All in all the 6th Berlin Biennale was a disappointment, which is just as much due to the high expectations of a biennial in Europe's premiere art location as to the lack of curatorial rhythm. Hours and hours of videos and film projections bore even the most charitable art lovers - something we should have learned at Okwui Enwezor's Documenta XI. Whether art fair, Kunsthalle or biennial, Berlin remains a testing ground on which failure is always a possibility.

David ULRICHS

On a wonderfully warm June morning the press gathered outside of a municipal hall in Berlin-Kreuzberg, one of the city's trendiest, yet also poorest districts. Well over a hundred journalists and art critics with notepads and Dictaphones lined up outside, ready to take notes from the makers of this year's Berlin Biennale. Inside the cool hall, which has also been used for church services, the curator, Kathrin Rhomberg spoke to the press. Afterwards, caught up in reading the catalogue and other documentation accompanying the exhibition and on its way to the first venue, the train of so-called art enthusiasts failed to notice the beauty of the morning outside: the sunny air was filled with floating sycamore seeds reminiscent of gently falling snowflakes. Not part of the exhibition, but incredibly beautiful - a rare aesthetic experience.

In its sixth edition and bearing the rather vacuous title ‘What is waiting out there', the biennial is organized by a curatorial team lead by Rhomberg, who in 2000 curated Manifesta 3 and the critically acclaimed Czech and Slovak Pavilion on the 53rd Biennale di Venezia. Already before its opening, questions were raised regarding the biennial's tendency to gentrify less commercial areas of the city, undoubtedly also on the back of recent developments in the area around Potsdamerstrasse and Kurfürstenstrasse, where the arrival of gallerists such as Martin Klosterfelde, Mathias Arndt or Esther Schipper has caused rent prices to soar. The exhibition takes place in six different venues, four of which are located in Berlin-Kreuzberg, and shows works by 43 artists, including a selection of pencil drawings by Adolph Menzel (1815-1905). Apart from the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, which traditionally houses part of the exhibition, two artist studios may be visited, an unused department store - vandalized annually at Berlin's May-demonstrations -, a derelict stable and a sliver of the ground floor of the Old National Gallery. The choice of locations continues the pedantic and superfluous tradition of the Berlin Biennale to present unusual city locations to an art audience. Two years ago an unused site in the city centre became a sculpture park, the edition before took us into what used to be a Jewish girl's school. But the spaces are becoming ever more difficult to find, only one aspect that has been testing the patience of the visitors.

KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

Reminding us of the entrance to Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish museum in Berlin, all visitors to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art must enter the exhibition through an underground passage and are ushered down a narrow stairwell into a cellar that leads to the main space. Here the youngest artist of the biennale, 24-year-old Kosovan artist Petrit Halilaj shows the wooden frame of a house that spills over the limits of the space into the yard, where a few hens run about as part of the installation, entitled ‘The places I'm looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don't know how to make them real' (2010). Rhomberg has given the artist an unwarranted three floors, including a controversial white space that takes up the entire second floor, which in effect is a ‘curatorial intervention' but is seen by visitors as an artwork. There is one door-sized window from which we look into the yard, where we see the hens chuckle and run. Unannounced this blurs the boundary between curator and artist, something that Rhomberg also achieves at the space on Oranienplatz. On the third floor Ion Grigorescu's video documents a man's sleeping pattern and in separate space Mark Boulos' two-channel video ‘All That Is Solid Melts into Air' (2008) juxtaposes angry Nigerians, who vent their rage at the multinational oil companies effectively running their country and a recording of the bustle at the New York Stock Exchange.

OLD NATIONAL GALLERY

On the way to the location at Oranienplatz, we pass by the Old National Gallery, where Michael Fried has curated the exhibition ‘Menzel's Extreme Realism' as part of the biennial. In a very narrow space about two-dozen sheets of paper decorate the walls, each page is wonderfully worked up with no superfluous lines or rubbings. Undoubtedly a great artist, it remains a mystery to the visitor where the curatorial input resides in hanging a selection of his works at eye-level in a straight line. It would have been more interesting to directly juxtapose his work with drawings of contemporary artists, justifying Menzel's inclusion at a biennial today. Instead, a 90-minute lecture with Fried, Rhomberg and artist Anri Sala tries to verbally make a case for the Austrian artist's inclusion.

ORANIENPLATZ 17

Some thirty-three artists have taken over the five floors of what used to be a department store at Oranienplatz 17 in Berlin-Kreuzberg. From the outside, the building have been strategically left ‘as it is', plastered with posters announcing various events across the city, lowering the risk of attacks of anti-gentrificationists. Inside a huge empty cloakroom with hundreds of empty hooks rouses suspicion - it is summertime and although visitor numbers at art events in recent years have risen, it is beyond wishful thinking to want to put the cloakroom to good use. Indeed, this is more than a functional cloakroom, it is an installation by the Bratislava-based artist Roman Ondak. Parts of the ground floor walls are covered with a rather kitschy installation by Vincent Vulsma, who has replicated gallery walls and paintings covered with a protective plastic covering to bring part of the art market into the building. From the windows on the staircase, a broken fiber-glass sculptural of a mammoth and dinosaur can be seen - a work by Austrian artist Hans Schabus entitled ‘Klub Europa' (2010). Also in the stairwell, Marlene Haring has performed ‘Niche Existence ([Female] Titelholder)' (2010), a series of angle-grinder engravings in the walls, which although they are made with heavy machinery come across with a delicateness characteristic of the work by the young Austrian artist. Apart from the top floor, which includes another dubious ‘curatorial intervention' made up of carpets and a huge empty u-shaped MDF wall, the location is unnecessarily overloaded with videos and films. Indeed, while Renzo Martens' 90-minute film merits attention, it could have been shown at a cinema and Phil Collins' documentary on former Marxism teachers aired on national television. The viewer is forced from black box to black box for hours of viewing at a relentless pace - definitely too much to absorb.

MEHRINGDAMM 28

Cameron Jamie and George Kuchar are showing works in two separate buildings at Mehringdamm 28. While a queue forms outside Jamie's work, which can only be viewed individually and with a handheld lamp that the visitor is given when entering, Kuchar's countless films are shown on monitors, each with a designated chair and headset, with only one being projected onto the wall of the space. Kuchar's videos alone, showing documentary style footage take over eight hours to watch in its entirety, a tall order for an audience that has just been through a film-marathon at Oranienplatz 17.

6th Berlin Biennale, till August 8th 2010, www.berlinbiennale.de