Do you believe in reality?
Do 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 8, 2010, at several locations in Berlin, the 6th Berlin Biennale 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 Nationalgalerie/Old National Gallery and the Kupferstichkabinett/Museum of Prints and Drawings of the National Museums in Berlin.
The 6th Berlin Biennale’s curator Kathrin Rhomberg recently Roman Ondák’s contribution for the Czech and Slovak Pavillon at the 53rd Biennale di Venezia. From 2002 to 2007 she was the director of the Art Association of Cologne (Kölnischer Kunstverein) and between 2002 and 2006 she conceived the project Migration together with Marion von Osten, an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Between 1990 and 2001 Kathrin Rhomberg was the curator and director of Secession, Association of Visual Artists in Vienna. In 2000 she co-curated Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana – European Biennial for Contemporary Art – together with Francesco Bonami, Ole Bouman and Maria Hlavajova.
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