The 13th Berlin Biennale unfolds across four Berlin venues—KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Sophiensæle, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, and the newly repurposed former courthouse on Lehrter Straße—running from June 14 to September 14, 2025. Curated by Zasha Colah, with Valentina Viviani as assistant, the exhibition features over 60 artists and more than 170 works, including a majority of pieces newly commissioned for the Biennale. The opening, held June 13–14, drew more than 20,000 visitors alongside 2,000 professionals and 350 press attendees. From the outset, Colah’s invocation of fugitivity and evasion sets both thematic tenor and tone.
Colah’s curatorial statement peppers the exhibition with questions of legality, orality, and bodily movement. In her words, fugitive knowledge is passed orally and somatically, “a bone fragment of song, speech, story … held by the teeth in the cavity of the mouth.” This poetic stake—an exposition drawn from legacies of oral history and acts of resistance—anchors the viewer’s experience. The motif of “foxing,” strategic opacity and sly elusiveness, threads throughout: Berlin Art Link reports that until a day before opening, the artists’ list online remained a cluster of cartoon foxes, emblematic of evasion and resistance to easy classification.
A compelling example of this dual poetics of disappearance and claim is Margherita Moscardini’s The Stairway at KW. A walkable sculpture of 561 numbered stones, each authenticated and donated by stateless or extraterritorial entities, this work questions state registration and ownership. It transforms legal apparatus into site-specific empathy, an embodied meditation on belonging. Nearby at Sophiensæle, Amol K Patil’s smoky radiophonic broadcast—blared speeches combusting mid-air—is paired with charcoal portraits of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. As Berlin Art Link notes, this gesture is humorous yet ominous: it echoes a building’s political past through sudden, smoky disappearance.
At Hamburger Bahnhof, scaling down creates emotional density. Larissa Araz’s chalk renderings of Anatolian landscapes with foxes seem untethered by geopolitical boundaries, while Gabriel Alarcón’s banner—held between sculpted hands—proclaims, “We can all see that the colonizer is naked,” accompanied by devotional retablos reimagining colonial iconography. Together, they pry open discourse on colonization and voice its repudiation through direct visual and performative provocation.
The former courthouse off Lehrter Straße is a study in architectural resonance and legal critique. Video works fill its cell-like rooms, notably Stacy Douglas’s exploration of Kafka’s The Trial, a questioning of whether describing law as “Kafkaesque” inadvertently lionizes its authority. In another cell, Fredj Moussa’s Land of Barbar fills drab walls with colored fabrics and landscape, satirizing the colonial term “Barbarian” and unveiling its racist genealogy.
Beyond the gallery walls, the Biennale anticipates performative, communal engagements—walks, spoken-word events, readings—that challenge institutional inertia. Colah asks visitors not just to observe but to “run with” fugitive ideas, to act fugitively themselves. This is a Biennale that resists spectacle in favor of lived inquiry, a carnival of critique and carnival as resistance. In these intentionally oblique gestures—smoke, stones, foxes, whispered stories—it offers a bold answer to contemporary silence, insisting that evocative art may be the most robust legacy of dissent.