Berlin Biennial Has Voodoo, Police Lectures: Where Is the Art? , Yazzy's Fine Art Corporation at www.williamverdult.com

This is an undated handout of "Grey Luminous Lights from the Sea" by artist Aleana Egan, released to the media on Friday, April 4, 2008. Source: KW Institute for Contemporary Art via Bloomberg News

According to Bloomberg News at the Berlin Biennial for contemporary art, you can hear recordings of extinct languages, watch films or listen to lectures on subjects as diverse as policing, robots, levitation and voodoo.

So what does all that have to do with art?

Good question. The biennial, which opens tomorrow and runs through June 16, is packed with events, yet there is little to feast on visually. With the exception of a few works that stand out, the daytime exhibitions, at four venues inconveniently dispersed around town, are underwhelming.

``When Things Cast No Shadow'' is the fifth biennial and curators Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic have a hard act to follow. The last one, in 2006, was a critical and audience success that encouraged the German government to commit 2.5 million euros ($3.9 million) to each of the next three editions.

That show was focused on one street, arty Auguststrasse, and created an intensely creepy yet inspiring experience. This new biennial falls short of that, with complex works that rely heavily on knowledge of the context. It comes complete with a 600-page catalog explaining the ideas. You need it.

Take Susanne Kriemann's ``12,650,000,'' on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie, which is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's glass, temple-like structure and one of the four biennial venues. The work shows black-and-white photographs of the construction and recent renovation of Albert Speer's heavy-load testing structure, built to ensure Berlin's swampy soil could withstand the mighty edifices Hitler planned.

Art or Documentation?

The title refers to the number of kilograms the structure weighs. Yet the display has no text about this most obscure of architectural oddities: Anyone with no special interest in building or Berlin is unlikely to know about it.

Or, at the same venue, Susan Hiller's ``The Last Silent Movie'' shows a blank screen while voices speak in languages that are extinct or endangered. It is fascinating to hear one of the last speakers of Comanche, yet it is stretching boundaries to call this art. Like Kriemann's work, it is documentation.

My favorite piece at the Neue Nationalgalerie is Paola Pivi's ``If You Like It, Thank You. If You Don't Like It, I am Sorry. Enjoy Anyway.'' Placed just beyond the entrance to the Neue Nationalgalerie, it's a lattice structure more than 5 meters high made of aluminum and fiber glass and studded with brightly colored, cheap glass rhinestones.

The title says it all: this work can be enjoyed at face value -- you don't need to read up on what it means. It has immediacy and pizzazz.

Zagreb's Heyday

Some works, while documentary in nature, impress with their creativity. At the KW art institute on Auguststrasse is the Croatian artist David Maljkovic's ``Lost Memories of These Days.'' Maljkovic photographed the neglected, dusty buildings of the Zagreb World Fair and stuck newspaper clippings from the fair's heyday on them, creating a now-versus-then collage that reminds us economic progress isn't all-inclusive.

The most unconventional biennial venue is a plot of wasteland on the former ``death-strip,'' where the Berlin Wall separated east from west. Known as the Skulpturenpark (Sculpture Park), it is home to a collection of installations during the biennial. (Ladies, leave your high heels at home.)

At a press conference yesterday, Szymczyk said the works on show here had to blend with the environment. That is an understatement -- it is difficult to distinguish holes in the ground or a heap of rocks from an artwork.

Musical Rubble

Yet I liked Hiller's ``What Every Gardener Knows,'' a sound installation of electronic notes emerging from a pile of rubble. A booklet accompanying the show says it refers to Gregor Mendel's theory of genetic inheritance, ``later abused by the so-called science of eugenics to justify killing people with `undesirable' hereditary traits, just as gardeners try to eliminate weeds.''

Well, all right. Whatever the explanation, it is a fun thing to stumble across in the middle of a park.

Szymczyk and Filipovic deliberately chose artists with little visibility. Eighty percent of the artworks were specially commissioned for the biennial. There are lots of long, very slow- moving video installations and the end result is way too cerebral. I left the press preview thinking: Where is the wow factor? Where is the show?

Yet with evening events spanning the whole 10 weeks, it is too early to pass judgment on whether the biennial will be a success. I for one will definitely try to get to a lecture titled ``The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future: A Brief History of Levitation From St. Joseph to Yuri Gagarin.''