“Fiction and artifice are everywhere in the ninth Berlin Biennale. Most international exhibitions on this scale strive to define contemporary artistic trends. This one offers a coherent set of fictions amounting to a comprehensive vision of the present.”
—Will Smith, Mixed Messages, Art in America
“…They have been greeted, just like the modernist avant-gardes were in their time, with accusations of bad politics and even worse taste. Perhaps these critics haven’t noticed: The world is a ruin, but we go on living in it…”
—Hannah Black, The Present in Drag, Artforum
“The Present In Drag essentially puts an end to contemporary art’s theatre of autonomy, thus liberating art from performing the tedious ritual of critical distance by fully embodying the problem.”
—Mohammed Salemy, Berlin’s belated biennale: A response to the responses, Ocula
“With such presentations DIS has pulled off a Biennale that, for the first time in years, can be seen as a benchmark. Other curators might not have allowed themselves to configure the art in this way, seamlessly, incisively, eloquently.”
— Catrin Lorch, Ausbruch aus dem Spinning-Training (Break-Out from the Spinning Training), Süddeutsche Zeitung
“When I saw the exhibition, however, much to my surprise, I like it. I found that it possessed what nine out of ten biennials lack: thoughtful curation, by which I mean (generally) good, site sensitive installation without in most cases, overcrowding; and a strong, coherent and focused concept, which was formally mirrored in…”
—Chris Sharp, 9th Berlin Biennale, Spike Art Quarterly
“Through its strong curatorial presence (a star curator position that can nowadays only come from an artists’ side) this Berlin Biennale creates a strategically coherent look.”
— Hanna Magauer, Mantras der Gegenwart (Mantras of the Present), Texte zur Kunst
“It is, at least aesthetically, a quantum leap for the Berlin Biennale. With the appointment of the New York artist collective DIS, whose online magazine offers articles on climate change alongside faux-commercials, the Biennale has transformed itself into the locus of the debate on post-digital worlds.”
— Kolja Reichert, Das digitale Erhabene (The Digital Sublime), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“in his opening remarks, Philippe Pirotte contrasted Le Grand Balcon with the Berlin Biennale, which he described as…”
—Claire Voon, The Sly Excess of the 2016 Montreal Biennial, Hyperallergic
“Welcome to the LOL biennial. And brace yourselves.”
—Jason Farago, Welcome to the LOLhouse, The Guardian
“DIS’s Berlin Biennale Isn’t a “LOLhouse” or a Fashion Spread—It’s Charting Art’s Future.”
—Alexander Forbes, DIS’s Berlin Biennale Isn’t a “LOLhouse” or a Fashion Spread—It’s Charting Art’s Future, Artsy
“Regardless of what we thought Berlin Biennale 2016 would be, we can now claim it is for us a milestone in art history, whether by that history we mean the last centuries, the last years, the last days, the last hours, the last fashion seasons.”
— Piero Bisello, Berlin Biennale 2016: last goodbye to the prematurely dead post-internet label, Conceptual Fine Arts
“DIS” have distanced themselves from the effervescent, slightly chaotic juxtaposition of various temperaments, backgrounds and aesthetics that is often the trademark of biennials in favor of a highly cohesive exhibition; it is a bit like their website or a magazine that has a specific take on the world and which embeds this in an aesthetic, you can even say in a brand. This is “DIS”’s approach and it is right for and brave of the Berlin Biennale to give the group free rein. Biennials are only ever interesting when sticking their necks out.”
— Boris Pofalla, Zeitgenossen der Zukunft (Coevals of the Future), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“A beautiful new world of total immanence can only be imagined as a dystopia.”
—Mark Siemons, Das Verschwinden der Gegenwelt (The Disappearing of the Counterworld), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“Su visión no se limita a plantear un mero estado de la cuestión sobre nuestro presente, sino que problematiza la gestión del tiempo a manos de las grandes corporaciones y gobiernos. Un presente travestido que se acelera y se ralentiza al ritmo del capital.”
—Alejandro Alonso Díaz, Si esto es el futuro, ¿qué es el futuro? (If this is the future, what is the future?), Editorial Concreta
“As a whole, the biennial articulates the sense that disengaging from networks of capital and power is neither effective nor interesting nor possible, instead performing its own complicity.”
—Tess Edmonson, “The Present in Drag,” 9th Berlin Biennale, Art Agenda
“In doing so, though, The Present in Drag successfully calls out the capitalist corruptions of the environment we all inhabit — and particularly these corruptions’ iterations within the supposedly “free” zone of contemporary art, critical theory and academia. In this way, viewers, admittedly many of whom are de facto members of this expanded peer group, are forced to acknowledge their complicity within the very problems and hypocrisies that they might claim to abhor — ideally, to better address them.”
—Courtney Malick, 9th Berlin Biennale, Art Papers
“But, as with all things DIS, this too has two sides. Their game of tensions between affirmation and uncertainty is seducing and disturbing at the same time. It creates its own paradoxical essence in that it has its finger on the pulse but eventually stands in its own way. DIS do this on purpose, of course. Taking the hyperbolic figure of an accelerated present to the extreme is meant to leave spectators in a state of suspension.”
—Jens Maier-Rothe, Showroom Dummies, Ibraaz
“If the DIS collective’s curatorial strategy culminates in such a transfer, it obviously has a functional effect that could best be described as dis-identification and hence as an effect of a method that is known to deal with dominant ideology in such a way that it neither affirms its structure from within nor pretends to oppose it from a fictitious and superior outside.”
—Philipp Kleinmichel, DIS-moralia: Reflections from a digitally damaged life, Contemporary Art Stavanger
“A personal favorite was the short circuits between the massive metal mural in Social Realist style, once a decoration in Erich Honecker’s office room at the DDR State Council (a building now housing the ESMT European School of Management and Technology), Simon Denny’s installation Blockchain Visionaries (2016), showcasing the visions of three real companies operating with BitCoins”
—Barbara Casavecchia, 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Mousse
“Meanwhile, after seeing exhibitions such as those of the Berlin Biennale man begins to wonder what exactly surrounds it. Walking through the streets of Berlin, constantly thinking, “Gee, after all, this billboard / sign / site looks a lot like art post-internet”. Only it is no longer art, but life itself, and in this sense it is a frightening discovery.”
—Carolina Plinth, Lepszego swiata nie bedzie. 9. Berlin Biennale, Magazyn Szum
“Porque esta bienal versa sobre la oscura realidad que se esconde tras las promesas de libertad, felicidad, bienestar, comodidad y fraternidad que nos hace el sistema neoliberal que gobierna nuestro tiempo.”
—Javier Hontoria, Un tiempo travestido, El Mundo
“Many of the work on view serves as a warning of what over-saturation in digital technology may reap, namely, awkward voids produced by endless feedback loops of digital consumption, communication and repetition.”
—A. Corrigan. AO on-Site – Berlin: “The Present in Drag”, Art Observer
“It’s not possible, it’s real”
—Flora Katz, En manque de rêve 2/3, Mouvement
“The biennale’s greatest strength may be its ability to pinpoint the current art world’s trouble knowing what to do with all this consciousness.”
—Sean Wehle, Berlin Biennale: ‘The Present in Drag’, Blouin Art Info
“One of Berlin’s best art critics, observed to me, ‘You’d think you were in a solo show. Everything looks the same.’ To which I answered: ‘What if, on the contrary, it was an extremely precise show, evidence that DIS had done a very good job?’
—Thibaut de Ruyter, 9th Berlin Biennale: The Present in Drag, Art Press
“The exhibition, too, felt like a culmination to something that would probably resist calling itself a movement. With artworks, performances, talks, writing, an album, comedy, marketing, the works, “The Present in Drag,” as flamboyantly immoderate as it purports, is an exhibitionistic Gesamtkunstwerk, produced in a total way that most shows today are still too self-conscious to be. ”
—Kevin McGarry, Drag Race, Art Forum
“DIS, who often stated that they saw themselves primarily as tourists in Berlin, chose their venues with the precision of geo-targetting and and big data: ‚Siri, show me all the places in Berlin where global capitalism is at home, where the East German past still makes ist presence felt, and where a prestigious ideologically charged construction project is underway.’ This is unbeatably efficient – with the result that what is then presented as content (i.e. art) at these locations is almost beside the point.”
—Dominikus Müller, 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Frieze d/e
“The edition of the Berlin Biennale curated by DIS is something like a series of conceptual twists with a political charge. And it’s another politics, a politics that is not read at such; one far removed from the political system, one that supposes a revolution.”
—Martí Manen, The Title is ‘The Present in Drag’, A*Desk
“Total Freedom was tasked with fostering unlikely artistic and musical collaborations in order to provide what DIS called a “multi-tonal counterpoint to the often hermetic modes of visual production” that pervade the biennial on the ground. Could a soundtrack charged with such a thematic thrust be any good?Surprisingly, yes.”
—Kevin Lozano,Total Freedom’s Anthem, Art Forum
“The everyday lives represented in ‘The Present in Drag’ are defined by contradiction: we’re extorted by our landlords for rent to live in urban centres, yet we Airbnb our rooms in art-world off-seasons to recoup cash while perpetuating gentrifying rent hikes. We talk about MoMA strikes while travelling in Ubers and buy Boris Groys books on Amazon. Social justice has found its home on corporate social-media platforms, and young feminists feel protective of Beyoncé, a multi-millionaire, when she was called a ‘terrorist’ by the black feminist doyenne bell hooks.”
—Karen Archey, 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Frieze
“Their Berlin biennial was the most generationally forceful art demarcation point since Freeze [in 1988, organized by Damien Hirst]. There were all these older artists walking around saying “What the fuck” whereas the younger people simply got it. It marks a distinct fulcrum moment in art history.”
—Douglas Coupland, Six Questions for Douglas Coupland, Who Doesn’t Hate Art Fairs, Artnet
“Finding myself confronted with such a unified front of fantasies, rhetorics, pretensions and desires for authenticity in 2017, I confess that I revised my reaction to DIS’s 2016 Berlin Biennale 9, ‘The Present in Drag’. That exhibition rigorously, to the point of cynicism, followed the web 2.0 world of digital prosumer reality and the moral ambiguity of its promises and aesthetics. In my view, it catered to a young, white, middle-class audience, but now it strikes me as more realistic than what we are seeing today: an outsourcing to the (post-)colonial other of the political, guilt, spiritual desire and collectivity that plague the Western-Northern self. ”
—Susanne Von Falkenhausen, Get Real, Frieze