BERLIN—To some, it might seem like the 5th Berlin Biennial, which opened April 4 and runs through June 15, is off to a rocky start, with mixed reviews, low international turnout at the opening, and grumbles about the official parties. But when ARTINFO visited, we found an intelligent, varied showing of less established and more up-and-coming artists. There is certainly a distinct difference between this approach and that of 2006’s co-curator Maurizio Cattelan, who exhibited a host of art stars — Tomma Abts, Martin Creed, Tino Sehgal, and Paul McCarthy, to name a few. This year’s curators, Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic, should be commended for avoiding such big names: while the shift has inevitably led to a much lower percentage of American and English artists involved, it is a valiant attempt to move beyond commercialism, and the results are neither amateur nor parochial.

A distinct noncommercial vein runs through the 2008 edition, exemplified by a program of evening performances and screenings under the title of "Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours" (My nights are more beautiful than your days), taken from the 1989 French film by Andrzej Zulawski of the same name. The biennial kicked off on Saturday, April 5 with an event that typifies the program: emerging French artist Cyprien Gaillard’s film and performance Crazy Horse, which played to a packed audience (despite the rain) at the Skulpturenpark, the most remote of the four biennial venues. The film looks at the construction of what will be the largest sculpture in the world: a memorial to the Lakota leader Crazy Horse, carved with explosives into the Black Hills in South Dakota. The performance also included singing by French composer and former opera singer Koudlam and a finale of red flares, causing a thick mist. Galliard said his work was a meditation on ruin and reconstruction, an explanation that had particular resonance given the desolation of the event’s scrubland setting. The sensory overload of the event, combined with the beautiful cinematography of the film, left emotions running high and many audience members shedding tears.

The biennial’s main center of activity during the opening two days was the Kunst-Werke in Mitte. Each day throngs of curators, journalists, gallerists, and artists took in the five floors of art or simply hung out in the Dan Graham–designed café. The first day saw curator Szymczyk touring an extremely appreciative gaggle of German ladies of a certain age. He looked a little weary to say the least. This tour turned out to be a VIP one-off; however, the biennial has implemented a system of “blind dates,” in which anyone is able to book a “date” with a key member of the organizational staff. You might get an artist, curator, or exhibition designer; the personality is revealed at the time of the tour.

Inside the venue a few key works stood out. Sung Hwan Kim, recently taken on by Wilkinson gallery in London, exhibited an epic film in which the artist physically followed descriptive directions of the city of Seoul by early 20th century Swedish zoologist and explorer Sten Bergman, only to become disorientated on finding how little they resembled the modern-day South Korean capital. His disorientation finds an outlet in the use of multiple film types, creating a mesmerizing, moving collage of the city’s psycho-geography.

Ania Molska, a 25-year old filmmaker from Poland, presented a large two-channel video work projected onto adjacent walls. On the first screen, a group of Polish peasant workers build a triangular scaffolding structure, their blue overalls contrasting with the washed out, gray landscape. The laborers work hard at what, for them, is a pointless endeavor, and at the end of the film they stand proudly on the completed structure, likely unaware of its debts to Russian Constructivism. The second video depicts an empty squash court with a practice machine firing unreturned balls. The action is filmed from different angles, calling attention to the architecture of the court.