13th Berlin Biennale

As if echoing Kafka’s boatman named Hopeless, drifting calmly through danger with nothing but a fragile sail, the 13th Berlin Biennale unfolds like a quiet resistance amid stormy global waters.

Curated by Zasha Colah, this year's edition (14 June–14 September 2025) gathers 60 artistic voices from nearly 40 countries to map a vision of post-apocalyptic optimism. A necessary gesture in a time marked by ecological breakdowns, systemic violence, and the tightening grip of authoritarianism.

Instead of succumbing to dread, the Biennale pulses with subtle subversion, humor, and poetic resolve. Across four carefully chosen venues, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Hamburger Bahnhof, Sophiensaele, and the former courthouse on Lehrter Straße, works of art whisper, shout and breathe through cracks left behind by failing institutions. Together they challenge dominant narratives, slip through the net of censorship and reimagine what presence and resistance might look like in this fractured world.

The very spaces that house the Biennale become an extension of its message. At KW Institute Walls, light, and movement work in concert with the installations, encouraging viewers not only to look but to linger. At Sophiensaele the intimate scale and theatrical acoustics lend a breath of urgency to each performance and installation. Meanwhile, Hamburger Bahnhof with its vaulted industrial grandeur softened by thoughtful curation anchors a heavier historical and political charge. Most striking, perhaps, is the Ehemaliges Gerichtsgebäude on Lehrter Straße, whose residual echoes of law and punishment now frame artworks questioning the legitimacy of power and the fragility of justice.

Colah’s curatorial vision emphasizes what she calls “radical acts of imagination” – gestures so nimble and ephemeral that they escape repression. Take, for instance, the haunting absurdity of the Kashmiri Cabbage Walker. A figure in a traditional pheran gently pulling a cabbage through the streets. It’s a strange, almost comical sight, until you understand its protest: a silent critique of militarized Kashmir, where there is one soldier for every seven civilians. The performance, born from Han Bing’s earlier acts of walking cabbages in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, now takes on global resonance – a form of protest that refuses to be contained.

In another register, Panties for Peace, launched by the Lanna Action for Burma Committee, turns patriarchal superstition into subversive theatre. In Myanmar, where military masculinity is prevalent, the act of mailing women's underwear to generals becomes a ritual of ridicule, dissolving oppressive power with irreverent glee. Humor here is not escapism – it is a weapon.

Jane Jin Kaisen’s Halmang expands the scope of resistance toward intergenerational feminist solidarities. Shot on the volcanic island of Jeju, her meditative films follow elderly sea-divers through rituals of labor, grief, and care. Sochang cloths flutter like prayers across rocks blackened by lava and memory, invoking shamanic traditions that resist the flatness of modernity. Kaisen’s visual language, saturated with silence and myth, invites a deep listening – a way of being with the world rather than against it.

The Etcetera Collective presents Liberate Mars, a speculative, absurdist installation that refracts Earth’s colonial tendencies into a post-futurist Martian fever dream. In its playful absurdity, it sharpens the edge of critique: how far will we go to replicate systems of extraction, even on another planet?

And there is more, so much more: installations that blend ritual and ruin, videos that reclaim the street as sacred ground, sculptures that laugh in the face of law.

The Biennale does not offer easy answers. But in refusing the status quo, in staging art as a living, shifting thing, it becomes itself a kind of collective exhale in the face of suffocation.

The decision to structure the Biennale into four thematic venue-specific chapters allows for a slow unfolding. Together, they form a patchwork of artistic resistance, gestures at once deeply local and fiercely global.

More than a showcase, the 13th Berlin Biennale is an invocation. It asks: How do we keep moving when the waters are full of reefs? How do we reclaim imagination not as luxury, but as necessity?

Perhaps, we begin by walking a cabbage.

Photos by Viktor Nikishov