The 13th Berlin Biennale opened in June 2025 under Indian curator Zasha Colah. Its title was a manifesto and its method was an argument with the institution that hosted it.
The Berlin Biennale has, for twenty-seven years, been the European biennial that takes the political register seriously without staging it as a theme. The institution was co-founded on 26 March 1996 by Klaus Biesenbach — then director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art on Auguststraße in Berlin-Mitte — and a group of collectors and patrons. Its first edition opened in 1998. The Biennale was conceived as a counterpoint to the institutional biennials — to Venice and to the documenta that opens every five years three hundred kilometres south in Kassel — and as a way of asserting that Berlin, in the late 1990s, was the European city in which the next consequential argument about contemporary art would be made. The Biennale's institutional home has remained KW, an organisation Biesenbach co-founded in 1990 in the former East Berlin in what was then the lightly inhabited margarine-factory complex on Auguststraße. The Biennale and KW are inseparable in practice; the institutional identity of one extends through the other.
The 13th Berlin Biennale, which opened on 14 June 2025 and ran to 14 September, was curated by Zasha Colah with Valentina Viviani. Colah — the Mumbai-trained curator who co-founded the experimental nonprofit Clark House Initiative in Mumbai with Sumesh Sharma in 2010 — developed the Biennale's curatorial argument from her own concept of foxing, first set out in 2022, around fugitivity as a method by which art remains operative under conditions of political dispossession. The exhibition was staged across KW, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Sophiensæle, and the former Courthouse on Lehrter Straße in Moabit, and the participating artist list weighted heavily toward practices from Myanmar, Iran, Sudan, Tibet, Kashmir, and contested post-Soviet territories. The curatorial argument was that these were the places where the contemporary political condition was most concentrated, and that the Biennale's curatorial intelligence ought to extend toward them rather than wait for them to extend toward Berlin.
What was hard about it
The 13th was a hard exhibition. The Lehrter Straße siting — a former Prussian-era courthouse in Moabit where Karl Liebknecht was tried in 1916 and which the Biennale grounded as a new site for contemporary art — is among the more charged venues a recent biennial has chosen. Colah's curatorial programme placed work by artists whose practices have engaged questions of legality, illegality and the carceral within courtrooms and chambers designed for the administration of state power; the formal effect was inseparable from the institutional question the staging raised. That question — whether a German state-supported institution staging an exhibition in a former courtroom about contemporary political dispossession produces solidarity or a particular kind of curatorial reception of other people's suffering — was widely raised in the German and international press at the time of the opening, and Colah and Viviani's curatorial position treated it as constitutive of the exhibition rather than an objection to it. Whether the 13th succeeded in the terms it set itself is something the next edition's curatorial committee, and the field, will be working through across the next biennial cycle.
The KW question
What the 13th made visible is the institutional question the Berlin Biennale has been postponing since at least the 7th edition under Artur Żmijewski (2012). KW Institute is, in 2025, a different organisation from the one that founded the Biennale in 1998. Biesenbach left as KW director in 2004 to become director of MoMA PS1; subsequent KW directors (Gabriele Horn, then Krist Gruijthuijsen since 2016) have shaped the institution in markedly different registers. The Biennale, in the same period, has been curated by artistic directors who have rarely had institutional positions at KW and who often arrived with a working method that did not, in any obvious way, align with the host institution's programming. The 13th edition under Colah, like the 12th under Kader Attia and the 11th under the four-curator team led by María Berríos, was prepared outside the KW programming calendar; KW's role was logistical and infrastructural rather than curatorial.
The Berlin Biennale and KW Institute are inseparable in institutional practice but distinct in curatorial intelligence. Whether that distinction can hold across the next decade is the question the 14th edition will be asked to answer.
— On the institutional question
The institutional question is whether the Biennale can continue to operate as a independent curatorial proposition while remaining structurally a programme of KW Institute. The 13th edition's success, on its own terms, suggests that it can. The institutional cost — KW's own programming has, in the past three biennial cycles, been visibly shaped around the Biennale's operating requirements — is the part that has not been publicly discussed. As of this writing the curatorial selection process for the 14th Berlin Biennale, expected in 2027, has not been publicly announced.
