Author- Brian Hawkeswood.
I had set out in search of the exhibition, not knowing precisely where it lay, only that it was somewhere within the half-forgotten quarters of the city where the maps themselves seemed to hesitate, offering not direction but the vague suggestion of movement, like the recollection of a place visited in childhood, indistinct yet hauntingly familiar. The pathway I followed—if it could be called a pathway—led me past a skatepark, that curious contemporary agora where the youth of the city, spanning the years from barely pubescent to nearly adult, enacted their rituals of speed and balance, their rites of bravado. They had even arranged for music and refreshments, as though preparing for a midsummer Dionysia rather than a suburban afternoon. There was a vitality there, no doubt, but already I felt estranged from it—an observer from another world, one less eager to glorify the instant and more inclined to linger over what endured.I had braced myself for the usual array of banal formalities, those brittle ceremonial speeches that so often trail behind the opening of an exhibition like the dull rattle of a carriage over cobblestones. Yet given the occasion’s billing—International, that incantatory word with its promise of openness, parity, shared meaning—I had naïvely assumed the language of the world would be spoken. But no: German prevailed, precise and unmoved, and though I make no quarrel with a language in its home, I could not help but feel a subtle narrowing of the very premise of the event. Only the organiser from Israel, whose English came haltingly, like a lamp flickering into foreign air, addressed the gathered crowd in the lingua franca. It was forgivable—no, admirable even—in its attempt to meet the Other halfway. And yet even this gesture, seemingly generous, soon folded into something else. Her brief remarks, weighted with allusions to a war in her homeland, struck me as discordant, as if a personal grief, however real, had been superimposed upon a canvas where it could only obscure, not illuminate. I felt in that moment the creeping shadow of politics—its eager hand reaching even into this space supposedly consecrated to art.
And so, already unsettled, I crossed the threshold into the building itself. It was no stately edifice polished for the occasion, no gleaming testament to civic pride. Rather, the entrance was dingy, the outer walls scarred by time and neglect, the stairwell into which I descended lit by a pale and sickly fluorescence that gave no warmth. Summer, though it reigned outside, did not follow me in. The cool air of the basement was not a relief but a withdrawal, a turning away from the season. I imagined, with a touch of the melodramatic I suppose, the passageways of some former detention centre—Stasi perhaps, their ghostly fingerprints on the rusted fixtures. But maybe that was simply my imagination reaching for a narrative when the architecture offered none.
Through a stiff, resisting door, I entered the first gallery space. A large screen dominated the room. On it, a face, strange in its affectation, unspooled a series of proclamations about life—or what I assumed was meant to be life. The music behind it surged, dramatic, imploring, though I couldn’t tell if it was meant to rouse or distract. To one side, a smaller screen flickered with images not unfamiliar: glossy, gamified, the half-clad bodies of young women posed in virtual space, somewhere between invitation and glitch. Then the main screen shifted—larger, more fantastical avatars now loomed across it, swaying in the rhythm of some alternate, digital pulse. It was vivid, yes—saturated with colour, with movement, with the breathless energy of adolescence—but I felt no thread to follow, no meaning I could clasp.
It reminded me less of art than of television or video games: not the slow unfolding of thought, but a cascade of sensation. It entertained, perhaps even entranced, but did not speak to me, and left no trace within.
In these subterranean rooms—windowless, sealed from the natural world—the projections ruled unchallenged. Here, light existed not to reveal but to dominate. The machines hummed and glowed, unburdened by sun or sky, and I understood, then, why the basement had been chosen. It was a bunker not for safety, but for spectacle.
I continued on until, quite suddenly, the venue for the 2025 OSTRALE Biennale disclosed itself to me—not in the triumphant manner of a grand museum revealing its marble staircases and gilded halls, but with the diffidence of a building long forgotten by time and left to the indiscriminate appetites of weather and youth. I paused and stood quietly, gazing at it through the tall, uncut grasses that waved gently, as though trying to distract me from the shame of their surroundings. Around me, the ground was scattered with refuse, and those temporary metal fences—the kind hastily erected around construction sites or disasters—lined both sides, suggesting a boundary not merely of space, but of meaning, as if warning me that to enter was to cross into some aesthetic no-man’s land.
The building itself bore the scars of its abandonment: the façades scrawled with graffiti, some fresh and glistening with insolence, others faded into the stucco like palimpsests of anger from earlier generations. It was, I thought, the very embodiment of post-war pragmatism—an architecture of necessity, now surrendered to entropy and adolescent boredom. I could not, in that moment, divine a single gesture of beauty. If the exhibition within mirrored the ruin without, then surely it would be a lamentable affair, another gathering of the well-intentioned to mourn the death of sensibility under the guise of art.
Yet even in the midst of my dismay, there were signs of life: a small crowd had begun to form—perhaps thirty or thirty-five souls—assembled not in reverence but with that peculiar restlessness that marks the uncertain beginning of cultural events. But what caught my attention most was not the people themselves, but the strange barrier that divided them from the entrance: the unmistakable red and white warning tape, stretched like a prohibition across the threshold. It spoke not only of hazard, but of taboo—of something forbidden or not yet ready to receive us.
I stood there on the far side, the wrong side, and for a moment I felt the familiar paralysis of social doubt. Why were they waiting, and I not? Why had I, without instruction, reached the point of decision? There was no sign, no voice, no authority visible. And so, in what could only be described as an un-German impulse—defiant, perhaps insolent—I stepped across the tape. I half-expected the sharp intake of breath, the disapproving grimace, the bodily retraction that so often greets transgression in this land so devoted to order and the known.
But nothing. No protest. No performance of outrage. The crowd remained as it was, unmoved by my quiet heresy. Perhaps they were not German at all. It was, after all, an international exhibition. And so I, having crossed the line not only of plastic tape but of doubt itself, walked onward, wondering whether beauty might still lie somewhere ahead, if not in form, then perhaps in defiance, in the refusal to yield entirely to despair.
I had braced myself for the usual array of banal formalities, those brittle ceremonial speeches that so often trail behind the opening of an exhibition like the dull rattle of a carriage over cobblestones. Yet given the occasion’s billing—International, that incantatory word with its promise of openness, parity, shared meaning—I had naïvely assumed the language of the world would be spoken. But no: German prevailed, precise and unmoved, and though I make no quarrel with a language in its home, I could not help but feel a subtle narrowing of the very premise of the event. Only the organiser from Israel, whose English came haltingly, like a lamp flickering into foreign air, addressed the gathered crowd in the lingua franca. It was forgivable—no, admirable even—in its attempt to meet the Other halfway. And yet even this gesture, seemingly generous, soon folded into something else. Her brief remarks, weighted with allusions to a war in her homeland, struck me as discordant, as if a personal grief, however real, had been superimposed upon a canvas where it could only obscure, not illuminate. I felt in that moment the creeping shadow of politics—its eager hand reaching even into this space supposedly consecrated to art.
And so, already unsettled, I crossed the threshold into the building itself. It was no stately edifice polished for the occasion, no gleaming testament to civic pride. Rather, the entrance was dingy, the outer walls scarred by time and neglect, the stairwell into which I descended lit by a pale and sickly fluorescence that gave no warmth. Summer, though it reigned outside, did not follow me in. The cool air of the basement was not a relief but a withdrawal, a turning away from the season. I imagined, with a touch of the melodramatic I suppose, the passageways of some former detention centre—Stasi perhaps, their ghostly fingerprints on the rusted fixtures. But maybe that was simply my imagination reaching for a narrative when the architecture offered none.
Through a stiff, resisting door, I entered the first gallery space. A large screen dominated the room. On it, a face, strange in its affectation, unspooled a series of proclamations about life—or what I assumed was meant to be life. The music behind it surged, dramatic, imploring, though I couldn’t tell if it was meant to rouse or distract. To one side, a smaller screen flickered with images not unfamiliar: glossy, gamified, the half-clad bodies of young women posed in virtual space, somewhere between invitation and glitch. Then the main screen shifted—larger, more fantastical avatars now loomed across it, swaying in the rhythm of some alternate, digital pulse. It was vivid, yes—saturated with colour, with movement, with the breathless energy of adolescence—but I felt no thread to follow, no meaning I could clasp.
It reminded me less of art than of television or video games: not the slow unfolding of thought, but a cascade of sensation. It entertained, perhaps even entranced, but did not speak to me, and left no trace within.
In these subterranean rooms—windowless, sealed from the natural world—the projections ruled unchallenged. Here, light existed not to reveal but to dominate. The machines hummed and glowed, unburdened by sun or sky, and I understood, then, why the basement had been chosen. It was a bunker not for safety, but for spectacle.
It has always struck me—though the feeling has only grown with time, like a faint discomfort one cannot name at first but that becomes a quiet affliction—that the written commentaries which artists so often affix beside their works, like explanatory epigraphs to visual poems, rarely correspond in spirit or substance to the work they are meant to illuminate. Rather than drawing us closer to the mystery of the image, they often repel us, veiling what they pretend to reveal, reducing what they claim to exalt. It is as though the artwork, in its mute autonomy, resists interpretation—resists even its own creator’s intent—so that the artist, perhaps frustrated by the silence of paint and form, feels compelled to speak, to explain, to impose a meaning where the eye might have found its own. But then one wonders, if the art must be explained in words, why make it at all?
So often these texts—half proclamations, half apologias—strike me as either misjudged or mistaken, dissonant with the visual register of the work, or worse, disingenuous in their obscurity. Would it not be better, I mused, drifting slowly through the cavernous gallery whose pale walls bore not only images but paragraphs, to leave the work alone—to let it breathe, to let it be—and to trust in the spectator’s sensibility, which is, after all, the final canvas upon which the artwork is completed? For as I moved from one display to the next, I read and looked, and all too often found that my reading did not align with my seeing. The words and the images diverged like two melodies in unrelated keys. And in this discord I felt a strange unease—not because I doubted my own powers of perception, but because the writing seemed to displace the authority of those perceptions, to overrule what I felt, to instruct rather than invite.
Indeed, I hold that the encounter between the observer and the work must be free—private, even—to allow for that alchemical transformation by which an object outside the self becomes the mirror of one’s interior life. And yet these texts, so frequently couched in arcane vocabulary and pompous abstractions, seem determined to constrain that freedom. They speak not of the work itself—its stylistic language, its technical method, the material presence of its forms—but of something beyond or beside it, as though the image were insufficient, as though the real art were in the idea, and the object merely an illustration.
Surely a text, if one must accompany a work, should be no more than a clear and honest description: a discussion of the artist’s intent, a commentary on stylistic choices, a framing of the piece within a broader historical or thematic context. It should be direct, lucid, and grounded in what the eye can verify, not some nebulous theatre of meaning wherein everything is suggested and nothing is said. When language is used not to clarify but to obfuscate, when vagueness is mistaken for profundity and complexity is confused with depth, the result is not elevation but degradation. The work suffers; the viewer, instead of being enlightened, is alienated. And worst of all, the dishonesty of it—this inflation of mediocrity with grandiloquent nonsense—diminishes not only the artwork in question, but the very idea of art itself.
Among the many works displayed—too many to attend to with the seriousness each might require—I lingered before two. One, in particular, held me longer than the rest: Casey McKee - "Social Silence". At first glance, I sensed its direction. Its message, though ostensibly veiled, seemed familiar—as though it followed, dutifully, the well-worn narrative of ecological catastrophe that has haunted the art world since the birth of environmental consciousness in the later years of the last century. And indeed, many works in the exhibition struck the same note—a dissonant chorus of warning bells, prophecies of ruin and collapse.
Casey McKee "Social Silence. "
But stepping back—deliberately ignoring, for a moment, the artist’s accompanying text—I let the work speak for itself. It was a composite: a beach, scattered with sun-worshippers reclining on deck chairs, their bodies languid, their pleasures ordinary. The technique was photographic—photo-emulsion with painterly overwork in oil, a realistic surface built atop chemical impression. Behind this scene, another image loomed, less defined, less photographic—perhaps gestural, perhaps abstracted. The sea was blue; the sky, equally so. There was no apocalypse here. No oil spill, no choking smoke, no plastic tide. The composition, if anything, suggested not contradiction but compatibility: a fusion, even a complicity, between modern leisure and industrial extraction. The holiday-makers, I thought, had arrived there by plane, by car—machines lubricated with oil. Their loungers were plastic or aluminium, products of petrochemical refinement and mining. What I saw was not a condemnation, but a portrait of symbiosis—of the seamless integration of oil into the fabric of our lives.
The artist, however, had written of a world in crisis. And yet, as I sat later by the Elbe, the summer air soft around me, the sky as clear and blue as the painted one, I could not reconcile this rhetoric of doom with the reality before me. If we were truly living in the final moments of an ecological tragedy—one as total as so many of these artworks suggested—how had we not yet perished? Ozone holes, bee extinction, Amazonian deforestation, aluminium saucepans, COVID—each, in its time, was presented as the sign of imminent collapse. But the world endures. The river flows. The bees still hum.
I do not deny that there are crises, nor that art may address them. But must every artist surrender to this same apocalyptic refrain? Why do so few choose different stories—those of inner life, of private sorrow, of faith and joy and madness, of disease and hope, of love and loss, of human frailty and grace? Must the only acceptable narrative now be the elegy for the earth?
To be continued.....
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