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The curators of the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art have a very clear political manifesto. Entitled Forget Fear: Act for Art, this edition is less about exhibiting art works. Instead, its goal is to address and reflect the social and political unrest in the current global financial crisis.

The Biennale and indeed, contemporary art are used here as a political forum to open up public debate on the various forms of political resistance taking place across the globe. It encompasses a multitude of various specific polemics such as the manipulation of events in current media reportage and the hegemony of religion and western capitalism. The influential power of religion, from the dogmatic teachings of Catholicism to the apparent fanaticism of Islam, is suggested in the work of Miroslaw Patecki’s Christ the King and addressed in the actions of Public Movement’s advertising campaign Rebranding European Muslims.

Institute For Human Activities, 7th Berlin Biennale, 2012, Photo: ©The Institute for Human Activities; Courtesy the BB7.

It is the aspiration of curators Artur Żmijewski and Joanna Warsza and associate curators, a Russian art collective called ‘Voina’ (translated as ‘War’), that the transformative power of art will effectively achieve a mass collective self-organisation against the evils of capitalism and corrupt governance. Described in the curators statement as ‘agonistic curating’, the intention is to emphasise the possible positive outcomes of a political conflict through an oppositional stance to the dominant opinion. This strategy is considered as a way of revealing ‘a political truth’ in which the artist’s role in the context of this Biennale is viewed as that of a politician. Here, political activism is presented as art and art as political activism.

Most prominently, the inclusion of ‘Indignados | Occupy Biennale’, activists from the protest movements of Occupy Berlin, Frankfurt and New York in the ground floor hall of the KW Institute situates this as the primary agenda. A rolling programme of participatory events is scheduled daily in the space of the ‘Autonomous University’. These events are independently led, uncurated and unsupervised – exemplifying a performative democracy yet a lack of critical engagement.

Occupy Biennale, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, 7th Berlin Biennale, 2012, Photo:©Marta Gornicka; Courtesy BB7.

Upon entering the KW Institute, the corridor leading to the main space is covered with graffiti and fly-posted literature – suggesting an aesthetics of resistance. The space itself reveals a pitched tent, tables covered in pamphlets and a round table discussion about to take place. The situating of the Occupy movement in a non-profit publicly funded institution as the KW Institute immediately draws parallels with the recent occupation and eviction of Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park and Occupy London at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Yet, it signifies a new ideological turn by transforming the space of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art into an ‘advocacy space’ for activist movements. It also forms a critique of the role of the art institution as an emblem of power within contemporary art spheres.

Upstairs, on the first floor, the sculptor Patecki is slavishly recreating, out of polystyrene, the head from one of the biggest statues of Jesus Christ in the world. The statue was installed on the outside of the Polish town of Świebodzin in 2010 and designed by Patecki himself. Adjacent to this, a film produced by Anna Baranowski and Luise Schroeder entitled Facing the Scene documents the ceremonial installation of the statue in November 2010. It depicts with meticulous detail the display of reverence for the statue demonstrated by the church community – an icon of the Catholic Church’s institutional power.

On the top floor, photographs of the actions of the Institute for Human Activities project are exhibited. The institute’s gentrification project is a five-year programme located eight hundred kilometres upstream from Kinshasa, on the river Congo. Designed to highlight the impact artistic activity has on the gentrification of an area, the intention here is transform this potential into an interventionist tool. The Institute in an open letter extends an invitation to the public to join the programme in June in the Congo, with visa and travel costs reimbursed.

Jonas Staal: “New World Summit”, 7th Berlin Biennale, Photo: ©Marta Gornicka; Courtesy BB7.

Rotterdam-based artist Jonas Staal proposes an alternative parliament for political and juridical representatives of organisations currently placed on international terrorist lists in ‘The New World Summit’. The Summit is suggested to have occurred on 4-5 May 2012. However, no documentation of the actual event and political exchange is presented in the installation. Staal presents a strong argument that ideologically democracy has failed by deliberately excluding certain political parties from participating in national and international politics. The non-transparent terms by which the activities of these organisations are determined as terrorist, is never fully disclosed to the public. In his own words Staal has said that “violence is nothing more than a bad articulation of something that could be said in better terms.”

Within the exhibition space, the flags of each organisation are suspended from the ceiling accompanied with a model of the political agora. Amongst the organisations represented are ‘Saor Eire’ and ‘The Red Hand of Ulster’. Significantly the majority of the insignias of each group include an emblem of violence, such as a closed fist gripping a Kalashnikov machine gun. Whether violent or not, the call to arms appears to be an embedded ideology in the majority of these organisations. With ‘New World Summit’, Staal hopes to create an egalitarian, fundamentally open and democratic society by administering its principles, albeit in a radical form.

Teresa Margolles: PM 2010, 7th Berlin Biennale, Photo:©Marta Gornicka; Courtesy BB7.

With Teresa Margolles work, Covers of PM, A Local Newspaper of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico from February 2010, the entire back wall of the upper floor of the KW Institute is decorated with the front pages of PM newspaper. Each cover contains graphic images from a crime scene juxtaposed against an image of a scantily clad woman. An accompanying text explains that on February 1, 2010 the story of a massacre in which thirteen students took place was published. This was the single most horrific example of the civil unrest and gang violence that was taking over the country. In 2010, it was recorded that there were 3951 murders in Ciudad Juarez, 476 of these were women. These fatalities are a result of the on-going gangland drug warfare destroying Mexican society.

In response to the Margolles installation, Antanas Mockus, a former mayor of Bogotá and political thinker, sets a proposition to the Biennale public in Blood Ties. Mockus claims that 47 die every day in the drug war in Mexico. Those who donate a drop of blood and choose to sign a legal waiver to abstain from the use of drugs during the course of the Biennale are directly contributing to the reduction of human fatalities in Mexico, as a result of the drug war. A Mexican flag attached to a pulley will slowly be either hoisted or lowered into a pool of liquid if the homicide rate increases or decreases during the course of the Biennale. This action attempts to trace the complicity of the recreational drug user with the drug’s violent origins. Mockus also claims in his statement that if the homicide rate does not drop during the Biennale, he will declare himself ‘a failed artist and art a pretentious concept’. Such a symbolic gesture is admirable but effectively politically impotent.

Antanas Mockus: Cocaine Machine, 7th Berlin Biennale, 2012, Photo:©Antanas Mockus.

Beyond the inclusion of such art-activist movements in Forget Fear, it is difficult to interpret any critical engagement with the artworks and actions exhibited. How the political agency of an artwork is measured in concrete, effective terms remains a contentious issue and this democratic and egalitarian curatorial approach is commendable but inherently problematic. The political gestures of many of the actions exhibited does not visibly extol any significant results and the various, divergent discourses taking place within Forget Fear detract from a collective action and become more of a declaration of one’s own political position. All these issues culminate in a Biennale, which although is well intentioned, lacks any real political impetus. The ambition to shock and provoke the public into a state of protest through such artistic gestures, instead through its execution, encourages the questioning of the artist’s commitment to their political cause. It seems in the current global climate of social unrest, what is most urgently needed is not gestures but actions.

Ruth Hogan is a writer and curator based in London.

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A pair of fleshy, enormous testicles suspended from a wooden angle brace. A pint sized yellow effigy of George W. Bush in an oversized stetson. A reclining mannequin with an enlarged doll’s head. Floating silicone heads frozen in a state of animated surprise. Discarded, dust filled buckets of KFC chicken, scattered Disney memorabilia, and metre long butt plugs. The layers of dust coating every surface is palpable in the air.  This is Pig Island (2003 – 2010), Paul McCarthy’s opus amassed from seven years of toiling in his Los Angeles studio. Transported to Hauser & Wirth’s Savile Row space as a sculptural installation, it constitutes the ongoing imaginings from McCarthy’s studio practice in an explosion of sculptural objects and ephemera. When observed from above from one of the four strategically placed step ladders, it appears as a sprawling landfill dedicated to the detritus of McCarthy’s labour.

Paul McCarthy: Pig Island (2003 – 2010), mixed materials, 1067.5 x 915 x 518.5 cm / 420 1/4 x 360 1/4 x 204 1/8 in. Installation view, ‘Paul McCarthy. The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship‘, Hauser & Wirth London, Savile Row, 2011 © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Delfanne.

McCarthy’s multidisciplinary practice from his early performance and video works to his ‘mechanical sculptures’ critique the hegemonic forces at work in contemporary US culture. His work often lampoons the political emblems of capitalist power, aspects of popular culture and the media as a humorous polemic.

The King (2006 – 2011) at the Piccadilly space is the result of a five year collaboration between McCarthy and a spray paint artist in Los Angeles. Four rows of church pews are arranged in front of a elevated timber platform. A life-size seated doppelgänger of a naked McCarthy, his limbs dismembered at each joint, eyes closed and wearing a blonde wig is the focus of the viewer’s gaze. The altarpiece behind him is a giant airbrushed painting of a topless African American man, a women lies against his shoulder in an act of willful submission. Surrounding the timber altar, four spray-painted works propped up on foam blocks adorn the walls. Among them an inverted portrait of Britney Spears overlaid with multiple crotch shots and a pornographic image of a reclining woman exposing her genitals provocatively, in what can only be described as an unholy shrine to male dominance. Here, McCarthy uses parody and self – parody to great effect. The re-contextualisation of the artist’s studio setting as a site of holy creation becomes in effect a criticism on the elevated status of the artist today.

Paul McCarthy: The King (2006 – 2011), multimedia installation; acrylic on canvas stretched over board, wood stage, lighting, life cast, 4 pews. Overall footprint:  6.20 x 12.20 x 8.45 m / 20′ 3″ h x 40′ x  27′ 7 in. Installation view, ‘Paul McCarthy. The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship‘, Hauser & Wirth London, Piccadilly, 2011 © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Delfanne.

Train, Mechanical (2003 – 2009) features an elaborate metal framework of whirring pistons and screeching levers upon which two squat, silicone replicas of George W. Bush relentlessly sodomise two pigs. The synchronised, debauched action momentarily slows down as a viewer enters the gallery space. The oversized, disfigured heads pivot and swivel at three hundred and sixty degrees following the movements of the viewer, their bulbous eyes eerily returning their gaze.

Paul McCarthy: Train, Mechanical (2003-2009), steel, platinum silicone, fiberglass, rope, electrical and mechanical components, 276.9 x 152.4 x 566.4 cm / 109 x 60 x 223 in. Installation view, ‘Paul McCarthy. The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship, Hauser & Wirth London, Savile Row, 2011 © Paul McCarthy; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Delfanne.

The prominence of the exposed mechanics in Paul McCarthy’s work reveals that the process of the production is integral to its interpretation. These mechanisations serve as an analogy for the capitalist machine and Western ideologies. The exhibition parodies the power structures that govern society and questions how our relationship to capitalism is conditioned. This is more so explicitly compounded in the video work Flicker King (2011). The single channel video is composed of thousands of flashing images taken from magazine advertisements promoting different lifestyle products. The rate and speed at which the images are burned into the retinas fluctuates in a heady frenzy of consumerist delight. Here, McCarthy is demonstrating through the aggressive proliferation of capitalist culture that to accumulate is by way an expression of identity. This exhibition as a whole serves as a warning against the idolatry of consumerist culture, albeit in an amusing and brutal way.

Ruth Hogan is a writer based in London.

Welcome to the neighbourhood is an invited international residency programme where five selected artists spend two weeks working and living in the local town of Askeaton, Co. Limerick. Now in its sixth year, this residency programme, co-ordinated by Askeaton Contemporary Arts and curated by Michele Horrigan, was developed from an initial desire to provide a centre for contemporary art outside of the urban environment, and to bring contemporary art to wider ‘non-art’ audiences.

Oswaldo Ruiz, video still, Askeaton, Co. Limerick, 2011; image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

There is no remit for the artists to create work in relation to the location of Askeaton, however, the participating artists in this latest edition have all chosen to do so, producing work in response to the direct environment, the local community history or the historical architecture of the town. The resulting output is exhibited at the end of the residency period in communal spaces around the town.

Influenced by the history of the Franciscan Friary and the practice of the order, Elaine Byrne’s film documents simple interventions she pursued with the friary’s ruined architecture. By placing green transparent vinyl screens against the window frames, she references the Franciscan monks belief that green was a contemplative colour. Historically, the monks cultivated a well-maintained grass lawn in the courtyard of the cloisters of the Abbey, which was regarded to instill pious reflection. Again this ideology is re-manifested as green fabric attached like curtains to the cloisters arches. Byrne has captured this sensitively on film; the gentle movement of the fabric casts a green hue onto the ground and surrounding stone walls, transforming the space.

Elaine Byrne, Franciscan Friary installation, green vinyl, wood, 2011; image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Next door, located amidst the wood veneers of a closed down hair salon, Oswaldo Ruiz’s film plays on a flat screen. Ruiz is a Mexican photographer and filmmaker who cites Seamus Heaney’s “Sweeney Astray” as the influence for this work. The poem is based upon the re-telling of the legend of the medieval King Suibhne who, having threatened Bishop Ronan, was cursed to behave like a bird and roam the Irish countryside as an exile.

In Ruiz’s film, he traverses the uninhabited urban spaces at night, shooting still images of the derelict and abandoned spaces around the town. Illuminated only by the streetlights, the cinematography of each seemingly banal scene is engrossing. Among local advertising notices stuck to the salon door, Ruiz also presents watercolour interpretations of the recounted tale.

Allan Hughes, video still, pillboxes, Askeaton, Co. Limerick, 2011; image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Located in the Civic Trust building, Belfast based artist Allan Hughes’ work considers moving image and aural methods of representation. For the residency, Hughes focused on the remaining pillboxes located in and around Askeaton. Pillboxes were strategic defense fortifications located along the Shannon estuary, designed as vantage points to monitor the river Shannon for German u-boats during World War II. Constructed from concrete, these could house up to two volunteers of the Local Defense Force (LDF) and the Local Security Force (LSF) appointed to keep look-out. Hughes interviewed three men from the locality about their experiences in the volunteer forces during the 1940’s. These conversations are replayed as an audio narrative from a speaker on a mount stand. Adjacent to this, a tv monitor shows alternating views of the River Shannon from the interiors of pillboxes, and is spliced with footage of its rough waters.  By recounting the experiences of the volunteers as two separate works, Hughes seems to comment on the fractured nature of historical narratives.

Alan Counihan, a sculptor who traditionally works with stonemasonry, enlisted the support of the local aerobord factory Kingspan to produce a site-specific work in response to the architecture of the ruined friary. Counihan carved a white plinth from aerobord, and installed it in the open courtyard of the friary, with a glass bell on top. The use of the lightweight, commonplace aerobord is a playful contrast to the fragility of the glass bell. The shape of the plinth echoes the formal Roman architecture of the cloisters arches, yet the durability of the sculptural materials negates their functionality in the open space – a possible indication towards the slow decay of the friary itself.

Amanda Gutiérrez, transcribed screenplay, Askeaton, Co. Limerick, 2011; Image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Chicago-based Mexican artist, Amanda Gutiérrez’s work looks at social, political and personal effects of migratory displacement. For this project she conducted separate conversations with four individuals from different native backgrounds who have settled in Askeaton. They are known only by their first names: Rita (India), Marianne (Denmark), JJ (Limerick), Raymond (England – of Nigerian parents). The conversations are transcribed into a screenplay, printed onto A4 sheets of paper, and pinned to the green felt notice board at the entrance of the local community hall.

Different categories within the screenplay parallel similar experiences of each of the individuals through their emigration, or immigration into the country. Under different headings – Labour, Interaction, Homesickness, Motherland – each participant describes their hometown. Departure describes their reasons for emigrating or immigrating, and Adaptation discusses their final assimilation into their adopted community.

On a small monitor in the corner of the entrance, anonymous hands type the accounts of each character. On the stage of the community hall, footage of the local countryside is projected onto a suspended screen. The screenplay, read by a local Askeaton resident, serves also as an accompaniment to the film.

Alan Counihan: aerobord, glass, installation, Friary, Askeaton, Co.Limerick; Image courtesy Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

The different modes of presentation, and the format of a screenplay, converted to video raises questions as to whether the characters are in fact real or fictitious and if the emotions expressed in text and through audio are unique to these four individuals or represent a universal feeling of displaced people. The fact that we are never presented with their visual identities or that their original sentiments have been presented by a third party, mirrors the act of displacement and establishes their loss of identity through immigration.

I was impressed by the well-considered and resolved work featured in this edition of Welcome to the neighbourhood.  This residency provides an alternative model for a community art initiative where social engagement between the local community and the artists is achieved through other methods. The success stems from the artistic freedom given to artists, and through the community’s support and interaction with the artists to facilitate the production of the work, often providing the source material with which to begin a discourse. May it run and run.

Ruth Hogan is an Irish freelance curator based in London.