From June 18 - September 25, 2022, the fifteenth edition of documenta took place in Kassel. The Goethe-Instituts in North America are taking this as an opportunity to invite a group of local curators from Canada and the USA, who are pursuing similar approaches in their work, to Kassel and to engage in an exchange with each other.
With ruangrupa, for the first time an artists' collective has been tasked with the artistic direction of the documenta 15. The ten-member collective was founded in Jakarta in 2000 and operates an art space there, realizing exhibitions, festivals, publications and radio formats.
Ruangrupa pursues a participatory curatorial approach for documenta 15, focusing on partnership models and interdisciplinary approaches. This approach is in line with current trends that reframe the role of curators as classic "gatekeepers" and situate the work and impact of curating more in community-building - inclusion rather than exclusion.
International Networking
The focus of the curator's exchanges will be on partnership models of curating, explicitly anti-racist ways of working, and innovative approaches to social inclusion and community building.
The curators
The following curators from Canada have been invited to Kassel:
Subalternes (CDEx, 2019), Je sais pourquoi l'oiseau chante en cage (Fonderie Darling, Centre culturel Georges-Vanier und CDEx, 2020), Respiration (Galerie de l'UQAM, 2020) und S'inscrire dans le présent ( Never Apart, 2021) are among her most recent curatorial projects.
Photo of the group of curators from the North America (NAM) and East Asia and Southeast Asia (SAS) during a conference held by Chiara Ianeselli, curatorial coordinator.
Among other curators from other regions, Elena Gross (San Francisco), Layne Hinton (Toronto), Anisa Olufemi (Washington) and Ellie Lee (Los Angeles) with Iswanto Hartono and Mirwan Andan from the ruangrupa collective
In the run-up to the fair, there was a discussion about possible anti-Semitic tendencies among the curators of documenta 15, especially from the ranks of ruangrupa and some groups associated with them. Jewish artists from Israel were not invited, and on the first day of the fair a work by the group Taring Padi with clearly anti-Semitic content was exhibited, and subsequently removed after strong reactions of the public. At this point, we would like to explicitly distance ourselves from content of this kind and anti-Semitism in any form.
Talk with theo tyson, Pieranna Cavalchini and Gediminas Urbonas documenta 15 in review
Summer 2022 has been a busy one for the art world with three major international exhibitions of contemporary art on view in Kassel, Berlin and Venice. Of the three, the fifteenth edition of Documenta in Kassel made the headlines most often, not only due to a series of scandals involving anti-Semitic tendencies and content in exhibited artwork. Documenta, is known for setting new directions in Art, and this year is no different. This edition, curated by the Indonesian artists’s collective ruangrupa, has shaken up the Art community and questions much of the traditional understanding of what Art is. Where are the boundaries between activism and Art? What is more important, the process or the finished artwork? Who dictates what Art is?
