New York has drugstores in old movie palaces, Detroit has its grand parking lots. For the duration of this exhibition, the provincial German city of Wiesbaden had a drive-in theater in its principal theater, as well as a fully functioning supermarket in the building’s neo-Baroque foyer. Deli refrigerator units, fair-trade coffee, fruits, vegetables, and in-store advertising partially obscured the grand room’s oil paintings, stucco, and ornate mirrors. This installation wasn’t credited to an artist but was commissioned from the supermarket chain REWE by Maria Magdalena Ludewig and Martin Hammer, curators of “Bad News,” the second iteration of the Wiesbaden Biennale, a ten-day-long hybrid of theater and art. A relational-aesthetics readymade, the store served as a theatrical performance created from the rituals of everyday life, playing out the endgames of both the ideology of consumerism and populist opposition to cultural elitism. The earnestness of the project was a fiction, but even the businessmen and architects discussing plans for a new shopping mall in the 2001 Harun Farocki video Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten (The Creators of Shopping Worlds)—installed in a darkened room above the imperial staircase next to shelves of herbs and spices—seemed to be speaking to an audience of retail-management honchos as much as to the navel-gazing art world or grannies going shopping. 

The biennial, here and elsewhere, tapped the rich vein of Germany’s sociopolitical energies in 2018, sometimes playfully, sometimes confrontationally, more often than not both. A section titled “Migrantenstadl” (an untranslatable word referring to a kind of migrants’ entertainment show), after a blog of the same name, brought post-migrant perspectives to the fore in discursive events, film screenings, German-Turkish rap performances, stand-up comedy, and a boxing match. A huge banner facing the street read INTEGRIERT EUCH NICHT! (Do Not Integrate Yourselves). A few doors up, Wiesbaden’s last operational porn cinema was the simultaneously awkward and perfect setting for Erik van Lieshout’s video diary/meditation on falling in love with his assistant, Sex Is Sentimental, 2009. Santiago Sierra’s 333m, 2018, a ten-foot-high, military-type border wall, abruptly bisected a swath of parkland near the train station. Borders were also central to Dries Verhoeven’s one-on-one interactive web-link video installation Guilty Landscapes, 2016, which created a moment of bonding between the viewer and a factory worker in Hangzhou, China, in a mixture of the real and the virtual. Their unexpected intimacy made this distinction irrelevant. 

Across town, in a spooky atmosphere of abandoned restaurants, broken skylights, and piles of junk, a theater-inflected group show offered a post-apocalyptic, postconsumerist counterpart to the clean, busy, modern and efficient REWE supermarket. There were creepy mannequins in horror scenarios by Roger Ballen, occasional dance interventions by Trajal Harrell as his alter ego Bhu, and a deconstructed ballet by Florentina Holzinger. In Dina Khouri and Rabih Mroué’s Seven Parrots, 2018, drones came to inspect viewers through the windows of a clean, whitewashed space, while in a red-carpeted room viewers could peer through a window to see scenes of sex and violence in Julian Eicke and Thomas Bo Nilsson’s performance Betreutes Leben Ezzelino Live Cams (Assisted Living Ezzelino Live Cams),2018. Visitors wanting bigger kicks could make an appointment to join them. But was all this really the artistic alternative to the supermarket, or its repressed equal and opposite? 

One further piece was unannounced in the catalogue and anonymous in authorship: a thirteen-foot-high statue of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that appeared on a public square after the show’s opening weekend. Locals with Turkish heritage apparently found it an insult to the country’s president, while people with Kurdish roots thought it glorified him. Eggs were thrown at the statue; it got graffitied with TURKISH HITLER and FUCK YOU. Two days later, it was removed, with city authorities alleging that the costs of 24/7 policing were disproportionate to the value of this artistic statement. For a moment the international press took notice. The curators had said they wanted to show “the power of art . . . to intervene in reality without . . . being dismissed as art from the get-go.” But in the work’s mutation into clickbait grist, what became invisible, almost unseeable, was the wannabe Koons-like banality of this kitschy, golden, oversize patriarchal authoritarian pointing his finger heavenward. 

— Alexander Scrimgeour