The present in drag: running now through September, the 9th Biennale is curated by NYC collective DIS, and there's plenty for the queer eye: Wu Tsang, Zackary Drucker, Ryan Trecartin and lots more

Jun. 7 – The hotly anticipated Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art returns. One of Germany’s most prominent art events since its 1998 inception, each Biennale is defined by its chosen curatorial team, and this year’s New York-based collective DIS – composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro – is promising. The group is behind DIS Magazine, an online publication that views art, fashion, music and culture through a subversively witty lens.

At a press conference last February, Boyle spoke of embracing a queer, anarchic concept. "Our proposition is simple," she said. "Instead of pulling talks on anxiety, let's make people anxious; rather than symposia on privacy, let's jeopardize it; instead of talking about capitalism, let's distort it […] instead of unmasking the present, this is the present in drag."

Along with DIS, the exhibition is organized by the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, whose founding director, Klaus Biesenbach, also co-curated the inaurgural Biennale in 1998. Here, artist and fantasy architect Shawn Maximo will orchestrate a de-gendered bathroom intervention, converging spheres of “private relief and public distribution and participation” in response to North Carolina’s discriminatory transgender bathroom law.

Meanwhile, performance artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang – known for her acclaimed 2012 documentary, Wildness, about the historic Los Angeles Latin LGBT bar Silver Platter – will display a video installation involving lesbian Kung Fu fighters (pictured above). 

Starting in mid-July, CUSS Group from Johannesburg will host a performance by queer music duo FAKA, who focuses on issues of the black queer body, seeking to “create a dialogue that transcends the bounds of queer activist rhetoric”. Celebrating “third-world aesthetics”, FAKA addresses the art world’s classism that excludes valuable expressions of disadvantaged black African voices. They describe their music video “From a Distance” (an ode to anti-apartheid Afro-pop singer Brenda Fassie’s rendition of the Bette Midler hit) as a lamentation for dick to the tune of Gospel and Gqom, a South African form of minimal house music.

Over at the Akademie der Künste, Lizzie Fitch and her long-term collaborator Ryan Trecartin will display an as yet untitled new piece. The pair began making off-beat, gender-playful structural video installations at art school and have since become internet and Kunstwelt sensations, landing shows at major institutions around the world such as New York’s MoMA PS1.

In July, Zackary Drucker, co-producer of the TV series Transparent, will host a talk show at the Akademie’s Assembly Hall. The performance will be in a similar vein to her previous community-fostering piece, “The Skew” (2015), a panel of trans women in the form of a round-table daytime talk show, exploring identity as a theme of contemporary art, the elusiveness of celebrity culture and transgender representation.

The city-wide exhibition will continue through mid-September, featuring 120 participants, including writers, musicians, fashion designers and DJs, and bringing with it a larger-than-usual flux of haughty art people to clash with the summer tourists – a sight that may be worth viewing in itself.

Mary Katharine Tramontana

9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
Now through Sep. 19
KW Institute, Akademie der Künste, European School of Management and Technology, Feuerle Collection, Blue-Star