A man stands on his head.

Not just anywhere, but in front of monuments that represent the future of the working class or the militant youth or the victory of a heroic army unit.

In the photos you can see the larger-than-life gray ideal bodies made of stone or concrete and in front of them the artist Ngo Thành Bac, who is doing a headstand in front of one of the heroes' memorials - which in Vietnam can lead to being taken to the police station.

The desire to see everything the other way around, to make the body sway, to trick gravity is pursued as disrespect and as an attack on seriousness, as a spoof and destabilization of the desired heaviness of the propaganda folk bodies carved in stone.

Nicholas Mak

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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It's a simple but very effective gesture, says artist Kader Attia, curator of this year's Berlin Biennale, which runs until September 18, as he stands in front of the paintings.

Born near Paris in 1970, Attia has lived in Berlin for a long time;

he was surprised that in a city that has such a large Vietnamese community, this community is not much more visible in art and politics.

Attia is one of the brightest intellectuals of his generation.

Systems of surveillance become visible

Like his work, his biennale is about colonization, telling stories of control and exploitation.

And when Attia makes the Berlin Stasi headquarters and its archives the exhibition venue alongside the Kunst-Werke, the Academy of Arts and the Hamburger Bahnhof, then it's not about giving the pleasant shudder of the winning regime the creeps, how bad the one from the West is vanquished communism was (which it sure was) - but about making visible different systems of surveillance: that of the East, which brutally persecuted and spied on its citizens, but also that of the current digital capitalism, which spy to manipulate, predict and to control behavior.

Not every work at this Biennale is equally good - but it has a thesis and an intellectual sharpness that one rarely finds: that art is the mechanics of manipulation, the attention economy and the image strategies and concealment techniques of totalitarian systems and terror regimes, but also those of the reveal digital capitalism and make it visible.

Works by the "Forensic Architecture" research team can be seen, to which the Frankfurter Kunstverein is currently dedicating a sensational exhibition.

For their "Cloud Studies" they use images and mobile phone recordings of explosions to analyze where tear gas and rockets were used illegally and where war crimes may have been committed;

the art-historical image analysis thus becomes an instrument of political enlightenment.

Yuyan Wang's The Moon Also Rises tells the story of a real-life project from 2018 that envisaged shooting three artificial moons into the sky over major Chinese cities to provide continuous light there - a particularly dystopian attempt to tame the night to declare war.

The accompanying video oscillates between beauty and horror, as does Haig Aivazian's "They own the lanterns but we have the light," in which someone is swallowed up and driven through a giant body like a high-beam car through a city at night.

It's also about places where control collapses: Florian Song Nguyen's drawings of feral dogs from Morocco show a world in which the civilizing process of taming wild animals is being reversed.