Zasha Colah as Curator
The 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art takes place from June 14 to September 14, 2025 and is curated by Zasha Colah with Valentina Viviani.
Zasha Colah is a curator and writer. Her exhibitions and texts have been an exploration of artistic imagination under conditions of sustained oppression, often through the prisms of liveliness and restorative laughter. Her work considers a range of cultural practices as an unspoken infrastructure of acts and channels of counter-expression in disobedient terrains that confound militarization and earthly extraction. She is particularly interested in the point at which these practices may cross over to become collective.
Zasha Colah was raised in Lusaka, Zambia, and Mumbai, India, until 2014. From 2014 to 2017, she split her time between Berlin and Mumbai, and has been based in Turin, Italy, for the past six years. She co-founded the Clark House Initiative in Mumbai (2010–22), a collaborative focused on freedom through art. Previously, she curated Indian Modern Art at JNAF/CSMVS Museum and public programs at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai. Colah has curated notable exhibitions, including body luggage at steirischer herbst (2016) and the 3rd Pune Biennale (2017). Her doctorate explored illegality and meta-exhibition practices in Indo-Myanmar since the 1980s (Sapienza – Università di Roma, 2020). As part of Archive, a decentralized community of practice since 2020, she co-curates various programs. Colah has been a lecturer in Curatorial Studies at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan since 2018 and serves on the editorial board of GeoArchivi. Since 2023, she has been the artistic director of Ar/Ge Kunst in Bolzano, Italy, and is on the board of the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean in Mauritius.
Curatorial concept
«The large presence offoxes within the inner city of Berlin is a starting point for thinking through the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art as an investigation offugitivity. The encounter with urban foxes has been described by poets as presencing, a spinning in place, delaying in the fox’s presence for a time. The mind encounters otherness, but does not move on to associative thought chains—or prejudice. This encounter has less to do with the human identifying with the fox, but of entering a new sphere of equality with it.
This proposal for the 13th edition of the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art is a working concept offugitivity understood as the cultural ability of a work of art to set its own laws, in the face of lawful violence. This illegality, this foxing, this traversing of laws that are unjust, sometimes happens within the imaginary a joke opens, or are glimpsed in the flicker of artworks.
As a curatorial grounding, this works at two levels within the biennale in the making.
First, slowly coming to the idea of doing away with the notion of minority altogether. To be wary of identity-labels that draw circles around minorities, defining artists as indigenous, nomadic, Dalit, that finally pit one minority against another, but never let them be equal to the false myth of a homogenous majority. This biennale seeks, instead, an encounter rooted in the restoration of lines and channels of dignity. If this sounds obvious, one may only recall to what extent that equality of voice to speak on its own terms, from its unique life of experiences has been stifled in various art contexts, globally.
The second is resisting any a priori decision of what an artwork is, where it may take place, and under what conditions, but relying on its opacities, its illegibility, and taking our illiteracy as a starting point, even for artworks arising from familiar imaginaries.»
Zasha Colah, Curator of
the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
Contact
Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
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Pressekontakt:
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Website:
https://13.berlinbiennale.de/en/ (external link, opens in a new window)