It is official, the next Documenta, to be held in 2022, has a new Artistic Director (or directors): the Indonesian artistic collective ruangrupa. (See here for the reports from ART News, Artforum and The Art Newspaper).
This exciting announcement has a transformative effect on my ongoing project to examine the legacies of documenta 14 and I will be sure to spend future posts processing the news. Some immediate questions I have on hearing the announcement came from reading the statement by ruangrupa members Farid Rakun and Ade Darmawan (pictured below, with members of the finding committee, including documenta 14 artist Amar Kanwar) about their plans for Documenta 15:
Our curatorial approach aims at a different community-oriented model of resource usage—economical, but also taking ideas, knowledge, programs, and innovations into account. If Documenta was launched in 1955 to heal war wounds, why shouldn’t we focus Documenta 15 on today’s injuries, especially ones rooted in colonialism, capitalism, or patriarchal structures, and contrast them with partnership-based models that enable people to have a different view of the world.
Given these wounds and their roots, we wonder how will Documenta 15 learn from documenta 14 in healing and revealing them? There seems to be so much shared territory, at the same time, a significant shift of what Walter Mignolo has dubbed ‘dewesternization’, as part of a decolonial project, by the very choice of ruangrupa to run the exhibition. At the same time, what remains of Athens as a site of the Global South in this shift? Will Documenta 15 be more firmly rooted in Kassel as a reaction to the controversial overspending of the previous split edition? If so, how can a process of decolonization take root in Germany?
These are some of the immediate questions I have and I am looking forward to exploring them further. To learn more about ruangrupa see their website and also Reinaart Vanhoe’s recent book Also-Space, From Hot to Something Else: How Indonesian Art Initiatives Have Reinvented Networking.
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