Eschewing any specific agenda, Kunsthalle Basel director Adam Szymczyk and independent curator Elena Filipovic have selected 113 artists representing more than 30 countries to exhibit work night and day at the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, entitled When things cast no shadow.

The Kunst-Werke Institute Berlin, the biennial's original venue, presents four floors of multifarious artworks, including Manon de Boer's film Two Times 4'33", which shows the artist twice performing John Cage's silent 4'33" composition. During the recital's second staging, the camera pans around the room to an awkwardly postured audience, which echoes the viewer's own discomfort. On the third floor, photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki's The Park series documents couples in flagrante delicto in Tokyo's public parks. Dozens of pictured onlookers bind the photographer and viewer together in a voyeuristic process that examines the clandestine side of lust.

The Neue Nationalgalerie, a modernist architectural icon and first-time biennial host, inspires a response from Thea Djordjadze, whose miniature exhibition deaf and dumb universe (working title) resists the building's dominant symmetry with a domestic setting of organic plaster sculptures that rests on staggered shelving. Additionally, Pedro Barateiro models two local bus stops on specific Lithuanian and Kazakh examples in The Naked City. The massive, poured-concrete shelter transforms transit infrastructure into studied, architectonic sculptures, and highlights the connections and divisions between two points in the city.

Heavy with the weight of history, the third daytime venue is Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, which was formerly a strip of the Berlin Wall and now consists of 62 barren lots. Lars Laumann's video installation Berlinmuren respectfully documents an objectophile's alternative perspective on this history — Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, who "married" the Berlin Wall in 1979, recalls how traumatizing the events of 1989 were for them both. Emanating from a pile of rubble and weeds, Susan Hiller's sound installation What every gardener knows celebrates nature's diversity by transposing Gregor Mendel's binary combinations, formulated to delineate and control inherited traits, into a chordal carillon. Meanwhile, Cyprien Gaillard's works — performative installation The Arena and the Wasteland, symbolic monument Le canard de Beaugrenelle, and filmic tribute Crazy Horse — all display the failings of social planning through architecture.

Nairy Baghramian and Janette Laverriere's collaboration, the first of five consecutive exhibitions at the Schinkel Pavillon, uses Laverriere's poetic mirrors to create a reflective structure containing a small library. The third exhibition at Schinkel comprises Ettore Sottsass' texts and works from the '60s and '70s — colorful and simple geometrical pieces that are aimed at a wide audience.

Mes nuits sont plus belles que vous jours, the nighttime element of the biennial, encompasses 63 nights of events, including the Complaints Choir, in which participants voice their woes through songs composed by Miss Le Bomb, and Alexandra Bachzetsis' deftly choreographed Gold, which reevaluates the eroticized female body in R&B culture. Other artists step out of their usual practices, such as Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan, who hold a convoluted talk on the strange connections made between an avant-garde artists' institute, a former train station, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Its unconventional 24-hour format and the selection of less-established artists separates BB5 from other biennials, and, ultimately, its success lies in simultaneous discussion of a variety of matters that interweave content with form, and the historical with the contemporary.

-Sarah Stephenson