Open Call

Within the framework of the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2012, curated by Artur Żmijewski, artists from all over the world are requested to send in their artist material for a research investigation, following the conditions below.

We accept artistic material in hard copy formats not bigger than A3 (297 x 420 mm or 11.69 x 16.54 in.), printed images, digital data, as well as DVDs.
PDFs in A4 (297 mm x 210 mm or 11.7 x 8.3 in.) or fax will also be accepted.
Please do not send any original artworks.
We welcome all possible languages of your artistic comments and explanations. However there should equally be an English version.

As the research also focuses on the question whether artists consider themselves to be political, please inform us about your political inclination (e.g. rightist, leftist, liberal, nationalist, anarchist, feminist, masculinist, or whatever you identify yourself with) or whether you are not interested in politics at all.

Please send your artistic statement or presentation as a hardcopy via regular mail, via e-mail or fax to the following address or number before January 15, 2011:

Berlin Biennale
– Open Call –
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin/Germany

e-mail: call@berlinbiennale.de
fax: +49. 30. 24 34 59 88


This open call is not guarantying that you will be invited to take part in the 7th Berlin Biennale. Please be aware that your submission might be used and published within its framework. Please also consider that the 7th Berlin Biennale is not able to send back any received material, but that everything will be integrated into the public research archive of the Berlin Biennale.

The open call is available for download in various languages (Arab, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish) on the website www.berlinbiennale.de.

“Usually, artists are not asked to identify their political positions. But this time it's different. In my opinion, all artists represent particular political standpoints, even if they don't want to identify them clearly. There is this invisible rule for artists to produce so-called “political art” from an unidentified political position and to keep neutrality, even if it is obvious that they are not neutral.

Our reality is structured by politics; this means that art is also structured by them. Let's present this invisible/hidden structure, this obscene background of art. Politics are not, as politicians would like to convince us, fights for power or dirty games. They are the language of our collective needs which people share.

We are not only human beings, we are also political beings, as Hannah Arendt said. Let's describe what we are doing as artists also in pure political terms. That's why I ask about this “secret” and “private” information. Let's give it a public body.

It doesn't mean that the curatorial choice will be based on preferred political identity—no, it will be based as always on intuition and ambiguity. But this time intuition and ambiguity will be a little deformed by this over-obvious political element. So, we will see what happens.”

Artur Żmijewski