Adam Szymczyk and documenta 14

The main installation by the Berlin concept and installation artist, Maria Eichhorn (*1962 Bamberg, Ill. 39a, b), stretches over several rooms in the Neue Galerie: she is well-known for her works on production, reception and value creation in the fine arts and for her criticism of the institutions she deals with. In her case the introductory text by Alexander Alberro is powerful proof of the fact that artists are sometimes unwilling to provide information about their current work.[39] That said, the lengthy work title, exhibition texts and her own website provide some help in overcoming this problem. Under the main heading, “Rose Valland Institut“ (2017), Eichhorn displays a nine-part, impressively carefully produced documentary installation on the illegal theft of books and art objects by the Nazis, most of these from Jewish property. These include the minutes of auctions between 1935 and 1942 (held in the Berlin Federal Archive), inventories of confiscated art and home furnishings from a Jewish household in Breslau, made accessible by the States Archive and the National Museum of Wroclaw, books from confiscated Jewish property purchased by the Berlin city library in 1943, an album with photographs of confiscation actions in Paris (held in the National Archive in Koblenz), and documents on the confiscation of the property and art collection belonging to Alexander Fiorino in Kassel between 1939 and 1941 (held in the Hessian Central State Archive in Wiesbaden). The Rose Valland Institute was set up by Eichhorn specially for documenta 14[40]: it will be organising a workshop on the theme of stolen art in September 2017, led by Małgorzata A. Quinkenstein and Nathalie Neumann, both of whom are provenance researchers.

The Senegalese artist, Pélagie Gbaguidi (*1965 Dakar,) who now lives in Belgium has created an installation entitled “The Missing Link. Decolonisation Education by Mrs Smiling Stone“ (2017. Ill. 40a, b). This mediates other arenas of recent history with Germany. She wants other people to recognise that colonisation and exploitation, the idea of subordinating other peoples, can only be overcome by school education, here by a workshop with school students from Kassel. The archived documentary films by Yervant Gianikian (*1942 Merano) and Angela Ricci Lucchi (*1942 Lugo di Romagna), also deal with the problems of colonialism and the situation of the individual caught between history, traditions and the present day: they present watercoloured drawings and a video installation of a journey to Russia (Ill. 41a, b). The Indian painter, Nilima Sheikh (*1945 Neu-Delhi, Ill. 42), has been dealing with feminist themes for several decades. Under the title “Terrain: Carrying Across, Leaving Behind” (2016-17), she presents a tempera image made up of 16 panels covering an octagonal space. According to an excellently precise text by Natasha Ginwala[41], an adviser to the curators of documenta 14: “The spatial design is a reference to shamianas, traditional tent pavilions in southern Asia, which are used as meeting points for celebrations, theatre and memorial events, as well as for political gatherings. The fragile paper architecture is reminiscent of temporary accommodation offered to pilgrims, whereas the visual vocabulary draws on many different forms of expression of movement and distance: migration, exile, fleeting geographies and common historiographies that pervade Europe and Asia”.