BERLIN — The Berlin Biennale had not even opened its doors to the public when criticism started rolling in. In May, curator Zasha Colah told an interviewer, “There is no censorship, I would say, in Germany.” In reality, there is ample documentation of the German state’s active repression of expressions of solidarity with the people of Palestine through police force, accusations of antisemitism, targeted arrests, criminal charges, coercion through the justice system, deportation, and banning. Organizations that stand for decolonial, queer, and feminist positions have had their funding withdrawn; artists and writers have had prizes rescinded and readings and events canceled; and speaking languages other than German or English at demonstrations can lead to police harassment and arrest. It’s been a policy of intimidation and punishment with the aim of ruining the reputations and careers of anyone voicing compassion for the victims of what more and more people are finally — after nearly two years and 60,000 dead — daring to call a German-government-enabled genocide. Under repressive regimes, art and literature of political heft are forced into hiding to escape persecution. In Germany, on the other hand, cultural workers are unwilling to go out on a limb and express an opinion for fear of repercussions for their careers or funding, an anxiety that might be described as “preemptive obedience” and that essentially amounts to self-censorship. Although Colah is herself no stranger to the unique difficulties attached to public funding, and one can only imagine the tightrope walk this exhibition must have entailed, choosing a curatorial concept that circumvents what is happening in the here and now in Berlin and Germany is questionable at best. Inspired by the city’s nocturnal wildlife, the 13th Berlin Biennale frames “foxing” as an ostensibly subversive position that adopts the animal’s slyness and “fugitivity.” Yet failing to address the repressive political climate or take a stance involving even a modicum of risk amounts to complicity — even if many of the works included model resistance, their contexts are notably deemed “safe” in Germany.The works shown in the Berlin Biennale come from nearly 40 countries, the majority of them employing strategies hatched in non-German sociopolitical contexts. In offering what are essentially blueprints for how art can respond to lawful violence in unjust systems, they read like a call to action for artists in the West whose main struggle has, until very recently, been trying to balance a teaching job or freelance employment with their studio practice and the rising cost of rent. Installation view of Akademia Ruchu, “Potknięcie (Slip)” (1977)In Berlin, much of the activism and cultural political discourse has retreated to the private sphere, where artists open up their studios for intimate meetings among friends, and invitations are extended by word of mouth. And indeed, the curatorial focus of the Berlin Biennale is on fugitive, i.e., oral and participatory, forms of information transmission. One of the most salient examples is a film from 1977 by the Akademia Ruchu (Movement Academy), a Polish group led by the late Wojciech Krukowski. “Potknięcie” (Slip) was performed in front of the Communist party headquarters in Warsaw, with members posing as anonymous passersby suddenly (and flamboyantly, and hilariously) stumbling on the pavement to the surprise of the uninitiated around them. Posing as absurd theater but closely tied to Lech Wałęsa and the powerful anti-communist Solidarność movement, the political resistance Akademia Ruchu enacted in public space was lost on no one — and contributed, in a very real way, to the overthrow of an oppressive regime. “Potknięcie” is just one of many potent forms of collective resistance presented by the Biennale, and although many of these groups are no longer active, they continue to serve as powerful models for the present. In the aftermath of the massacre in Srebrenica, Serbian artist Milica Tomić co-founded the artists’ collective Grupa Spomenik (Monument Group) to explore whether art and theory can generate a language to speak about genocide. Highlighting the work of Jacques Lacan and his “Borromean Knot,” a model for analyzing human subjectivity, Grupa Spomenik interrogated false narratives to better understand the limits of representation. In her performance “The Berlin Statement. Who Makes Profit on Art and Who Gains from It Honestly,” which expands on Yugoslavian conceptual artist Raša Todosijević’s “Edinburgh Statement” of 1975 to incorporate the digital realm and defines art as a site of political and ideological conflict, Tomić calls out people who attend exhibitions “not to encounter art, but to scan for potential violations” and everyone who refuses to accept a reality that “demands they live in a world without Palestinians.” In the midst of what is otherwise a striking absence of artists speaking to this harrowing reality, Tomić’s statement comes as a relief. Left: installation view of Milica Tomić / Grupa Spomenik, “Is There Anything in this World You Would Be Ready to Give Your Life For?” (2025), assemblage of video interviews, sculptures, a drawing, and a slide projection; right: installation view of Htein Lin, “Selection of Prison Paintings” (1999–2003)Spread out over four venues, the Biennale features many works that implement civil disobedience and humor to undermine power. Mila Panić’s stand-up comedy routines use hilarity to bypass the pieties of political correctness and break through the rhetoric surrounding war, displacement, and refugee life. Additional highlights are the works of Erfurt, an underground group of East German feminist artists active between 1984 and 1994; paintings by Burmese artists Busui Ajaw and Htein Lin, the latter of whom used scraps of bed linen to create vivid paintings that were then smuggled out of a prison he spent six long years in; Italian artist Anna Scalfi Eghenter’s installation “The Comedy!” (2025), which traces the history of socialist revolutionary Karl Liebknecht, whose trial took place in the very building housing the exhibition; and Isaac Kalambata’s tactile, multi-media work “Witchfinders,” which explores how allegations of witchcraft served colonialist goals in Zambia. Luzie Meyer’s “Berlin Piece for Voice and Tap Music” (2025), a six-channel audio piece in the form of six small loudspeakers mounted on three walls at the Sophiensäle, is one of the only other works in the Biennale that directly addresses the current cultural-political context in Germany. Drawing from notebooks and overlaying fragments of news coverage, Senate debates, and personal reflection, voices that sound vaguely like AI merge with minimal music and percussion to create a sound poetry that feels like it’s occurring just below the threshold of consciousness. Phrases such as “cultural policy is euphemism turned flesh” unexpectedly punctuate the soundscape, and at some point, startlingly, one hears, or believes one has heard, “hypocrisy, Germany’s second-largest export” — a jolting, largely isolated moment of frankness that speaks to the silencing of dissent in the exhibition’s host country. Installation view of Isaac Kalambata, “Witchfinders” (2025), acrylic on canvas, pencil and ink on paper, texts, photo prints, tarpaulin, bark clothSeveral works in the Biennale have adopted the fox as trope. At Hamburger Bahnhof, for instance, Larissa Araz’s delicate drawings in chalk on the black walls of the darkened space portray the Vulpes vulpes kurdistanica, the Kurdistan red fox whose territory lies in the wild borderlands between Turkey, Armenia, and Kurdistan. In one of many attempts to render invisible a people whose existence it finds inconvenient and dangerous, Turkish authorities renamed the animal Vulpes vulpes, a taxonomic example for how language is routinely altered to erase history. Correspondingly, the chalk of the drawings is just as easily erased, suggesting a strategy of clandestineness, fugitivity, and deniability in the simple act of recording that which is no longer part of the official record. No one has better described the inherent ambiguity in adopting the fox as a totem than the late Croatian exiled author Dubravka Ugrešić, whose Fox (2017) famously plays with the manifold traits traditionally associated with the reclusive animal, among them “cunning, betrayal, wile, sycophancy, deceit, mendacity, hypocrisy … vindictiveness …” It is a strategy of survival that uses, unapologetically, every means at its disposal; given the political climate, it’s a potent image for a curatorial concept. Yet it’s difficult to understand how an exhibition as visible as the Biennale can fail to address its own volatile context. Paradoxically, World War II guilt and a decades-long process of “Aufarbeitung” — reckoning with the atrocities Germany committed in the war, while remaining mute on the colonial-era massacre of the Nama and Herero people and its complicity in the current genocide — have paralyzed the country’s ability to live up to its own moral code of “Never Again.” In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025), the Canadian-Egyptian journalist Omar el Akkad writes: “When the past is past, the dead will be found to not have partaken in their own killing.” His book has just been translated into German; let’s hope that, in joining the other lonely voices crying out in the dark, cracks emerge in the façade of silence to illuminate what has long been hiding in plain sight. Detail of Larisa Araz, “And through those hills and plains by most forgot, and by these eyes not seen, for evermore” (2025), white chalk on black painted wallBusui Ajaw, “The Military State’s Oppression of the Peoples / Mae Huak Loh Ko River” (2025), acrylic on canvasDetail of Isaac Kalambata, “Witchfinders” (2025), acrylic on canvas, pencil and ink on paper, texts, photo prints, tarpaulin, bark clothThe 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art continues at multiple venues across Berlin through September 14. The exhibition was curated by Zasha Colah and Valentina Viviani.