The world’s most important art event, Documenta, in its 14th edition, opened at Kassel, Germany with more artworks, more artists, greater crowds––and a curiously absent centre. Adam Szymczyk, 46, the curator vacates the centre of reputed names in a show oddly shorn of spectacularism, yet embeds the margins so fully with contested histories that they compel a politically engaged response. Or the rethinking of a new centre even.
One can get a sense of the scope of the exhibition by working from the periphery inwards. Documenta 14 is a sprawling exhibition across 30 venues including cinema halls, disused railway stations and city squares. If one is dogged and watches the videos and films, you can push for eight or nine venues over three intense days. Szymczyk has broken with convention to locate one part of the exhibition in Athens—ancient seat of democracy and Hellenic art—and then concluded it at Kassel, the conventional, unexceptional site for Documenta in the heart of Germany.
Double displacement
The hard fact of a Europe caught in a dyad, of South and North, of economic vulnerability and power, is at the core of this Cain and Abel bipolar split. To drive the point home or perhaps integrate the two halves, the curator makes the main venue, the Fridericianum at Kassel, host an exhibition by Greece’s National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in a “double displacement” with a show replete with images of barbed wire, suitcases in cages, even the headless refugee. Kimsooja’s bundles of the refugee on the run, the photographs of Bethlehem Ramallah by Emily Jacir and Allan Sekula locate Greece and implicate high Europe among the nations torn by war and migrations.
This is a narrative that Documenta 14 chooses to press home in ways that are nuanced and sophisticated as they insinuate and touch upon manifold histories. Evacuating the power of Western Europe and the U.S., and making way for the people of the First Nations, the Sami of the Artic, smaller histories of Eastern Europe and the Arab world—the people on the edges—allows for an expansive reading of art. It broadens the scope of the contemporary to include classical pieces (Gandhara sculpted heads, Mughal paintings) and anthropological, with a calm flourish. It is like linking arms across the peripheries of Europe, awaiting a humanist response from the core.
Here, even the large pieces somehow avoid spectacularism and embed in their frames the still, small voice of truth. Ibrahim Mahama who wraps the Torwache, Kassel’s sentinel-like gate, with jute bags used to export cocoa, coffee or sugar from erstwhile colonies creates a link between Europe’s imperial wealth and today’s global market. A massive illuminated pantheon of forbidden books created by Argentinian artist Marta Minujin looks ethereal, a reminder of censorship under fascist regimes. Olu Oguibe erects an obelisk reminiscent of victory memorials at the strategic intersections between the German-dominated and the newer transnational settlements, inscribing it with a quote from the Bible’s Book of Matthew “I was a stranger and you took me in”, in German, Arabic, Turkish and English. A reminder that humanity lies at the core of the Christian faith.
There are other such curatorial sleights that embed the political against the shifting grain of art history. Nilima Sheikh, with 16 painted panels drawing largely on Kashmir, its violence and mystic poetry, is seen proximate to three prints from the Jehangir album drawn from the Berlin museum—the ‘Killing of the Innocents’, the ‘Flaying of Marsyas’ and the ‘Holy Family on their Way to Nazareth’ (1582). European art history becomes the prism for reading the Kashmir memory landscape, thereby expanding but also restricting its scope for interpretation.
In such a sprawling exhibition, one may get fatigued or irritated by the multiple sites, since not all the works are uniform. What stands out, however, is the choice of videos. I was spellbound by Thai artist Arin Rungjang’s work ‘And Then There Were None’ that narrates the experience of a Thai diplomat in Berlin during World War II. Amar Kanwar’s enigmatic ‘Such a Morning’ is his most poetic work, and a profound endorsement of the writer at the core of civilisational values. Indeed the Indian/ South Asian presence, sensitively chosen by Natasha Ginwala, brings in a marvellous cross-section that marks art at historic intersections—Gandhara, Partition, the Non-Aligned Movement.
Art under duress
The core of the exhibition is the Neue gallery, dense, crammed with works, ideas, and histories. There is the stunning Maria Eichhorn archive of books appropriated from Jews during World War II, and the reference to the infamous Gurlitt’s collection of art looted by the Nazis. On different levels, different peoples and histories speak compellingly, through small works viewed up close, making this exhibition a slow, page-turner of a show, rather than a slam-bang rock concert. The exquisite drawings of David Schutter, Geta Brătescu’s ‘The Studio’ (1979), Lorenza Böttner’s works on the damaged or the partial body are works that you are not likely to see elsewhere. The sense one has of the exhibition then is of the intersections of aesthetics and history over time, but also of the privileging of the poverty of materials, cramped studio spaces––art under duress, made in the zones of the forbidden. In making such a determined, brave separation from the art world, it returns the exhibition to the public as perhaps Arnold Bode, the founder of Documenta, knew in 1955—damaged and uncertain about the future of Europe.
Which brings us to the core of the exhibition and its still empty centre. Evacuated of its grandeur and eloquence, the vacant heart of Europe is an interesting proposition, one that sidesteps the idea of a Kantian utopia of perpetual peace. Instead, the overriding plea is for fraternal coexistence, energetic and crowded like the exhibition itself, like a community of workers, free and equal.
Gayatri Sinha is an art critic and curator who, while preoccupied with her art website www.criticalcollective.in, is also contemplating a book on the Middle Ages
