It is hard to hear the title of the current edition of the Berlin Biennale, passing the fugitive on, without thinking of the political instrumentalisation of immigration in Germany, across Europe, and beyond. The German government is currently orchestrating pushbacks along the border, which, according to national and European laws, are illegal and deny vulnerable individuals the opportunity to claim political asylum in Germany – literally passing them on to other countries.
But this show is not about the fugitive or the refugee, but the specific state – volatile, ephemeral, and fleeting – of being in transition, in passing. Curator Zasha Colah suggested in a radio interview that the title could be thought of as a Fluxus-inspired instruction piece, in which the fugitive content of the artworks are passed on to the Berlin audience, like the proverbial hot potato. Then it is up to the visitors to “run with it, pass it on, or keep it in hiding until it is transmissible, sayable.”
What may sound a bit lofty takes on increasingly precise form as you progress through the venues of the biennial. Together with assistant curator Valentina Viviani, Colah has brought together highly diverse works by more than sixty artists, many from South East Asia. Several are historical, but more than half have been commissioned for this show and are presented in four locations.
The show takes up all of Kunstwerke (KW), a large hall at each Hamburger Bahnhof and Sophiensäle, and occupies two full floors of an abandoned former courthouse in Moabit; it is, all in all, rather manageable. It is surprisingly refreshing not to be overwhelmed by works of extensive volume, like too many long videos, gigantic installations, or simply too much information in or accompanying the artworks.
But, then again, there is also no figurehead piece that would encapsulate and represent biennial’s ambition. Everything appears modest and, dare I say, soft-spoken? In a cultural climate in Germany that feels like it is becoming more repressive by the day, many would have wished for the curators to make a bolder statement.
Or should artists already start practicing being sneaky? One section at KW is titled foxing, inspired by the observation of urban wildlife around the city, but explained by Thai curator Somrak Sila in the biennial guide as a viable survival strategy rehearsed in response to recent political developments and disastrous events in Thailand and Myanmar. It’s about employing subversion, humour, and creativity rather than adhering to strict logic, to not only reclaim dignity, but to stay alive and capable of thinking freely. Under extreme conditions, in the face of repression, persecution, violence, and systemic injustice, the artist needs to assume the role of a fox, a trickster who can adapt to adverse surroundings.
In the fight against the ruling military in Myanmar, the self-described witches of the Lanna Action network based their “Panties for Peace” campaign on the local superstition that male power and honor could be destroyed by men coming into physical contact with women’s underwear. From 2007 to 2010, the international female activists mailed packages of panties to Myanmar’s top officials and embassies in several countries, fusing derision with exposure of those abusing their powers in a veritable blow below the belt.
There are plenty of works displaying the subversive potential of humour at KW, with the carnivalesque queering of Japanese emperor Hirohito and American general Douglas MacArthur by Bubu de la Madeleine and Yoshiko Shimada in a 1998 photograph on a heart shaped pillow titled 1945. Or in the dead-pan performances of Potkniecje (The Stumble)(1977) by the artist group Akademia Ruchu from Poland, which captures in grainy film footage passersby suddenly falling over their own feet like iron-curtain-era Buster Keatons, startling onlookers and causing brief irritation before life continues. Or in the garish caricatures of late conceptual artist turned carnival prop-maker Piero Gilardi (1942–2023), such as Trump Molino (2017), in which the American president’s portrait forms the centre of a windmill surrounded by swirling missiles.
The attic of KW belongs to Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s installation Joker’s Headquarters. Gesamtkunstwerk as a Practical Joke (C’est le Premier Vol de L’Aigle) (2025). In a video, the artist himself assumes the role of Batman’s antagonist, presenting the character in existential crisis, reading and ambling around. Large banners in the space draw connections between military production, armed conflicts, and art funding, and show lists of weapons, much like in a restaurant – à la carte? – or a biennial artist list.
Moving Multitudes and the Conscience of Art is the title of the comparatively small section at Hamburger Bahnhof. In the introduction, Mumbai-based curator Sumesh Sharma refers to the caste system, and connects the idea of the moving multitude with the social justice movement Chalwal, acting against tyrannical social laws by walking together, with everyone at their own pace. Vikrant Bhise’s monumental painting We Who Could Not Drink (2025) illustrates a famous march in 1927 by B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution of 1950, leading a group of mixed castes to a water tank to share a drink of water.
The fox makes another appearance in Larissa Araz’s drawings in chalk on the blackened walls, titled And through these hills and plains by most forgot – And by these eyes not seen for evermore (2025). Her foxes roam in sketched Anatolian hills, apparently unbothered by having their origin officially dropped from their Latin name, Vulpes vulpes kurdistanica, by Turkish authorities in 2005, reflecting the resurgence of Turkish nationalism and echoing the symbolic politics of other nationalists, such as the more recent and equally stupid renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
A large video installation by Copenhagen-based artist Jane Jin Kaisen takes centre stage, a composition of four video works shot on Jeju Island in South Korea, Halmang (2023), and Core, Portal, and Wreckage (all 2024). Superimposed on the swirling sea, snippets of an American propaganda film can be seen: soldiers dumping weapons into the sea, set to a shamanic lament. Another video shows a group of eight elderly women on a rock, and sea divers harvesting seaweed and mollusks as if in a choreography of women’s solidarity. A fifth element, the installation Knots and Folds (2025), features Sochang cloth, long white cotton fabric with a deep spiritual meaning: it is used in shamanic practices and symbolizes the human connection to the spirit world.
A small transistor radio on a simple wooden table, blares speeches, only occasionally shutting up to spew a small cloud of smoke, as if possessed. Amol K Patil’s BURNING SPEECHES (2025), is a theatrical display, comprising paintings, wall drawings, and objects; it is the standout work at Sopiensäle. Today housing several stages for theatrical productions, the historic building was originally built for the association of Berlin’s craftsmen, and has seen its share of speeches by the likes of women’s rights advocate Clara Zetkin and revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Liebknecht was tried in the former courthouse, which is home to the final and, in this reviewer’s eyes, most important chapter of the show, Legality, Illegality, and the Artist’s Claim. The venue’s small office rooms and hallways still breathe the stale air of twentieth-century legal administration.
Milica Tomić presents an installation addressing the massacre of Srebrenica – the genocidal killing of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males in July 1995 – asking how one can hold the memory of such violence without perpetuating new violence. A hallway features figures by Elshafe Mukhtar showing scenes from the ongoing war in Sudan. With heads in the shape of tin cups, fighters representing the Muslim Brotherhood are seen in front of rows of human victims; some carry knives, some cut off heads. The repression and persecution of activists in Sudan will also be the subject of A People’s Tribunal, the first of two events to be held in Berlin during the biennial. A second tribunal will focus on the repression of human rights in the Philippines. Both will be mediated by the artist duo Sinthujan Varatharajah and Moshtari Hilal.
Htein Lin, who served six years in prison in Burma, was not granted permission to leave Burma and travel to Berlin. Instead, we see his paintings executed on prison issued cloth, pieces of bed linen, and painted with whatever he had at his disposal. These works were smuggled out of prison with the dirty laundry, and feature doodles, dancing women, contorted figures, and observations from prison life. In another work at KW, the artist can be seen in a video reproducing a performance he had shown a handful of fellow inmates. The Fly (Paris) (2008), shows the artist naked on a stage. Constrained to a chair, his eyes fixate a fly, abruptly he swallows it, convulses, then virtually turns let’s the fly take over his body.
“Every border implies the violence of its maintenance,” writer Kate Sutton quotes scholar Ayesha A. Siddiqi in her introduction to this segment. The powers of subversion and humour may find their limitations at these borders. An audio piece by Merle Kröger, Was fehlt – Eksik Olan – What’s missing (2025) offers no escape, not even a fictional one. It reflects on the suicide of Turkish activist Cemal Kemal Altun, who leaped to his death from the window of another Berlin courthouse in 1983 following seven months of struggle to evade deportation, and on the way that TV journalist Navina Sundaram reported on the subject. Altun’s asylum application had been granted, but the extradition was not halted – in spite of being illegal. A frightening sense of continuity.
