Berlin Biennale: Azucena Vieites

After a delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the 11th edition of the Berlin Biennale will run from September 5 to November 1. Basque artist Azucena Vieites will join other artists to present her work.

Vieites will bring a remake or re-elaboration of her previous projects to Berlin. One example is her prestigious project Coloring Book, resulting from her continuous interest in ways of looking at childhood and immersing into the languages linked to subcultural aesthetics and their (re)production. The Basque artist´s work will be exhibited in the form of drawings, serigraphs, and fanzines on the walls and in a set of showcases arranged in the exhibition space.

Using drawing and collage in a constant exercise of visual re-elaboration, Azucena Vieites’ work explores the expressive potential of non-linear forms of narration and knowledge production. Her work critically reflects on questions such as the conception of aesthetic creation as a processual task always linked to a certain social and economic context, or the need to generate discursive strategies that help break the binary logic which persists in many of today’s cultural representations. Vieites’ artistic practice has been closely associated with feminist and queer activism, and her works have been displayed at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, among other venues.

The German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes) has been in charge of organizing the Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art (abbreviated to BB) since its fourth edition. For this 11th edition, the organization has brought together a team of four South American curators, in which the presence of women stands out. The program they created was supposed to last one year, starting in September 2019 and divided into several phases; but the COVID-19 has caused the biennial to stand still for several months. Now that the situation seems to have calmed down, the final phase of this edition, called "Epilogue", will take place from September 5 to November 1.