biennale stories

Enmeshed and Complicit

A Revision The German Pavilion #3

Enmeshed and Complicit The Venice Biennale, European Colonialism, and the German Pavilion

Rosemarie Trockel, Eye, installation view, German Pavilion 1999, 48th Biennale Arte di Venezia © Courtesy Sprüth Magers, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023 / photo: picture-alliance, dpa/epa Ansa Merola

At the Intersection of Political Responsibility, Autonomy, and Artistic Freedom.
Every other year, Germany presents itself in international artistic exchange at the Venice Biennale. Since 1971 ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen has played a key role in positioning the German Pavilion by taking general responsibility for the large-scale artistic project as its commissioner under the auspices of the Federal Foreign Office.

In doing so, ifa acts as a repository of knowledge, management body, center of competence, and space for dialogue in close collaboration with the artistic teams and other project participants in Venice and Germany. Yet, it’s not entirely transparent what criteria govern the selection of curators of the German Pavilion by the international committee. Nor does much about the selection criteria for artists chosen by the selected curators filter to the surface—a circumstance that frequently drives speculation in the run-up to the opening.
With the task of selecting (head curator) and coordinating (ifa) the artistic contribution in the German Pavilion, the Federal Foreign Office transfers enormous cultural-political responsibility to both the curator and the institution, but also at the same time an enormous artistic freedom.

One key question is: what cultural-political expectations precede participation in the German Pavilion?

Selection and Responsibility

Up to 2022, the Art and Culture Committee at the Federal Foreign Office selected a renowned personality, usually working in a leadership position at a German art institution, and proposed that individual to the Federal Foreign Office as head curator of the German Pavilion. As a general rule, the foreign minister then officially commissioned the proposed individual as curator. Neither the membership of the internationally composed Art and Culture Committee nor the criteria guiding selection of the head curator were public knowledge.
NEW: responsibility for the German participation at the Venice Biennale has been more fully transferred to ifa, so that after fifty years of participation as a project partner ifa has taken on new tasks and responsibilities. In order to make the procedure for selecting curators more transparent and fairer, in 2024 selection for the German Pavilion was for the first time conducted on the basis of a proposal made by a selection committee with members representative of the many different fields and networks in the art world, whose names were made public.
Curators are not given any dictates by the Federal Foreign Office, and they have absolute autonomy and creative freedom in selecting artistic positions. This freedom is upheld by ifa, the institution with financial responsibility for the participation at the German Pavilion.

Between National Identity and Transnational Positioning

In jockeying for visibility and recognition, artists connect in global networks, form collectives and joint projects, participate in biennials and residencies on an international scale, and exhibit worldwide. For that reason, the concept of national pavilions in the context of the Venice Biennale is regularly called into question.

Artists whose participation at Venice is made difficult by structural conditions demand that Eurocentric structures be overcome, meaning those structures that postulate Europe as the midpoint of the world. Structural hurdles include financing possible space rentals, personnel requirements for the duration of the biennial, and high travel and production costs for a mega-exhibition in which so many participations are jockeying for visibility. Prohibitive visa procedures are another big stumbling block. The strict entry regulations for non-western participants and privileging of financially strong countries with pavilions at the Giardini, in particular, have proven to be a stable matrix of power.