A biennial of contemporary art in Berlin follows all good clichés that people have when thinking about the capital of Germany. The assembly is half punk, buildings falling apart and have not been renovated to receive you, darling. No, nobody gives very concerned to impress you.

The theme of the show this year is "was draussen wartet" (anyway, lowercase), which means "what you expect out there." Thus, instead of showing a lot of work that discusses the making artísitico or who are just pretty to look at (things, you see, are not unworthy), curator Kathrin Rhomberg opted to select papers that discuss real life , if we may so call it. "The papers reject the trend - increasingly seen in art - to distance himself from reality, towards art and the formal problems," says the text presentation. Then they spread the selection of six buildings in the city. Ironically, the only non-contemporary artist went into the Alte Nationalgalerie (ie, Old National Gallery): Adolph Menzel, realist painter of the 19th century.

The videos take care of the biennial, and many are actually documentaries. The longest of all is poverty Enjoy, Renzo Martens, which lasts 90 minutes. In the film, French artist (better to call it a film director, but as the film is a biennial, will know, this thing an artist) tries to convince photographers of the Congo to take advantage of their own poverty. He teaches the local photographers, in which he tries to convince them to stop shooting wedding parties (whose images they sell for $ 1) and start clicking the refugee camps, women raped etc.. The climax of the film shows Martens accessing a neon sign in the middle of comundidade that brings writing 'Enjoy poverty "(" Enjoy Poverty ").

The building is 6 concentrates the highest number of artists and also the majority of audiovisual works - are 33 farmers, 17 have videos of woe. Here's a snack that is on display there:

Anna Witt, Die Geburt, 2003.

Passage Briare, 2009: silent film made ​​with 16 mm, Friedl vom Gröller (Kubelka).

It has pictures too: Çiçir the series, the Turkish Nilber Gures artist, whose work (divided between photography, video and performance) is focused on the lives of women in Turkey.

Ron Tran, whose artistic research is based on changes in public spaces, joined the Oranienplatz banks in order to stay face to face, very close to each other. Nothing is more appropriate for this moment in Germany, which has been discussed with an almost obsessive frequency to organize the immigration and integrate foreigners living in the country .

Three in the building, still in Kreuzberg, is the video The girl chewing gun from John Smith , which shows the movement on a street corner in London. After filming, Smith inserts an audio mimicking a film director - and the mix between reality and "the direction of reality" makes us immediately think in this era of reality shows. The choice of this video, shot in 1976, could not be more rewarding because, despite it having been made decades ago, has a premise very current:

It is in a building, however, that the discussion of what is so "out there" is a little more conceptual. The work that caught my attention was that of Petrit Halilaj, which has a wonderful title: The places which I try, my dear, are utopian, they are boring and do not know how to make them real. He built a few wooden structures quite normal except that, between them, put a lot of chickens, and resilient, cute, eating all day. Chickens, yes, touched my heart. It is an experience-zal and Lispector, who understood so well the intimate life of a chicken. But video of them did not: I think everyone can imagine how it behaves a chicken inside a gallery. Or not?

The Berlin Bienalle runs until Sunday. To learn more about her, click here .