Why Berlin Biennale was surrounded with controversy

The 12th Berlin Biennale has appointed Algerian-French artist Kader Attia to curate the artworks to be presented, and the website notes that he “looks back on more than two decades of decolonial engagement.”

Yet the art showcase has fallen behind on its goal of “decolonial engagement”, as three Iraqi artists initially voiced objections to placement of their work, and later on, decided to pull out of the Biennale altogether.

What happened? Well, the three artists’ works were placed in close proximity to another work, by the French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, showing inmates being tortured by US Forces at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The three Iraqi artists, Sajjad Abbas, Raed Mutar and Layth Kareem objected to their work being shown at the Hamburger Bahnhof alongside Lebel’s work, which they believed served no purpose other than to exploit the pain and misery of the subjects who had not been asked for their consent to be exposed in a gallery setting.

“The Biennale made the decision to commodify photos of unlawfully imprisoned and brutalised Iraqi bodies under occupation, displaying them without the consent of the victims and without any input from the Biennale’s participating Iraqi artists, whose work was adjacently installed without their knowledge,” the curator Rijin Sahakian wrote in ArtForum on July 29, 2022.

Sahakian was the one who, according to her words on ArtForum, “had introduced Abbas and Kareem’s work to the Biennale, lent a painting by artist Raed Mutar to the show, and contributed catalogue texts on their work.”

Yet she now regretted her suggestions, as their works that “unequivocally address the act of consuming their undoing-as-human, and the impossibility of ever communicating what that feels like” were placed next to Lebel’s photography.

Kader Attia and the Berlin Biennale artistic team responded to the accusations on August 15, 2022, also on ArtForum: “We did not anticipate the hurt caused by the juxtaposition of the works, and this is maybe where the misunderstanding of our intentions comes from. We do not deny our accountability.”

They defended the acceptance of Lebel’s work to the Biennale, admitting that “Poison soluble. Scenes de l’occupation americaine a Bagdad [Solvable Poison. Scenes from the American Occupation in Baghdad], 2013, activates pain and trauma.”

Attia and the artistic team went on to say “However, we deemed it important not to indulge the impulse to turn a blind eye to a very recent imperialist crime—a crime conducted under military occupation that was quickly brushed under the rug with the intention of prompting a swift forgetting.”

They also pleadingly addressed the complainants (“Dear Rijin, dear Sajjad, dear Raed, dear Layth”), pointing out that they immediately tried to placate them by accommodating the Iraqi artists’ work in different locations: “Sajjad’s amazing banner was moved to the Akademie der Kunste Pariser Platz. Raed’s work has been moved from Hamburger Bahnhof to KW Institute for Contemporary Art.”

Sahakian had written that she had had to go through a curtain “to see the rest of [Abbas’s] installation. As I do, I am presented with an installation by Jean-Jacques Lebel titled Poison Soluble. It is composed of images printed to life-size: the charred skin, limbs, and hooded faces of the Iraqi men abused and murdered at Abu Ghraib.”

Attia and the artistic team addressed Sahakian’s pointed review that viewers had to face images of torture experienced at Abu Ghraib to see Abbas’s work: “We would like to add that no visitor of the exhibition was or is obliged to go through the installation Poison soluble. All works in the exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof are accessible from the corridor as well.”

Yet the matter remained a knot, and despite the efforts of the Berlin Biennale to keep the artists at the exhibition, the artists felt as if they were wronged beyond repair.

Sahakian writes scathingly, in a letter dated August 16, 2022, signed together with Sajjad Abbas, Layth Kareem, and Raed Mutar: “[Berlin Biennale’s artistic] team has directed readers to elevate Lebel’s exploitative, fetishizing repetition of this violence, reproduced in an artwork made without consultation with the victims, as work for justice. The curators make this claim by listing their decolonial credentials while at the same time lecturing us on how to understand our own history.”

She then informs the Berlin Biennale that the three Iraqi artists object to Lebel’s work, their own work’s placement near it, and the whole idea of using still-shocking images of Abu Ghraib torture victims without their consent and therefore are pulling their work from the Biennale.