zurich.

Wilkes, Cathy
* 1966 in Belfast. Lives and works in Glasgow.

Woodman, Francesca
* 1958 in Denver. Died 1981 in New York.

Zipp, Thomas
* 1966 in Heppenheim, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.

Here you can find the website of the 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.