Adam Szymczyk and documenta 14

“Guerilla tactics” in Berlin

Szymczyk made a name for himself in Germany in 2008 as the curator of the 5. Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst, when the critics hailed him as the “shooting star of the scene”.[7] The Berlin Biennale was set up as a forum for contemporary art in 1996 [8]on the initiative of Klaus Biesenbach (now the director of the New York exhibition house, MoMa PS1), for which he curated the first exhibition in 1998. In 2008 it received a grant of €2,500,000 from the Kulturstiftung des Bundes. The Kulturstiftung still regards its range of exhibitions as the “most important shop window for contemporary art” in Germany to offer “a podium to less established positions in more recent art”. Here the German capital was regarded “as an ideal stage to enable artistic exchanges between East and West.”[9] In 2008, on the tenth anniversary of the series, Szymczyk invited the Los Angeles art historian, Elena Filipovic, to be his co-curator and presented the fifth show under the heading “When Things Cast no Shadow”. In 2014 Filipovic was appointed to succeed Szymczyk as the director of the Kunsthalle Basel.

Szymczyk and Filipovic divided the Berlin Biennale into a day and night area. The day area comprised exhibitions by 50 artists from four generations, presented in four Berlin venues: the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum and the Schinkel-Pavillon. According to Szymczyk and Filipovic in the exhibition catalogue, the venues, on both sides of the separating line between the East and West, were intended to represent “typical contrary conditions for the presentation of art”. The history of the corresponding buildings and sites should reveal “a multifarious ideological context for understanding the individual parts of the exhibition and the works shown therein, most of which were made especially for the Biennale”. The night area was a programme of 63 events featuring over 100 other artists, and including talks, discussions, performances, concerts, workshops, film and video screenings. Under the title, “Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours“ (English: My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days) – it was taken from the eponymous erotic film made in 1989 by the Polish director, Andrzej Żuławski (1940-2016) – the night programme was “convinced that it is possible to produce knowledge of methods, other than by means of a conventional series of talks and exhibition formats. This series is intended to give artists and thinkers from various areas the chance to experiment and present their ideas. Hence we have asked them to produce new works, revise old ones, and talk about them or interpret them before an audience.”[10]