Artur Zmijewski has been appointed curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, which will take place in early 2012.
The artist is particularly interested in the power of art and its relation to politics and is well-known for orchestrating social experiments - as in two pivotal works Them (2005) and Repetition (2007) - and for his controversial video art, which involves the participation of people in extreme situations and that often represents historical traumas and catastrophes. From an almost anthropological viewpoint he investigates social norms, morality and representations of power in today's society and the effects that art have on it.
Zmijewski is not the first artist to take the job. Maurizio Cattelan was at the helm of the fourth Biennale, assisted by curators Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick.
