The KW was once a house where people lived, and something of that remains in the atmosphere of the whole compound. The building housed industrial enterprises in the 19th and 20th centuries and now it can be seen as a venue typical of the 90s, when places of production were turned into places of exhibition. In this sense KW exemplifies the fate of Mitte quite well. Then we needed to find a location that is more remote and has a completely different significance, which is what made me think of Berlin’s serious exhibition spaces. The first and only one that came to my mind was the Neue Nationalgalerie, which appears to be a very well planned and carefully built space, though in fact it is enormously difficult [to install art in].

The Skulpturenpark, in comparison, appears completely chaotic. The group of artists who run it have made very minimal interventions in the area; they turned it into an art venue mainly by naming it. The Biennial’s temporary occupation of this territory refers critically to the idea of public sculpture, which is an important theme of discussion in postwar Germany, perhaps more than elsewhere in Europe.

There’s also the Schinkel Pavilion, with changing exhibitions curated by artists. Are these artists bb5 participants?

Yes. In the Schinkel Pavilion we have five exhibitions. The first, for instance, is Jeanette Laverriere, a Swiss designer who lived in Basel in the 20s, before moving to Paris [she turns 100 next year]. Her show is a collaboration with Nairy Baghramian, who also presents her work at the NNG.

Is bb5 a Berlin-specific biennial?

I think it’s impossible to be specific to a city, because any “city” is really just an image of that city. So you have to be image-specific. We chose three venues [in addition to the Kunst-Werke] because they represent three different types of exhibition spaces. NNG offers an unobstructed view onto the surroundings through transparent glass walls, but you are still enclosed, like a fish in an aquarium. The Skulpturenpark, in contrast, has no walls and also no borders.

Was the pool of international artists living and working in Berlin, which I think is incomparable to any other city in the world, a gift or a curse when you were putting together the artist list?

I think it was a gift. There are many artists who are part of the Berlin scene in the show, especially young ones, which testifies to the liveliness of this scene. We made new discoveries. There are 50 artists in the daytime exhibitions and more than 60 in the night part, and more than half of them are people whose work I had never seen before.

Can you talk about some of the artwork in the show?

More than 80 percent of the works are new commissions, which makes it a complicated show to talk about beforehand. But I can give a few examples.

Anna Molska, aged 25, is the youngest artist in the biennial. We have her installation of two videos: “Power” and “Work” – two simple notions of physics illustrated with use of actors and inanimate objects. Kilian Rüthemann from Basel is there with a large-scale outdoor work for which he’s perforated the ground of the Skulpturenpark with hundreds of holes. We’re showing Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki’s rarely seen series of photographs from the 1970s, “Park 1” and “Park 2.” One is night shots from a gay cruising area in a Tokyo park; the other is the series in which the photographer shadowed voyeurs who were watching couples make out in a park. And there is Thea Djordjadze, from Tbilisi, who is now living in Germany and who is showing an amazing ensemble of fragile sculptural installations at Neue Nationalgalerie.

One project that’s changed over time is by Ulrike Mohr, who is based in Berlin and has been involved with the Skulpturenpark. She was planning to transplant five trees that grew wild on the roof of Palast der Republik [the landmark former East Berlin parliament building that was recently demolished despite protests from the public] and replant them in the exact same configuration in the Skulpturenpark. We proposed to push the project a little bit further and bring the trees to the roof of the NNG, which is similar in size to the Palast der Republik’s. We thought it would give the project more exposure and would lend new meaning to the NNG. But permission was refused, so the actual project will take place in the Skupturenpark, though it’s being documented at the NNG.