Artists At Berlin Gallery Weekend Question What It Means To Be Human

Artists have long turned to science fiction, to worlds of the imagination, to understand what it is to be human. This general concept forms the overarching theme at the 2023 Berlin Gallery Weekend — the annual event which sees independent galleries around the city open their doors to all — with mixed results.

A curious group exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon, for instance, proposes a series of alternative futures, questioning the reality of being human, its weaknesses, fears and limitations. It asks if the distinctions between dystopia and reality are collapsing due to technological and ecological upheavals.

Borrowing its title from the 1955 short story by Philip Dick, “Human Is” has been curated as a series of stories involving historical artifacts and contemporary artwork. They unfold a little like a house of curiosities (at times, I feel like I’m on the set of the sci-fi television series “Stranger Things”), found dotted around the gallery’s dark and dingy corners and within the main gallery space for an engaging, if a little creepy and terrifying in places, show.

The show references the work of the science fiction writer Ursula K. le Guin, who sees fiction as a means to reinvent the possibilities of human experience beyond any linear narrative of progress. “Human Is” argues through these imagined stories, we can “trigger creative processes and a new ethics of relationality, which may no longer be truly human.”

Working on a similar theme, but perhaps more convincingly, is Cao Fei’s “Duotopia” at Sprüth Magers. For over two decades, the Beijing-based contemporary artist has been investigating what it means to be human within our rapidly changing twenty-first-century landscape through various mediums. Visiting the artist at her studio in Beijing a few years ago, I was struck by her work’s originality and how alive it is, constantly moving and evolving to be in conversation with our time.

In this significant exhibition, she has transformed this lovely Berlin gallery space into a visually cinematic, performative and highly engaging series of multi-media exhibits that take the viewer on a journey into multiple worlds here on earth and in the multiverse.

“Duotopia” begins with a series of videos — some older, some made for the show — that look at the connective and creative possibilities of the metaverse in connection to life on earth. In the documentary-style “Meta-mentary” (2022), ordinary people share their thoughts on the metaverse and their hopes and fears of the distant future. “Isle of Instability” (2020) documents Singapore under pandemic quarantine, the masks and sanitizer and government paperwork, while a video depicts the “island” the artist installed for her daughter’s distraction in their living room during the period, which is juxtaposed with scenes of deserted city streets.

Elsewhere, Cao’s first imagined avatar, China Tracy, plays the starring role in “RMB City” (2007-11) and in “Oz” (2022), she introduces her newly imagined avatar, a joyful androgynous water-related character with biopic tentacles.

The tone shifts in “MatryoshkaVerse” (2022) as Cao reflects on the rapid changes brought about by global developments in China. The film captures documentary footage of Manzhouli, the border city in Inner Mongolia that blends Chinese and Russian influences visible in the giant Matryoshka-doll buildings. Meanwhile, in “Nova” (2019), two films are told in a non-linear narrative to explore the concept of time, space and the fiction of history and geopolitics.

Pivotal to “Duotopia” is the artist’s first architectural metaverse created for this show. The ring-like construction floats and spins with substructures shaped like massive aquatic features that appear to bridge ocean air as the viewer is encouraged to watch this imagined world lying down for a highly immersive experience.

There is a lot to take in at Sprüth Magers, with much of my day in Berlin spent observing Cao Fei’s vast body of work, which isn’t surprising since the “duo” in the exhibition title refers to the Mandarin word meaning “many,” suggesting a layering of many possibilities for future environments and the human experience.

More than the other artists exhibiting during Berlin Gallery Weekend, Cao’s inquiry feels more constructive and, despite its avatars and metaverses, strangely more grounded in reality.

If the purpose of art is to change the order of reality given to us, if art is a way to make sense of the world, then these exhibitions create expansive narratives to help guide us into the future.

Berlin Gallery Weekend runs annually from April 28 to 30. Cao Fei’s “Duotopia” is on until August 19 at Sprüth Magers, and “Human Is” is on until July 21 at Schinkel Pavillon.

See my reviews of Isaac Julian at Tate Britain, Steve McQueen’s “Grenfell” at the Serpentine Galleries, “Rites of Passage” at Gagosian London, and interviews with installation artist Leonardo Drew, and generative artist Tyler Hobbs,