The Brooklyn Rail

Armin Linke’s new photograph, Negotiation Tables (2025), of an old painting—Anton von Werner’s The Congress of Berlin (1881)—greets visitors upon arrival to the 13th Berlin Biennale curated by Zasha Colah, with Valentina Viviani as assistant curator, at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Turn left from Linke’s piece, and you’ll see The Fly (2008), a short film by Htein Lin about political repression in Myanmar. These contributions aren’t far from a watercolor study by Hannah Höch, Im Park (1945). Höch’s painting shows a lush garden that could be hung up at your local dentist office without offending anyone. It’s only after reading the wall text, however, you realize that what matters is below the surface: in 1939, Höch, a bisexual ex-Communist, decamped one day to the Tegel forest and buried her subversive, “degenerate” Dadaist photomontages and sculptures underneath the garden you observe in her painting, which speaks to self-preservation under Nazism. Grouped together, Linke, Lin, Höch, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe (Joker’s Headquarters. Gesamtkunstwerk as a Practical Joke [2025), and others transmit sagas about censorship, fascism, and geopolitics.

Margherita Moscardini’s The Stairway (2025) is another allegorical piece at the Berlin Biennale that conceptually ties into Linke’s photograph. The 1878 Berlin Congress, which split up the Balkans between competing Western imperial powers, was orchestrated just a short walk away from the present-day KW Institute for Contemporary Art at the then Reich Chancellor’s Palace, an event which had global implications that still reverberate today. Similarly, Moscardini’s architectural sculpture ruminates on the Treaty of Berlin, which established a new “Status Quo” for holy sites in Palestine, namely Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron. This status quo updated an Ottoman Empire decree from 1852, which was aimed at preventing conflict between religious groups. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin overruled this decree, declaring new codes of conduct for sacred spaces like Al-Buraq Wall (Western Wall) and Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Even before the Nakba, Zionists violated the status quo. The violations continued through 1967, when settlers razed the ancient Moroccan Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City, culminating in Itamar Ben-Gvir storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque with a band of settler thugs just last month, another clear violation.

Moscardini’s intervention emulates an ancient staircase at the Tomb of the Virgin Mary in East Jerusalem (first century), where Christians believe Mary, the mother of Jesus, is buried, and Muslims, the prophet Isa—hence its Arabic name: the Maqam of Maryam. According to the Status Quo, the Tomb of the Virgin Mary belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church and Armenian Apostolic Church. Clad over a major egress point in the center of KW Institute for Contemporary Art, The Stairway is composed of 561 interlocked stones, each engraved with a number. The inscribed digits speak to each stone’s legal status, namely their individual Certificate of Authenticity and Relinquishment Deeds. The work is formally compelling in its own right, but the manner in which the stones arrived in Berlin is what’s worth emphasizing. The Stairway isn’t so much about the object, but rather the object’s rules of assembly, not unlike architect Yury Grigoryan’s Barn (2006), a pavilion “built in accordance to a text message, without any blueprint.”

An “experiment in national law,” Moscardini “bequeath[ed]” the stones to “stateless, supranational, and extraterritorial organizations, cities, and universities who were then asked to donate them back” for transport to Berlin, ahead of The Stairway’s penultimate assembly at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Some of these participants included individual university professors in Germany, and university departments in Italy, among other entities. The participating donors were asked to sign a written agreement which dictated “the work shall not be subject to private ownership or national appropriation by the state.” That is to say, nobody owns the stones, or the artwork, for that matter, making The Stairway float in a stateless metaphysical void, a liminal space Moscardini’s other work has long explored. “Might a sculpture be a space that takes its distance from the sovereignty of the state whose territory it physically occupies?” art critic Alicja Schindler asks in The Stairway’s wall text.

But which state? What territory?

The proximity to real imperial power makes the presence of Linke’s and Moscardini’s works much more jarring, although neither work, at least in the wall text, makes explicit mention of genocide or land displacement underway in Palestine today—an omission art critic Ana Teixeira Pinto characterized, to paraphrase, as ambiguously unproductive in her critique of the Berlin Biennale. The Stairway and its accompanying wall text summon questions about the limits of abstraction and the utility of didacticism. The viewer is justified in asking: Were the artist’s hands tied, or was this omission intentional? Was there censorship? (To the latter, photographer Adam Broomberg slammed the Berlin Biennale for inviting a curator, Kito Nedo, accused of harassing pro-Palestine artists to help write the catalogue and wall texts, although Colah said in an interview that there was no state censorship.) Does The Stairway deliver without a more expanded, explicit artist statement? Taking this query a step further, can we draw a parallel between Moscardini’s The Stairway and Höch’s Im Park? Is Palestine the contraband we are looking at but aren’t supposed to see? Are we back again in Höch’s garden?