Organizers for the Berlin Biennale, the biannual contemporary art exhibition that has established itself as a proving ground for emerging curatorial talent, has announced that Polish artist Artur Żmijewski will curate the next edition of the event, which opens in 2012.

Żmijewski is known for wildly controversial video art, which often involves the participation of people in extreme or outrageous situations, and that often represents historical traumas and catastrophes. He has, for instance, filmed World War II concentration-camp survivors having their numbers re-tattooed onto their arms, and a group of men and women playing tag, naked, in an abandoned basement.

While the selection of an artist for the coveted curatorial position is unusual, Żmijewski is not the first one to take the job. Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was at the helm of the fourth biennale, which was held in 2006, though he was assisted by curators Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. Cattelan had curatorial experience of a sort when he took the job, having organized the "sixth" edition of the Caribbean Biennial (which was, in fact, a scheme that he had invented to fund a trip for a group of his artist-friends to vacation in the Caribbean).

The rather impressive full list of former curators is as follows:

Sixth Biennale: Kathrin Rhomberg
Fifth Biennale: Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic
Fourth Biennale: Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick
Third Biennale: Ute Meta Bauer
Second Biennale: Saskia Bos
First Biennale: Klaus Biesenbach, Nancy Spector, Hans Ulrich Obrist