Adam Szymczyk and documenta 14

Political themes as a selection criterion for art

Since the exhibition in Athens and Kassel would be on equal terms, it was necessary to divide the budget originally planned for Kassel. In order to prepare the show, Szymczyk appointed a team of international curators comprising Pierre Bal-Blanc, Hendrik Folkerts, Hila Peleg, Dieter Roelstraete and Monika Szewczyk. In 2016 the team was extended by Paul B. Preciado, Candice Hopkins and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung as Curator at Large. (Ill. 4) Marina Fokidis, a curator and author who lived in Athens, was appointed as the head of the artistic office there. Fokidis curated the Greek pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003; and in 2011 she curated the 3. Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. She is also the founder and artistic head of the Kunsthalle Athena, and editor of the English language periodical for art and culture, South as a State of Mind, which is published twice a year in Greece. Four editions of the periodical, each with more than 200 pages and exclusively devoted to articles on documenta 14, were published between Autumn/Winter 2015 and Summer 2017. They also make up the publicity basis of the exhibition alongside the “documenta 14 Reader” and a ca. 300 page “documenta 14 Daybook” containing monographs on all the artists.

Szymczyk wrote that South as a State of Mind, “comprises literary genres, archive documents, commissioned essays and special articles on artists, poets, composers and others; it is part of [18]the development process of documenta 14, instead of simply following it”. The articles it publishes should deal with associative twin concepts like banishment and expropriation, silence and masks, language and hunger, violence and victims, as well as analysing social and political areas like colonialism, indigenous knowledge, feminism, post-queer politics and so on;[19] areas into which artists in the exhibition can be placed. In order to be able to fully comprehend all the social and political areas in the exhibition, like flight and banishment, or stolen art and restitution, visitors and critics at the exhibitions in Athens and Kassel cannot avoid studying all the published material or analysing the themes themselves from the artworks and actions shown there.

Other themes like the opposites of poverty and generosity are shown in the exhibition by older works of art, in this case by a work by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) from the time of French realism. This is covered by an essay written by the American art historian, Linda Nochlin, in the first edition of South as a State of Mind.[20] But anyone who expects a representative Courbet picture in the exhibition will be disappointed and will have to be satisfied with a visit to the Kassel Neue Galerie where they can find a small pencil sketch by the painter entitled “L’Aumône d’un mendiant à Ornans“ (English: Alms for a Beggar in Ornans, 1868), taken from a far-off American collection. All in all it is clear that it is the intellectual concept of the artistic head and the team of curators, rather than the art, that is in the foreground of the current documenta. Proof of this concept is provided by the fact that, alongside around 150 contemporary artists, works by 105 classical artists or artists who died in the 20th century or in recent years, are represented in the exhibition.[21] Documenta 14 is thus primarily an intellectual construct rather than an exhibition of current contemporary art.