The Fox and the Fortress: How Berlin Biennale Transforms Political Urgency into Artistic Strategy

In the summer of 2025, as visitors enter a former courthouse in Berlin-Moabit—one of four venues hosting the 13th Berlin Biennale—they encounter not just an exhibition but an instruction: "passing the fugitive on." This cryptic directive from curator Zasha Colah encapsulates both a curatorial methodology and a survival strategy for art under conditions of increasing global authoritarianism. It's a call to become complicit in art's escape from systems of control, to carry forbidden messages from mouth to mouth until conditions allow them to materialize.

The concept of fugitivity runs deeper than metaphor in Colah's vision. Drawing from her observations of urban foxes in Berlin—creatures that have adapted to thrive in the interstices of human habitation—she positions the artist as trickster, shape-shifter, and survivor. This is not romantic idealization but practical necessity. As Colah notes, many of her artist friends in Myanmar are in prison; in India, artistic expression faces mounting restrictions. The question becomes: How does art persist when its makers are hunted?

Berlin seems the perfect laboratory for such investigations. This city, scarred by division and surveillance, rebuilt from rubble and reunified through revolution, understands fugitivity in its bones. The Biennale has always drawn from this reservoir of historical memory—from the 2012 edition's controversial engagement with political activism to the 2022 exploration of decolonial practices. But the 13th edition marks a shift from representation to enactment, from showing resistance to practicing it.

The selection of venues itself tells a story of transformation and reclamation. Beyond the Biennale's institutional home at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the exhibition sprawls across Hamburger Bahnhof, Sophiensaele, and most significantly, a decommissioned courthouse. This last space—promised to Berlin's art community after years of bureaucratic limbo—becomes a site where law's violence meets art's lawlessness. Colah rejected an adjacent former prison ("too literal," she explains), but the courthouse offers its own charged symbolism: a place where judgments were rendered now hosts works that refuse judgment's finality.

The three-year postponement of this edition, initially scheduled for 2024, proved fortuitous rather than merely frustrating. The delay allowed distance from what organizers called a "biennial super art year"—avoiding competition with Venice, Gwangju, and Lyon—but more importantly, it provided time for Colah's radical rethinking of the format. Unlike previous editions that announced artist lists months in advance, building anticipation through conventional marketing cycles, the 13th Berlin Biennale kept its participants secret until opening day. This wasn't coyness but strategy: How can fugitive practices be advertised? How can clandestine operations be press-released?

The appointment of Axel Wieder as the Biennale's new director in August 2024, following Gabriele Horn's tenure, signals institutional recognition of the need for new approaches. Wieder, coming from Bergen Kunsthall, brings experience with experimental institutional formats. His arrival coincided with new protocols for curatorial selection—a response to increasing calls for transparency in the art world, but also an acknowledgment that the Biennale's strength lies not in following trends but in anticipating urgencies.

What distinguishes Colah's approach is her insistence on orality and embodiment as primary modes of transmission. In an age of digital surveillance and algorithmic control, the human voice carrying messages between bodies becomes a technology of resistance. The exhibition includes performances, reading groups, tribunals, scientific lectures, and even stand-up comedy—formats that privilege presence over documentation, encounter over capture. This emphasis on the ephemeral and interpersonal challenges the art world's increasing digitization and market-driven emphasis on collectible objects.

The Berlin Biennale has weathered its share of controversies—from the 2012 edition's Occupy encampment to heated debates over representation and cultural appropriation. The 2022 edition's inclusion of Jean-Jacques Lebel's Abu Ghraib images sparked fierce criticism about the ethics of displaying images of torture. These conflicts, rather than weakening the institution, have sharpened its purpose. The Biennale succeeds precisely when it creates discomfort, when it refuses the art world's tendency toward aesthetic neutralization of political content.

Yet "passing the fugitive on" suggests something beyond provocation. It implies a network of trust, a community of risk-takers willing to shelter dangerous ideas until they can safely emerge. This vision of art as underground railroad rather than museum display radically reimagines the biennial format. While Venice celebrates national pavilions and Documenta attempts comprehensive global surveys, Berlin offers something more modest and perhaps more necessary: a space for practices that cannot yet be fully seen or spoken.

As Berlin continues its transformation from divided Cold War capital to Europe's creative hub, the Biennale provides a counter-narrative to gentrification's smooth surfaces. In a city where former squats become luxury lofts and underground clubs become tourist destinations, the Biennale insists on art's capacity to remain genuinely underground—not as lifestyle choice but as survival strategy. The urban fox doesn't choose marginality; it adapts to the margins power leaves unguarded.

The 13th Berlin Biennale asks not what art represents but what it does—how it moves between bodies, evades capture, and preserves possibilities for different futures. In a world where public space shrinks and surveillance expands, where borders harden and movements are tracked, the figure of the fugitive becomes not romantic outsider but pragmatic strategist. The Biennale doesn't just display this strategy; it enacts it, inviting visitors to become part of art's escape network. The message passed on might be a whisper, a gesture, a moment of recognition between strangers who understand that some truths can only survive in motion.