EXHIBITION

6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

KW Institute for Contemporary Art , Berlin, Berlin, 06/11/2010 - 08/08/2010

Auguststraße 69

ABOUT

ExhibitionDo you believe in reality? What a question, you’ll reply. Reality isn’t something you believe in. It proverbially catches up with you anyway – always. But then what are we talking about here? Maybe we could talk about the fact that you so often hear people saying something was different ‘in reality’? Or about why it has become so customary to add a ‘really‘ or an ‘actually’ or an ‘in fact’ to so many of the things we say? Let’s talk about the cracks in reality, about the gap between the world we talk about and the world that’s really there. But why this distinction? Because reality is always the other? Or the others? Everything that’s waiting out there?

Let’s talk about the self-deceptions where reality becomes too painful. Let’s talk about the fictional arsenal of the mass media and consumerism, about the rhetoric of distraction and appeasement.

Won’t that ultimately lead us to question contemporary art, and its relationship to reality?

From June 11 to August 08, 2010, at several locations in Berlin, the 6th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art will bring together numerous artistic positions on the present. Michael Schmidt’s photographic works are the first artistic contribution to the biennial and will accompany it in the public realm and the media throughout its duration.

The biennial will be contextualized by an exhibition with works by Adolph Menzel (1815–1905), curated – at the invitation of Kathrin Rhomberg – by the American art historian Michael Fried in cooperation with the Alte National Museums in Berlin.

Curator: Kathrin Rhomberg
Since 1990, Kathrin Rhomberg has worked as a freelance curator of exhibitions of contemporary art. She has organized projects on art and art theory, lecture series and symposia, and has numerous publications. On July 1, 2008 she has been appointed curator of the 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art that will take place in summer 2010. From 2002 to 2007 Kathrin Rhomberg was director of the Art Association of Cologne (Kölnischer Kunstverein). From 2002 to 2006 she and Marion von Osten were the artistic directors for the Migration project initiated by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Together with Maria Hlavajova, Kathrin Rhomberg is founding director of Tranzit, a long-term initiative for the promotion of contemporary art projects in central Europe, which is sponsored by the Erste Bank Group and has been running since 2002. In 2000 Kathrin Rhomberg was co-curator of Manifesta 3 – European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, together with Maria Hlavajova, Ole Bouman, and Francesco Bonami. From 1990 to 2001 she was curator and director of the Secession exhibitions center in Vienna.

Most recently, in 2009, she curated the exhibitions Ion Grigorescu – In the Body of the Victim 1969–2009 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and Roman Ondák – Loop at the Czech and Slovak Pavillon, 53rd Biennale di Venezia. In the Art Association of Cologne she has presented Clemens von Wedemeyer (2006), Jutta Koether (2006), Sanja Iveković (2006), Cezary Bodzianowski (2005), Trisha Donnelly (2005), Cosima von Bonin (2005), Roman Ondák (2004), Florian Pumhösl (2003), and others. Among Kathrin Rhomberg’s exhibitions for the Vienna Secession are solo shows by Christopher Wool (2001), Trinh T. Minh-ha (2001), Renée Green (1999), Pierre Huyghe (1999), Markus Geiger (1998), Mike Kelley & Paul McCarthy (1998), Zoe Leonard (1997), James Coleman (1997), Lois Weinberger (1996), Carsten Höller (1996), Dieter Roth (1995), and Heimo Zobernig (1995), and the group shows Ausgeträumt… (The Dream is Over, 2001) and Young Scene (1998).

Kathrin Rhomberg lives and works in Vienna and Berlin.

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