The Paper's reporter Qian Xue'er compiled
From 18 June to 25 September 2022, documenta 15 takes place in the central German city. The exhibition was curated by a group of Indonesian artists Ruangrupa, who took inspiration from the "rice barn" in rural Indonesia to form a curatorial concept, using documenta as a collective resource "from and for use" in the city of Kassel, supporting local artistic practice. Unlike most mainstream biennials, ruangrupa member Farid Rakun said they wanted to provide a tonic for the exhausting way of viewing the show, suggesting that "alternative ways of creating and experiencing art are always possible.".
Documenta in Kassel is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary art exhibitions in the world. This quiet German town will be visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors during Documenta and will become the focus of the art world.
In 1955, the first Documenta was founded by Arnold Bode, a veteran art historian and Kassel native, who conceived Documenta kassel from the beginning with the intention of being a research exhibition of modern art to the world.
Poster for Documenta 15th Kassel
This year, Documenta, curated by the Indonesian group Ruangrupa, continues this avant-garde tradition. The exhibition conference was held in an open-air football field, and the sound of rock music was heard from the speakers from time to time, and a "karaoke" style press conference made the audience cheer and applaud continuously. Ruangrupa comes from Jakarta, Indonesia, and ruangrupa in Indonesian can be roughly translated as "art space" or "space form". The team currently has 10 core members from different disciplines such as art, architecture, media, and political science. Ruangrupa thinks about collaboration in the collective, emphasizing process rather than result, and their artistic experiments embody the aesthetics of publicness, madness and harmony, free from the limits of rules and elitist ideas.
Ruangrupa applauded the artist at the Documenta launch
Many artist groups have appeared on this year's list of artists. For example, Taring Padi, an Indonesian art organization, wanted to exhibit hundreds of cardboard figures drawn by students and clubs in Kassel. Romanian artist and editor Dan Perjovschi, who is planning to launch a huge, varied newspaper in front of the Kulturbahnhof, has already scribbled graffiti on the pillars of the Friedrich Museum. Colombian group Más Arte Más Acción hopes to draw attention to the climate damage in the Rhinehard jungle with a sound sticker. The Nest Collective, from Kenya, has designed a walk-in e-waste heap for waste shipments to the Global South.
Works by Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi on the columns of the Friedrich Museum, Documenta 15th Kassel, 2022
Chinese artists are also attracting much attention, and compared to the previous edition with the participation of only one Chinese artist, this year's Documenta kassel invited four groups of art institutions to participate, namely artist partners Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun, artist Zhang Enman, Guangzhou's local space "Pineapple Kernel" (BOLOHO), and Asia Art Archive.
Minghao Cao and Jianjun Chen, Water System Project, Wenchuan, 2019
Curatorial panel from Indonesia
In 2000, two years after the fall of the Suharto regime, which banned public participation in Indonesia's political process, the Ruangrupa group was formed. They started out as a group of artists, with the hope that there would be more room to engage in dialogue and artistic practice.
While clinging to a physical space in Jakarta on the island of Java, the world's most populous island, ruangrupa also wanted to provide a spiritual breadth for research, performance, and critical analysis of the arts, which they believe had become a means of production.
Ruangrupa's early space in south Jakarta was used as some kind of gathering place, with studio space, library and research space. It is always active and always open. The change in its membership over the years reflects dynamic exchanges within the organization, perhaps starting at the local level but ultimately extending its network beyond boundaries and across different disciplines.
Early Ruangrupa's studio in south Jakarta
The resulting projects, such as the 2003 "Jakarta Video Art Festival: OK. Video", Indonesia's first video biennial, introduced new artistic possibilities to the city by providing a platform for participants from 20 countries to explore the ideas of body, identity and popular culture.
Subsequently, in 2017 they continued to collaborate with other groups to form Gudskul (Good School) – "gud" is short for gudang (warehouse) and "skul" is a slang term for "school"– a collective knowledge dissemination system and a public learning space for artists, musicians, architects and designers, emphasizing process sharing and experiential learning.
In 2022, ruangrupa became the first Southeast Asian art group/collective to curate Documenta in Kassel, with nine members taking on the role of Artistic Director of Documenta 15. The exhibition uses "Rice Warehouse" as the curatorial concept. "We invited 14 collectives to work with us as 'Rice Barn' members to develop a strategy, and they invited other individuals and collectives, whether related to their own practices or to documenta –the connection is heart-to-hand. Each collective brings their local context, but also involves broader networks through which they share knowledge and respond to local needs. Reza Afisina, a member of ruangrupa, introduced.
Documenta 15th, workshop with Ruangrupa and the art team, Mirwan Andan and Reza Afisina, 2019. Photo courtesy of Documenta 15th Kassel. Photo by Nicolas Wefers.
Anti-Semitic controversy before its inception
Long before the 15th Kassel Documentation Exhibition, the exhibition was embroiled in an ongoing debate about "anti-Semitism", a situation that is rare for an exhibition that has not yet been made public and whose content and structure are not clear.
"We want to be able to have a discussion about the exact topics that exist in the work," said Farid Rakun, a member of the Indonesian group and artistic director of documenta in Kassel, Ruangrupa. In this exhibition, they focus on groups of artists like themselves. Rakun and members have been working on exhibition preparations for the past three years, but since January, a series of events have drawn them into a whirlpool of controversy surrounding racism in Israel as well as in Germany. The controversy stems from the pro-Palestinian stance of two artists in the Teams of Funding, as well as the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, a Palestinian exhibitor. That led the Alliance Against Anti-Semitism Kassel to accuse the exhibition of inviting "anti-Israel activists" and violating Germany's strict anti-racist laws. Last month, talks discussing the allegations had to be dropped after criticism, after which the Central Committee of German Jews filed more complaints against the country's culture minister, Claudia Roth.
Not long ago, the exhibition space of The Question of Funding, a Palestinian artists group, was destroyed and a threatening message was scribbled, and the group's views were considered anti-Semitic by many German Jewish and Zionist groups, and the Kassel police believed to be part of a politically motivated attack.
The destroyed Documenta WH22 space © documenta
In an open letter posted on e-flux's website, Ruangrupa clarified his position on the matter, in which they called the anti-Semitic allegations against Documenta "baseless." "Censorship, joint crime, racist defamation and rumours – recurrent without criticism – threaten Germany's international cultural cooperation," the letter reads, after which it concluded that "the initial failure of the Forum was therefore also the failure of the German debate on anti-Semitism and racism". Rakun said they are still considering whether the issue could be discussed in other forums at Documenta 15, but he acknowledges that at this stage, they have not yet decided how it will be presented.
Due to the number of attendees at Documenta this year, it is very likely that this will happen – this year's attendance reached around 1500, the highest in the exhibition's 67-year history, and the operation of the exhibition is rarely supervised by the curatorial team. The exhibitors were divided into groups called "majelis" ("gathering" in Indonesian) and exhibited together in small groups.
Rakun insists that ruangrupa does not play the usual curatorial role, but "more or less" allows artists to do what they are already doing, asking them to show "the continuation of existing practices" rather than creating new works for the exhibition. In fact, according to Documenta's artistic team member Gertrude Flentge, this is probably the "most non-object-based documenta ever" — with little to no art shipment taking place, replaced by live creations, whether tangible works or "art dialogues, music, cooking, and gatherings." For example, Más Arte Más Acción, a group from Colombia, develops a key framework around territorial struggles and will host 10 separate exhibitions during the 100-day exhibition.
Más Arte Más Acción is working
As a result of last month's attack, Documenta 15 held several meetings around the safety of the participating artists. The Delhi-based group, Party Office, shares the same exhibition space as the Quest of Funding, transforming their space into a "sex cell," a supple leather playroom as well as a dance floor and reading room. According to the group's founder Fadescha, they will explore "the intersection of gender, perversion and the country's constitution" here. The group's practical reflections on why "for queers, brain function is different from ordinary people, daily survival is hard labor" and questions the boundaries of work within the neoliberal framework.
Alternative Art Experience: Creating a "Rice Barn" locally
Documenta Kassel will take place at 32 locations in four regions of the central German city. Its curatorial concept "lumbung" refers to the Indonesian "rice barn": the surplus grain in the harvest is stored and redistributed within the community, which echoes the group's own resource allocation practice, that is, public and private funds are pooled and redistributed according to the needs of each organization. Ruangrupa presents documenta XV Kassel as a collective resource "from and for" the city of Kassel and envisions the exhibition as a public jar in which ideas, stories and time are exchanged in a cyclical pattern, eventually returning the resources to Kassel in support of local artistic practices.
Concept map of the "Rice Barn"
Although the exhibition will not build a real rice barn, the main theme of the exhibition seems to be the transformation of space and the gesture of community building. Ruangrupa, for example, will create The RuruHaus, transforming a former department store into an informal space between a living room, kitchen, radio station and studio.
RuruHaus
Several art groups will exhibit ambitious large-scale works in a comprehensive exhibition hall that once housed the large headquarters of the Hübner transport engineering company and an abandoned indoor swimming pool on industrial land in the eastern part of the city. Exhibitors here include Jatiwangi Art Factory from Java, who will present sculptures and models related to the use of clay by the local community to build houses; The Foundation Festival sur le Niger from Bamaoko, who will organize events and present works related to the philosophy of the Marimahs; Four separate groups, including Dhaka's Brittto Arts Trust, will host activities such as street parties.
Fondation Festival sur le Niger held an event in Mali
"Our goal is to get everyone on the team to still be amazed at what happened in Kassel during these 100 days," Rakun said. "We want to eliminate the idea that people have when they go to the Biennale that they don't see everything that others see, and that their experience is somehow not enough." While Rakun refuses to compare their exhibition to the Venice Biennale — "ruangrupa's purpose is not to confront anyone" — he hopes the difference between Documenta 15 and other mainstream multi-venue exhibitions or events will be "noticeable."
Many visitors to the bibliography may have arrived directly from Art Basel, which opened a few days ago, and they may have spent most of the week walking through the hallways trying to admire as many works as possible. And Rakun and the Documenta team want to provide a tonic to this often exhausting way of viewing art, suggesting that "alternative ways of creating and experiencing art are always possible."
(This article is compiled from "The Art Newspaper", Ocula and "New York Times", some of which refer to the public account "Curatorial Culture")
Editor-in-Charge: Weihua Gu
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